Like brothers and sisters fighting over the keys to heaven, the various Jewish sects disagree over the degree to which Jewish laws and customs must be followed, and among the family members, the Lubavitcher Hasidim fight the hardest. A Hasidic sect devoted to the strict observance of ritual laws, the Lubavitchers grudgingly admit that everyone will go to heaven–Christians, Buddhists, Muslims–but they believe that their ways are the holiest and that their mission is to persuade other Jews that theirs is the correct way through the gates.
Following this ritual, she gets dressed, covering her short hair with a scarf because a mitzvah commands that a married woman cover her head (she will wear a shaitl [wig] when she goes out or has guests). Then she reads aloud from her siddur (prayer book), about seven pages of text, walking about the room swaying because davening (praying) must, according to the Torah, be done with the whole body. The prayers “acknowledge that God gave us our souls and eventually he will take them from us.” They ask that God “keep me from illness or malicious tongue or unnatural death.” In effect, it is a prayer for protection for the day. “Then,” she adds, “you say a b’rocha for studying the Torah, for the precepts that bring joy to the world–honor your father and mother, hospitality to strangers, visiting the sick, taking care of a poor bride, escorting the dead, bringing peace between men and between husband and wife, concentrating on prayer. The study of the Torah is the equivalent to them all because then you know how to do it.”
Jewish dietary laws, adhered to by Orthodox Jews and followed strictly by Hasidim, help establish and maintain the separateness and holiness of those who follow them. Of the 248,000 Jews in Chicago recorded by the Jewish Federation of Metropolitan Chicago in 1982, only 4 percent were Orthodox. The Hasidim believe that the larger Jewish community doesn’t meet their standards in the manufacture and preparation of food. Lubavitchers eat only meat from their own shokhet (butcher) in New York. Cottage cheese is also imported to ensure that it is made only from cholov. The Penanskys import most of their ready-made foods, in fact, from other cities. There are now about eight kosher restaurants in Chicago. The Penansky daughters love the two kosher pizza parlors, though a pizza in a kosher restaurant doesn’t much resemble one from Giordano’s.
Many Orthodox Jews and most of Chicago’s Hasidim live in Penansky’s neighborhood of west Rogers Park. Of the 60 Lubavitcher families in the Chicago area, all but a handful live in west Rogers Park, where they can walk to the shul and where they have their schools and each other. West Rogers Park is also the location of the mikvah, a private bathhouse maintained by the Orthodox community. A central concept in Orthodox Judaism, one that Penansky says provides “a honeymoon every month,” is that husband and wife must have no contact–not even passing a spoon to one another–during the woman’s menstruation and for seven days afterward. After the period of abstinence, women must visit the mikvah for immersion in a purifying pool before they can reunite with their husbands. About 1,000 women use the Chicago mikvah every month.
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Sex is an important part of Jewish life, she continues. “It’s a mitzvah to have a good sexual experience. In Catholicism, the saints stay away from sex. In Judaism, the holy man has to have a wife because he’s considered only half a person if he doesn’t. It’s like one soul that was split apart and put back together again. True, we have our divorces, but generally, a marriage is an institution–sometimes a nuthouse–out of which everything comes.”
What sets the Lubavitchers apart from other Orthodox Jews is their more fundamentalist dedication to these laws (i.e., personal devotion), and a different philosophical approach to be found in the major text, the Tanya. A story repeated by the seventh Lubavitcher rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, in his “Thought for the Week” (a weekly publication) perhaps best exemplifies the philosophical difference. “A great Rebbe once said to his Chasidim and followers, ‘In the parable of the Baal Shem Tov [the founder of Hasidism] the stress and emphasis is not so much on the “Father, Father, save me!” but rather on the crying-out.’” In other words, the content of prayer is less important than the act of prayer itself.
