Judgmental? Me?

I went to B&H to buy an electrical accessory, and I was being helped by (who else?) a chassidishe fellow. Pathetically, I felt a need to prove my heimishness, and began to shamelessly drop Yiddish terms, which he was rather unimpressed by. 

While waiting for my item to be fished out from the basement stockroom, a Hispanic worker came by and they chatted. She was complaining about having to greet the customers in the doorway as the cold air made her shoulder ache. 

She walked away, and the chassid said that she had just gotten a tattoo on that shoulder. 

I expressed my perplexity in terms of tattoo allure - the pain, the permanence. 

He looked disapprovingly at me. "It's another lifestyle," he admonished. 

That really gave me something to chew on. 

Divisiveness nowadays is based usually on the flimsiest of premises - skirt length, Cholov Yisroel vs. Stam, velvet or knit kapul. In other words, sinas chinum: baseless hatred. 

 

Many smaller communities outside New York are more welcoming of their fellow neighbor. A relative of mine in Australia doesn't eat in the house of her best friend - there's a real problem with her kashrus, but they are still BFFs. In many areas, everyone does their own thing and no one holds that against them. 

But I think the divisiveness stems from another area; I think many of us don't trust ourselves, and in order to feel as though they are "proper" they have to alienate themselves from true, kind, frum people for rather shvach (weak) reasons. 

These people are not the "chaver ra." That person will incite others into bad behavior. They simply don't do things exactly like you.

Acceptance is the understanding of who one is, yet welcoming those whose lifestyles are not the same.

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz wrote an article called, "Why Doesn't Religion Make Us Better People?"

. . . that of the person who is very particular about religion, but sees it only as a form of ritual. For him, religious practice does not have any meaning — except for going through a routine in a particular way. While such people may be good or evil by nature, ritual life may become mechanical. Over time, they may be more and more involved with meticulous observance. They may measure others only by the way they, themselves, practice religion. They may see observance as an excuse for avoiding any good deeds that are not part of the ritual. And sometimes ritual practice even serves as atonement for very immoral behavior in other arenas, or for belittling or despising other religions. They see God as an idol that demands sacrifices — the sacrifice of other human beings.

This line that ends off with nutshells it: 

Both wisdom and faith work much better when the worshipper identifies with them internally rather than being tamed to show them off externally.