Hasidic Roller Derby, or, "Aren't you hot?"

Last week, I saw a Hasidic man rollerblading down Dizengoff Street. For those of you of the goyish variety, Hasidim are those Ultra-Orthodox Jews who wear a lot of black, year-round, and have those side-curls (payot), fringes hanging from corners of their shirts (tzitzit), long black coats, and sometimes giant black hats or even big furry ones. I remember stopping that day and watching as his payot moved forward and back, forward and back as he took very long, easy strides on his very 21st-century rollerblades. All the faster to get to synagogue, I guess.

Then, walking to yoga the other day, I saw a young man, maybe 15 or so, wearing an American football jersey, and I noticed tzitzit flapping in the breeze from the white, collared shirt he wore underneath. His hair was traditionally short, and he had payot, and an American football jersey. I wouldn't even understand this phenomenon if it was a regular football (soccer) jersey. Everyone has those here. The mixture of Old World tradition and 21st century culture doesn't make sense.

Of course, if I were the one making the adjustments to allow for modern products to mix with traditional ones, the big fur hats would be the first to go. At least when it's summer. This past Shabat, I was walking to get coffee with Keren as a group of Hasidim were going to their ba'it knesset (synagogue). Most of the men had on black suits and kipot (yarmulke, or Jewish beanie, if you prefer), and were clean-shaven except for their payot, which was standard curled and perfected. This, by the way, is an affectation, a show of vanity, even. The rule in the Talmud is (paraphrasing here) 'not to trim the corners of your beard'. So you see Hasidim also with big fuzzy beards and no discernible payot, because they are all frizzy, too, and mixed in with the rest of the beard. Vanity is, I guess, allowed in some circumstances.

But again, I digress.

The fur hats are GIANT. Google Hasidic Judaism. Wikipedia has a good bit on the dress code, and great pix of the enormous fur hats that some of the men wear. It is always the older men with super-long, frizzy beards, dressed head-to-toe in black, and wearing their prayer shawls (talit) over everything who also wear the fur hats OVER their kipot. Oy vey. I was wearing a cotton strapless dress and sweating my ass off. I can't imagine what they go through. Maybe that's part of the tradition, constant discomfort to keep you thinking about God, like wearing a hairshirt or something.

I think about God. Even when I'm strapless. I don't mind that they want to keep to tradition, but why allow rollerblading and wearing talit under a football jersey, and not toss the fur hat aside in the summer, or let the kids watch Rekhov Sesame or something from time-to-time. Whatever floats your fedora, I guess.