What I Saw at Simchas Beis Hashoeva in Crown Heights

Op-Ed: Yosef Shidler walked the streets of Crown Heights during Simchas Beis Hashoeva and came away with an observation about the crowds that filled the neighborhood.

Op-Ed by Yosef Shidler

Tonight I walked the streets of Crown Heights during Simchas Beis HaShoeva, and I came away seeing something I can only call a glimpse of Mashiach.

The first thing I noticed was practical. This year, the neighborhood decided to do away with the street vendors, reaching instead for a more organized, more orderly system. But that wasn’t what stayed with me. What stayed with me was the people.

I’m a Chabad guy living down in the Toms River and Lakewood area, and I know what our Jewish streets usually look like. Walk through Borough Park and you’ll see Hasidic Jews. Walk through Williamsburg and you’ll see Hasidic Jews. Every neighborhood has its own kind, its own crowd. Even when we gather in the thousands, like on Chol Hamoed at Six Flags, we’re mostly there doing our own thing. We happen to be in the same place. We aren’t really together.

Crown Heights tonight was different. I saw every walk of Jewish life in one place. More religious and less religious. Super Hasidic and Chabad and not Chabad. Litvish and Yeshivish, some in their nice ties. And they weren’t just tolerating each other in the same square footage. They were arm in arm, dancing, faces lit up. Nobody was staring the next guy down, nobody was silently asking why are you even here. It was natural. And I thought: this is it. This is what Mashiach is. All of us, every kind of us, together under one roof, and no one keeping score.

I don’t say that lightly, because I’ve felt the other side of it. I run an organization called Bunker of Light in Toms River, where we work with Jews from every kind of background, especially teens and young adults. This past year, I was dismissed from my own synagogue. The problem, in their eyes, was that Jews come to my home who might drive there on Shabbos, or who don’t dress to somebody’s standard of tznius. So to stand in Crown Heights tonight and watch every type of Jew celebrate side by side, with nobody blinking an eyelash, was more than a nice scene. It was personal.

We already have the blueprint for this. Every Sukkos we take the four species in hand, the lulav, the esrog, the hadassim and the aravos. The Midrash teaches, and the Rebbe built a whole sicha on it, that the four are four kinds of Jews: the one with Torah and good deeds, the one with Torah but not deeds, the one with deeds but not learning, and the aravah, the plain willow, the Jew with neither. And here is the whole point: you cannot make the bracha on three of them. You cannot do the mitzvah unless all four are bound together. Leave one out and the mitzvah is gone.

There is something else the Rebbe draws out. For the first three species the Torah is strict, the esrog must not be dried out, the lulav’s leaves bound to its spine, the myrtle thick with leaves. But the aravah, the Jew with the least to show, is the one the halacha asks almost nothing of. Even a willow that never grew by the brook is fit. The very Jew a stricter world would turn away is the one the Torah bends to keep in. Every single type of Jew is not just welcome, but required.

And if you ask me what actually bound them together that night, it was the simcha. In Chassidus we live by a principle, simcha poretz geder, joy breaks through every boundary. That is exactly what I watched.

When a room, a city, is truly rejoicing, the walls we spend the rest of the year building quietly come down. Nobody stops mid-dance to check the next man’s hat, his tie, his kippah, whether he drove there. Simcha doesn’t ask those questions. It bursts straight through the fences we put up, because real joy has no patience for them. And when those fences fall, what’s left is what the Tanya teaches all along, that underneath every kind of dress and every level of observance we are the same neshama, children of one Father, one single Jew wearing a thousand faces. The joy simply lets us see it. That is why the celebration is not decoration around the mitzvah. The joy itself is how the four species come together in one hand.

The image I can’t shake is a bus. Scrolling through the WhatsApp statuses of teens back in Lakewood, I watched an entire busload of them, boys and girls, spend their own money on public transportation and ride all the way to Crown Heights. Think about what that means. These are kids who could board a bus to anywhere in the tri-state. The movie theater. Manhattan. Any night out a teenager could dream up. And on their own dime, of every place in the world, this is where they chose to go. Not for a party, not for a single headline attraction, because there wasn’t one. They came to breathe the air of a place where they knew they’d be accepted. Some came to dance. Some just wanted to be there, among the kosher restaurants and the street life and the sukkahs open all night. They came because they knew there would be a place for them. And there was.

Guys from the Russian community, from this circle and that one. One without a kippah. One who wouldn’t pass somebody’s dress code. All of them together as one, and somehow it all works.

And it wasn’t only that bus. On my drive back to Toms River it hit me that everyone was leaving somewhere to be there. People left Williamsburg. People flew in from Israel. I met a guy from Miami, a guy from Canada. They left their own countries and states and communities and streamed toward one small neighborhood in Brooklyn.

Think about how strange that is. We usually travel home for Yom Tov, back to our own crowd. This was the opposite. People traveled away from their own kind to reach the one place where every kind shows up. And that is not a new thing at all. It is aliyah laregel. Three times a year all of Klal Yisrael left their fields and their tribes and went up to Yerushalayim, to the Beis Hamikdash, and stood together in one place. Simchas Beis HaShoeva was the great water-drawing celebration of that very Mikdash.

So watching the whole Jewish world pour into Crown Heights for these nights of all nights, I wasn’t seeing something new. I was seeing an echo of the real thing, and a promise of it coming Bigger and Bolder.

That’s the lesson I’m bringing home to Toms River tonight. We don’t become one people by making everyone the same, or by turning away the ones who don’t fit a standard. We become one by binding ourselves together anyway, four species in one hand, and refusing to make the bracha without every last one of us. Crown Heights showed me it’s possible and can work.

Now the work is to build it everywhere else. Every day of the year.

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