A COMMENT ON SEVENFATCOW

5. Atzmus September 11, 2007 at 10:15 am
Death By Numbers - Train Number 3
http://www.jewcy.com/node/8492
For anyone in New York who has visited Crown Heights, and back in the (those of you who may have visited the Lubavitcher Rebbe) if you where coming from Manhattan, you would have got the Number 3, (it’s red).
I know that because I used to get the number 3 OUT of Crown Heights to the Village most Shabboses, while I studying smicha in 770′ (that’s the Lubavitch HQ, & Main Yeshiva - for those that don’t know), every erev Shabbos I’d get on that train, towards freedom, because i had a place to escape to, a friend in the village, Ari, who was a bit like me, although he had left Lubavitch about a year or so before.
We had a special custom that we invented, from the time between Licht Benchin, to Schikya Mumash, that is from candle lighting to the sun setting, which there is about 20 mins, we would down, drink and consume as much alcohol as we could afford at the time, usually one of those 8oz ‘8 Ballz’ each or some cheap Vodka, that i’d purchased from the ‘Other Side’ of Easternparkway.
I didn’t eat much on Fridays, because the Yeshiva eatery [1414, Crown/Kingston] was usually closed by the time i got up Friday morning and wouldn’t give anyone food in the afternoon, unless they had been doing outreach, and to be honest, i only eat there if i really had no choice, who would want to fight Israelis for food that the rats had left, in a condemned building with live wires hanging from the ceiling with and rain water cascading through the light fitting and pooling at our feet?
Blissful and very drunk we would walk however many blocks to the NYU Bronthman Center, and get there in time for the Shabbath services, hopefully Ari would have put our names down for dinner?
Anyways, I had a place to run, to escape from the madness of Crown Heights, a personal drunken utopia, where i knew that most weekends i could run to.
My Shabboses in the Village helped me survive, the internal destruction that I was feeling while living in Crown Heights. I remember returning a few years later, clean shaven (that’s a big deal by the way) to CH, and finding myself braking down in an ally somewhere, crying to myself, asking ‘why am i back here in this hell?’
More than the external community, there is a more powerful and insipid control that existed in CH’s that of an internalised culture, of internal gatekeepers. The community like the si-fi Borg, is one being, it knows everything you are doing, everything you are thinking, where-ever you go, even if one member of the community sees you, it gets fed back instantly, beyond the speed of light, they know, it becomes part of their mass consciousness, they know who you are and what you are up to.
People said that I had a ‘prikas oal’ posture, a way of walking that gave away my underlying thoughts and feelings, my desire to be free, to brake free from the intolerable suffocation of the CH’s community and the constraints of that style of Judaism.
It was not the community itself of course, but the community as it existed in my mind, the accepted norms, that i had internalised, far more powerful and all knowing than any real community ‘out there’.
Jumping in front of the Number 3, on Kingston Avenue, out side the Subway stop that is literally on the doorstep of the Rebbe’s shul, 770′. Was the ultimate flashing fantasy, what a way to go! That would really send a message home, but i didn’t need to, I had a way out.
Like that second to final scene in Flight Club, were he puts a gun to his head, he was not trying to kill himself, but rather to kill his alter-ego who was in his head.

http://sevenfatcow.wordpress.com/2007/09/09/1719/

ON SEVENFATCOW ......

Kafka on Chabad Suicide
I have been sort of numbed by the Gershy thing. This one goes on and on. A calling? The carelessness numbs the time antidote. I see him walking in the tracks. It’s dark. What was he thinking of then, the minutes leading to it…? I guess I will never know.

The only possible meaning was said to me at Chulent, outside, around 4:00 am. Somebody was crying with me about Gershy. And she turned to me through choking tears, and I had never seen her speak so clearly, she sobbed, “Avreml, He was saying, Hi, I’m here.” She was Leah Kleim, and she seemed to care, really care, about what was going on more than anybody else I have met in Chabad or without.

I re-read the Hunger Artist the day after the incident and have always found this story deeply insightful of the plight of the unknown quiet creative person, the one who is never really understood and/or appreciated or respected.
Franz KafkaA Hunger Artist(1924)

For the rest of this post go to...
http://sevenfatcow.wordpress.com/2007/09/11/kafka-on-chabad-suicide/

LEAH KLEIM
May you rest in peace buddy.