Too Many Hasidim For My Personal Comfort
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10/29/2014
If you want to know what I can't stand about going to visit my parents in Suffern, it's the fact that the Hasidic Jews from other parts of the town of Ramapo have totally ruined the area. Their attitude of "I-I-I-Me-Me-Me" is a bad influence on me, as is their manipulative dishonesty and the fact that they don't behave the way the mainstream Americans, even mainstream Jews such as myself, have been trained to. In fact, for the first nine months after I started my current job in Kingston, I didn't go down there for just that reason, which is why my job coach gave me the BUFFY THE VAMPIRE SLAYER DVD box set as a holiday gift to reward me for good attendance. What he didn't know was that the issue with the "Ha-Has", as I call them, had been a problem for years, making every visit very anxiety-producing; in fact a couple of weeks before I went on a visit in March of 2013, I got in serious trouble because of my severe anxiety. When I lived in Suffern, in the early 2000s, the only break I had from the Hasids was in a recreation group that I had to drop out of because one of the staff wasn't nice to me. She took advantage of the fact that I had no home front in Suffern because everyone was afraid of the "Ha-Has", whose attitude is that "everyone must live peacefully in misery until the Messiah comes to free us." In the 80s, when I attended a special day school in Rockland County, I had teachers who favored non-Jews over Jews because they saw the damage that the "Ha-Has" did to the county. That still happens today, and hopefully, if Ramapo is divided into wards, it MIGHT get better, but don't bet on it. When I take the bus from Suffern to the mall when I'm visiting my parents, and it's on a Saturday, I'm just grateful that they don't throw rocks at the bus- or at me. I'll be celebrating that with a special dessert on Friday night.
Adam | Kingston, NY