Inside Out

Yes he’s different. It’s as though time has frozen in 19^th Century Europe. Donning a fur shtreimel and silken coat, the Hassid stands inert against the quickly changing landscape of time. Exuding distance and aloofness, the Hassid turns his back to the world, closes his eyes and locks his lips in silence. But beyond the closed doors and the closed mouths there lies a story. A story worth telling.

Who is the Hassid? How are we to relate to him? Is he like a translucent window, whose outside clearly reflects what is within? Or is he instead like a frosted glass, whose warm interior gets obscured by the icy exterior? The only way to truly understand a people is to uncover them from within. Like the filmy layers of an onion, we must peel back the outer skins in order to expose their innards.

And  if we are to get past the strange garb, the  unusual customs, the unfamiliar language, if we go beyond all the externals, what will we find underneath? Surely the heart of a man beats within this people. Surely they leads lives like you and me, with needs like yours and mine. Surely they’re just people. Just like you and me. Just people.

My goal is to reveal the Hassidic people from the inside, out. To show that beyond the strangeness of without, lies a familiarity of within. I plan on entering their sphere, going into their territory: their homes, their stores, their synagogues- and telling their story, in their language, on their terms. I plan on showing you their world as they see it, and not how you see it.

Certainly there must be some compelling reason they have shut themselves off from the world? Some tell-tale explanation as to why they’ve shielded themselves from integration and assimilation for all these years?

They once tried to blend in. But they couldn’t. They once said, “it can’t happen here.” But it did. And the price they paid was too heavy. The price they paid was six million. Theirs is the story of the Viceroy butterfly. Like the butterfly, the only way they could survive was by blending out.

* Mimicry is the ability to to imitate something other than what you really are. Viceroy butterflies use it as a protection mechanism to trick predators into thinking they are an venomous species. Foremost, the intention of mimicry is to draw attention to yourself. This is usually achieved by advertising your presence with bright colors. Bright colors are probably easier for predators to learn and therefore likely reduces the number of casualties necessary before the predator learns the pattern to avoid and providing the mimic with protection.  http://home.cogeco.ca/~lunker/mimicry.htm