NEW YORK
Failed Messiah
There is a byzantine, serpentine world where black means white and white comes in all shades of gray, from charcoal to battleship, battered and torn, stained, dirty. A place where truth lies broken, torn, shattered, covered in mud, trampled on by hasidim who do not even recognize what it is their feet are stepping on.
It is a world with its own complete structure, its own terminology, its own dialect, its own unique morality. It is a place where conversations often start in the middle and end long before the participants stop talking. This is a place where outsiders are often lost without knowing it. Their eyes only see the surface, the shell, not the meat within. But the hasidim know the shell is only a husk, a covering, meant to be discarded. It’s the stuff inside that matters.
So when the Forward’s Paul Berger, an outsider who has no background with and no real knowledge of the hasidic community and little real knowledge or grasp of the Kellner case, writes what reads like an opinion piece (but is posted by the Forward as news) equating Sam Kellner with accused serial molester Rabbi Baruch Lebovits, one should take it with a large grain of salt – especially because both Berger and the Forward been unethical before this.
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