The Eyes are the Window to the Soul

This summer, I was in Monsey for 10 days. Monsey is a town in upstate New York where a lot of different types of observant Jews live - both Litvishers and Chassidim, and different types of Chassidim, all in the same town. Next to Monsey is a town called New Square. I had the opportunity of taking a guided tour of New Square this summer.

For those of you who don't know, New Square is an all-Jewish town marked by two main things: its separation of non-married men and women (which is evident even on the streets), and its isolation from the rest of the world. The level of the first is controversial, to the point where the second is often overlooked.

Yet the isolation is fundamental to their way of life. An example to explain this: Our tour guide told us the history of New Square - how when he came to America, the Skverer Rebbe was shocked at the ads on the streets and what people wore, so he started a community out away from the city, on a plot of land that hadn't been built on before. In the middle of this, our tour guide mentioned the phrase "the eyes are the window to the soul", a phrase that commonly means "you can see someone's soul through their eyes". This seemed out of place, until she explained the Skver interpretation:

What you see, enters your soul.*

This is why they built themselves a shtetl in America, isolated from the rest of the world. Yet our tour guide also said that she admires the strength of Lubavitchers - that they go out into the world for the sake of others, despite all the things that they end up seeing.

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* This idea is not unique to the Skverer Chassidim - there's a phrase, even in popular internet culture, with the same idea - "There are some things you can't un-see."

My chassidic LOLcats: Let me show you them.

For those of you unfamiliar with the concept of LOLcats, they are unusually-captioned pictures of cats. The captions generally are in a sort of "kitty pidgin" (that is, the grammar and spelling in them is internally consistent but different than standard English), and are for humorous effect.

So I present to you, two Chassidic LOLcats that I just made:

An Introduction

Hello, my name is Miriam, and welcome to my blog!

The Sages say that "every person is a world" - and I believe it! Everyone has a different set of life experiences than the person next to them. Not only that, but even if two people share a single experience, how they perceive that experience differs - sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly - depending on the experiences they've had in the past. Hopefully, by sharing some of my world as it happens, this world will be a better place. So welcome to my world.

• I'm a Mathematics senior at Arizona State University, graduating in May 2009.
• I am a Chabadnik.
• My mother passed away a little over a year ago (late December 2007).
• I am engaged to be married in early June of this year to the wonderful Ariel.

As the posts continue, hopefully you'll enjoy my world, and share a little of your own.