Anash

B H
I dont know that you'll ever pass this way again, but I wanted to respond to some of your comments.

When I 'date' my life in the general life journey we all accumulate, it begins in 1977 attending my first shabbaton in Crown heights and being sent to Minnesota. I didnt really get 'the short end' of anything. The Rebbe shlita supported my family, the Pinsons, Abishter bless them and her parents, did everything to cloth and feed my children. Where would any stranger find such compassion and generosity?

The short comings were mine, albeit my upbringing was a major factor. Without family to be a support and guidance in selecting a spouse, showing a woman how to care for children, how to deal with marital difficulties, I was left to learn by jumping in the deep end of a committment I didnt fully understand and slowly drowned over 9 years.

My coming to crown heights was a bit different from many of the BT's I met there. I wanted to rectify my mother's unkosher conversion, correct my own status as a jew, have my father's ashes buried and finally live as a jew in a family with traditional jewish values. What I didnt understand and have a reference point on, is that you can love and be a part of the Rebbe's world and still use your brain and have an opionion and maybe even make some of your own decisions. My need for security overrode any logical thinking...so the first shidduch had to be right, there may not be another one...whatever the REbbe said had to be followed even if not understood.

I'm not making excuses for the double standard in terms of class distinction of 'lifers vs BT' because the fallout from that has effected not only my generation that came to CH, but many of our children, as well as the children of lifers who have drifted away.

For myself as well as trying to rekindle my children's hearts toward Judaism, I've begun davening and bentching light again. I dont know there is anything I can do to turn them into being shomer shabbos, their treatment in Lubavitcher yeshivahs, both in NY and outside has embittered them more than anything else.

YOu're right about porn...I've known and talked to enough people to agree its something so open and available, its a given that men are drawn to it. Its also a given that it degrades women, no matter what the participants say in how women 'control' what they do and how much money they make; it destroys the spritiual relationship between spouses when a man can look at the nakedness and perversity on a screen and then desire his wife from that perspective, rather than from a point of godliness. And I dont mean godliness exclusive of sexuality or tenderness, but a relationship that is relatively pure not based in haram and filth.

To end...in hindsight, the lifers that I once thought distant, rude and cold, were probably only concerned with protecting their own families from whatever 'filth' outsiders like BT's were bringing in with their emotional baggage. They were expected to invite us into their homes, feed us, talk with us and all the while hope that the investment, emotional and financial, would make us decent yidden.

b'simcha is not exactly my nature:-)
Like so many others, I feel like part of my body/self is missing with the Rebbe shlita gone from CH.

thanks for writing.