I am walking through the echoing corridors of the Jewish Y on Westbury Avenue with three Hasidic men, two of whom are playing wind instruments. Doron is on sax, and David is on piccolo. Another guy, a local, is running ahead of them, peering into the windows of closed doors, looking for possible audiences. We are being kicked out of every room we enter. The Sephardic centre asked us gently to leave, the restaurant less gently.
The nursery school told us to go away right now , assuring us that if we went near the Jewish library across the street, security would be called, if not the police. A lady whose bouffant peaks at my shoulder scolds us before slamming the door in our faces. Go back to wherever you came from. There is a great darkness in this city. He has been asking me the same questions all day. Where is the light? Where are the young Jewish people? He and his cohorts are a new kind of Hasidic Jew.
They have a message to spread. And even though they are on what seems to me the least considered spread in the history of missionary positions, they are very much in Montreal to plant a stake. In Israel, their sect—the Na Nach—is already notorious, known for raucous, sometimes surreal guerrilla street parties in which Hasids pull up just about anywhere in white vans, cranking out ear-trouncing trance music.
YouTube videos show them dancing everywhere from the trendiest street corners, to schoolyards in suburban slums, to Israeli Defence Forces checkpoints. The Na Nachs create their scenes of urban misrule as part of what they call hafatza —outreach. In addition to dancing, they give out books and stickers and offer suggestions for classes, bookstores, and study groups.
Why I am on this particular hafatza run with them is a question I have increasingly been asking myself, especially since they appointed me their Montreal Jewish community tour guide. I met Doron in Tel Aviv a month ago, at the house of a Hasidic rav —a tzaddik , a holy man.
