Ben Chorin pulls a Buber out of the Chulent

On the subject mentalblog.com: Gershom Sholem on Buber and his Chassidim and mentalblog.com: A taste of Chulent at the Ben Chorin’s Tish

Ben Chorin's description of Chulent is a caricature drawn to make a point that is as far removed from Chulent as nachos with extra cheese. In this sense he is following a familiar Buber shtick. Take a culture, strip it of its modality, duality, complexity and contradictions, mine few random wise cracks and present the sugary extracts as philosophy (see Gershom Sholem above on this subject).

There is more to Chulent than leather jackets high fiving in Yiddish (see mentalblog.com: Escape From the Holy Shtetl). There is pain that hovers above the place like a morning fog in Catskills. There is a ubiquitous chemical dependence that already ended up in deaths. There is poverty of sensitive elevated souls dropped out of the economic path. There is the uncorked sexual drive of the youth. But more importantly and this my main point here, it is the realization by all the Chulenters that civilization let them down. The revolutionary impulse is always there. People feel that culture reached a dead end and want to change it, just that they don’t know how. To use Chulent as an illustration of indifferent contentment is a self serving score abused for the sake an argument that has nothing to do with the people who visit the joint.