"So I just joined Chai Society," my friend Dain Lewis '07 said over dinner last spring.
"Chai Society?" I asked. "Chai" means "living" in Hebrew, but I heard never it used as a substitute for "high."
"It's hard to explain," he said. "It's this kind of intellectual society centered around Judaism. It's incredible." His brown eyes widened as he cut his fork into the meat. "I'm meeting the coolest people. And Shmully, the guy who runs it, is unbelievable." Shmully, pronounced like "bully," is among the most traditional Jewish names around. I was intrigued: What kind of a Shmully starts a Jewish "high society" at Yale?
"This guy is such a businessman," Dain continued. "He's so well-connected and so sharp, it's ridiculous. I'm learning so much from him." At the time, Dain was running the Yale chapter of Mercado Global; he now directs Sex Week at Yale 2006 and the operations of the Globalist Foundation. Shmully Hecht, Chai's director, sounded like Dain's ideal mentor.
Except Dain is about as Jewish as I am, which is to say, barely. My parents raised me Jewish, but after one too many bad years at Jewish day school and some existentialist-inspired thought during high school, I turned atheist and never looked back. I remain a strictly social, cultural and culinary Jew. I've never stepped inside Slifka's chapel, but I'm a member of its kosher kitchen and a devoted attendee of its Shabbat dinners. Dain was more or less similar -- so how, and why, did he join a society run by someone whose big toe might be more Jewish than both me and Dain combined?
"You should come with me sometime to Shabbat dinner," Dain said. It would be the first of several invitations to the Chai house, from him, Shmully and Toby, Shmully's wife; invitations that I didn't act on until the fall. At first, I thought they simply wanted me to see the house and meet the members; eventually, I realized they were recruiting me. Shmully, it turned out, was a businessman with a business plan, one that included selective recruitment. I fit into that plan. I was a secular Jew curious about Judaism. I was a campus leader, the editor in chief of the Herald. I was passionate, driven, extroverted -- "interesting," as Chai members liked to sum it up. I was exactly the kind of person they wanted. Did I want them?
When Dain called me, roughly three months ago, to invite me to that week's Shabbat dinner, I eagerly said yes to satisfy my curiosity. Chai also has Tuesday dinners, regular guest speakers (sometimes open to the larger community, sometimes members'-only), and the occasional party or joint event with Slifka, but the staple event was Shabbat dinner. We arranged to meet just before 7:30, late by my standards; I was used to the 6:45 p.m. Shabbat dinners at Slifka. Only really religious Jews start later. I knew that from visiting my Lubavitch, or ultra-Orthodox, relatives in Chicago, who follow every Jewish law to the letter. At their house, Shabbat dinner starts at least an hour after the sun sets, no matter how late it sets. The males must first davin mincha-ma'ariv (pray in the afternoon-evening service): every Friday evening, my uncle and his three sons walk in their black top hats and coats to and from synagogue as the wife and daughter set the table, stomachs roaring in impatience. Since Chai's dinner started 45 minutes after Slifka's, I could practically smell the challah when I walked into the Chai house.
As Dain and I traversed the campus en route to Chai, he gave me a warning that set off a Lubavitcher light bulb in my head. "I tell girls, don't shake Shmully's hand," he said. "He doesn't touch women." In Jewspeak, that means Shmully is shomer negiyah: after his bar mitzvah, he cannot touch any women who are not in his immediate family. Now I knew for certain that Shmully was a Torah-studying, black-suit-and-yarmulke-wearing, fatty-food-eating super-super-Jew.
But Shmully's traditional appearance would belie his progressive nature, as with the Chai house. The brownstone, at 297 Crown, stood several doors down from AEPi. The half-dozen steps leading to its front door had cracks in the concrete. The mezuzah (the index-finger-sized case filled with a prayer scroll to remind residents of God's presence), nailed to the right side of the front door frame, seemed to have seen better paint.
Inside, Shmully told me Chai had joined two adjacent brownstones by knocking down the walls between them, and hired a professional decorator to handle the interior. In the living room on the main floor, a felt-covered grand piano commanded the street-side wall. Two dark-green Persian rugs covered the wooden floors. Burgundy velvet sofas stood at opposite walls, whose textured pink wallpaper gleamed with white roses. It was an environment almost any Yalie would feel drawn to.
As Dain and I removed our coats, he introduced me to one of the people on the far couch: Shmully. He looked like every Lubavitch man I had ever seen: full, frizzy beard, plump middle, white Oxford shirt and black everything else -- from shoes to yarmulke. But he was young: he and Toby recently invited me to his 31st birthday party. "Nice to meet you," I said, raising my hand in a quick wave rather than advancing to shake hands. He did the same from the couch.
At dinner, I barely talked to Shmully. He sat at the other end of the table; I was busy chatting with Dain and the other members over the three-course meal. The dinner started with salads: spinach with berries, pureed eggplant, guacamole, couscous and red cabbage. Then came the main course: chicken, kugel (noodle casserole), pasta and butternut squash. Dessert, special for Toby's 29th birthday, was chocolate cake, cookies and fresh fruit. Throughout, the kosher Cabernet Sauvignon and White Zinfandel flowed like prayer.
Nevertheless, Shabbat dinner at Chai felt eerily like the ultra-religious ones I'd gone to, not only because everyone felt stuffed at the end. Before we ate, one of the men said kiddush, the prayer that precedes Shabbat dinner; as we ate, Toby spoke about the parsha, the weekly Torah portion; after we ate, Shmully led the birkat hamazon, the grace after meal. Toby, like Shmully, looked the part of a Lubavitch: she wore a high-collared sweater with sleeves below the elbows, a skirt below the knees, and closed-toed shoes. She wore a wig, a shettel, to cover her hair, which all Lubavitch women do wear after marriage. All of the men I saw wore yarmulkes (skullcaps), although they guests varied in their degree of practice, and some were not even Jewish. One of these Gentiles, Nick Shalek '05, gave that night's speech, a novel tradition at Chai Shabbat dinners. He spoke about his campaign for Ward One Alderman, which we won weeks later. I wondered why Shmully had us discuss New Haven politics on Shabbat, the day of rest: was that not a contradiction? How religious was Chai?
When Dain and I left, at 10:30, the long dinner table was still mostly full, as was I. Though my stomach was more than satisfied, my curiosity was not: Chai was still a mystery wrapped in a long, black coat.
To get a fuller perspective, I turned to other, more involved members of Yale's Jewish community. Where did Chai come from and what was it about? How did it fit into Yale's Jewish scene, and the larger college Jewish scene?
From my many forays to the Slifka dining hall, I had gotten to know Amanda Elbogen '07, one such person. Having grown up and gone to school in a largely Orthodox community in Brooklyn, she came to Yale hoping to become involved in Slifka and Hillel. Now co-president of Yale Friends of Israel, she had unsuccessfully been recruited by Chai Society freshman year.
One of the reasons she chose not to join Chai, she told me, was that she had grown attached to attending Slifka. "I think that they attract not necessarily a different crowd than Slifka attracts, but they have their own crowd," she said of Chai. "And there's certainly lots of overlapping, but they tend to be pretty right-wing on most stuff -- religion, politics," a stance she doesn't share. "It's just a different sort of experience."
She prefers the Slifka experience because she feels more at home there. "You go and you're just surrounded by people you know very well," she said. "When you go there, that everyone's looking out for you. Everyone really cares about each other."
Alexandra Bicks '07, the current Hillel co-president, felt similarly about Chai. Although neither she nor Elbogen frowned on Chai for being exclusive, both prefer Slifka for its inclusive and informal atmosphere. "You do have to be invited to go to Chai, so even if I felt like going to Chai tonight I couldn't just walk in," Bicks said. "Whereas at Slifka, if I just feel like eating there for some reason I could."
Like them, I felt attached to Slifka: it had nurtured my love of Jewish food and supportive company since my first days at Yale. But was the larger Jewish community concerned about Chai's emergence as an intellectual alternative to Slifka and Hillel? The consensus, from leaders in Yale's Jewish community, seemed to be that the priority was to get and keep Jews (and Gentiles) engaged in Judaism.
"I actually think it's great that Chai provides another venue, another way in which people in the Jewish community can sort of enjoy Shabbat and hear speakers and sort of engage in Jewish life at Yale," Bicks said. She hinted at a kind of competition from her perspective, however, in that Chai has prompted Slifka and Hillel to ensure that they remain in tune with Yale's Jewish community. "It's a healthy, constructive challenge," she said. "I don't think there's any real competition; I think it's just a chance to continually think about what Hillel does, why there is Hillel, and what we can do to make it the best it can be at Yale."
"Some people see [Chai] as dividing the community," Elbogen said. But she said that the wide range of choices available is a strength for the larger Jewish community. "I think it's nice to have different outlets if for whatever reason people didn't want to go to Slifka and wanted to explore different types of Judaism."
Nonetheless, something still nagged at my mind. Shmully clearly had a business plan, but what exactly was it? Although it was flattering to feel like a chosen person among The Chosen People, the concept of Chai still struck me as bizarre: Why was a Chabad rabbi running an intellectual, quasi-networking Jewish society?
I decided to approach the source himself. It took three rounds of e-mails for me and Shmully to find a mutually agreeable day, time and place to meet. He could give me only half an hour. During that time, his Blackberry would buzz four times.
I arrived at Chai's brownstone slightly early and cautiously rapped the front-door knocker. Shmully opened the door and invited me in with his wide, thin-lipped smile. He wore khakis and a black fleece jacket over the staple white Oxford shirt. He led me to the guest suite, as elegant and alluring as the rest of the house. In the living room, a pastel-green velvet loveseat and matching chairs surrounded a circular wooden table. Along the street-side windows stood a narrow wooden table with hardcovers such as "Jews in the Music World." A spacious glass desk, with a black flat-screen monitor, a cordless phone and a leather chair, faced a bulky cabinet. Painted wooden doors parted like the Red Sea to reveal the bedroom, dominated by a brass bed with plush white pillows and matching down duvet. The ceiling's light fixture was painted with floral engravings in jewel tones. The walk-in closet, the size of some Yale singles, led to a bright white bathroom with glass shelving and gleaming tiles.
After the tour, Shmully offered me food and drink. The same bulky cabinet housed a mini fridge and pantry, both amply stocked. "We have Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite, seltzer water, water …" he started in his slightly nasal, high-pitched New York accent, listing the usual suspects of Lubavitcher non-alcoholic beverages. I stuck with water, my non-alcoholic beverage of choice.
We began with his background. He was born and raised in Forest Hills, Queens. "I am a Lubavitcher, a very proud Lubavitcher," he said. His family is one of the largest Lubavitch families in the world, and most of the men are rabbis. Before continuing, he hurriedly muttered the Jewish blessing for beverages and took a sip of soda. His relatives live all over the world, including Australia, where his mother was born, and where he studied for his rabbinical degree. He never attended high school or earned a high-school diploma. He has learned all he knows about business through books and experience.
He counted three jobs: fund raising for Chai and running a local real-estate company, Preperty, and a domestic oil business, Rozoil, both successful. He was helping redevelop downtown New Haven, one unit at a time, and doing well. His family just moved into a comfortable house on Orange Street. But he didn't tell me about his plans to make New Haven into Silicon Alley, the center of commerce between New York and Boston, or about the $50 million he managed from his dorm room at Yeshiva. He had convinced Benny Shabtai, an old friend who got rich distributing wristwatches, to invest in his fund, after Shabtai's $1 million investment in Shmully's uncle's gold and copper mine in Australia grew tenfold.
He told me he went all the way to Australia for rabbinical college because his uncle was in the gold-mining business and started the college. But he didn't tell me -- Toby did -- that the college was elite, or that he graduated before 21, an unusually young age. He told me that he left the stock-market world, having lost the money, to return to the United States and do kiruv, the Lubavitch code word for outreach designed to transform unaffiliated Jews into observant ones.
He chose New Haven partly because of its Ivy League school, and partly because his relatives ran a Jewish day school where he could teach. While he taught there part-time, he studied with Yalies. That was how, in 1996, he met Ben Karp GRD '95, the co-founder of Chai. "He wanted to start a Jewish society and I wanted to do outreach, so he asked me if I would be a rabbinical advisor to the club he wanted to start," Shmully said. "I figured it would be an easy way to do outreach, so we started." They rented apartment 5Q in the elegant Taft Apartments, just off-campus and held their first official Shabbat dinner in January of 1997. From the start, they made Chai exclusive and intellectual, rather than inclusive and religious, because they realized the former would get them more attention and membership. "At Yale, if you're quiet, you get further than if you make more noise," Shmully said. Once Karp graduated, Shmully ran Chai on his own, with Toby as the unofficial second-in-command.
But Shumlly didn't tell me explicitly whether outreach was part of Chai, perhaps even the end goal of his strategy. As a Lubavitcher, outreach had been ingrained in him since birth. Was it ingrained in Chai?
Again, I turned to more knowledgeable and more involved Jewish Yalies for answers, like a neophyte Jew turning to an aged rabbi. I started with my friend Ben Siegel '07, last year's co-president of Hillel and a longtime reader of Jewish thought. Siegel lived near the Bloomfield Hills, Mich., Chabad house, which he had entered several times out of curiosity.
"Chabad takes a pragmatic approach to issues of outreach," he said of the international Lubavitch organization. Although a Chabad rabbi generally engages his congregation members to the degree they feel comfortable, the larger organization operates more aggressively. Ever since the Holocaust, Chabad has made outreach central to its practices. "They recognized that the desirable thing would be that everyone were a Halachic Jew," Siegel said, "obeying the 600 et cetera commandments."
I thought of my Orthodox relatives walking to synagogue in the humidity of a Chicago August, covered in clothing from head to toe. Jewish law never accounted for global warming.
"The people in charge of Chabad widely realize that there are different ways of getting people to become 'more Jewish,' that is to say more Orthodox or traditionally observant," Siegel continued. The spectrum runs from those who donate money to those who become shuva, the Jewish equivalent of "born-again."
"They have an interest in getting people to be born-again, and they do it with a higher degree of success than any other Jewish organization," Siegel said. "It's not a secret Protocol-to-the-Elders-of-Zion kind of thing either; it's open."
When I met with Toby, she excitedly cited a recent international Chabad men's conference on outreach (the women convene in February). Nearly 3,000 shlichim, Jew-to-Jew missionaries, represent Chabad worldwide; the organization even has a placement office to create "outposts," or missionary centers, in "needy" locations.
Chai had not felt like an outpost:though I was a recruit, I had only gone there twice, and I knew only one member closely. I asked Dain if he had ever felt proselytized at Chai.
"Absolutely not," he answered immediately. Shmully had told him that Slifka and Yale's Chabad house were meant to do the outreach at Yale. He had always wanted Chai to be more intellectual than religious, though with a Jewish influence. Shabbat dinners were meant to facilitate that intellectualism, Dain's main reason for joining. "It's like an intellectual candy shop," he said. "You go and you're like, what interesting conversation am I going to have this week?"
Shmully was ambitious and competitive in his goal for Chai, to make it the most intellectual forum at Yale, the place smart, passionate, leadership-oriented students would seek for lively debate. Still, Dain has told me repeatedly that attending Chai events makes him feel more Jewish and abates that nagging Jewish guilt. The Shabbat dinners, for instance, have taught him blessings and prayers he never said before.
Siegel thought outreach had to play some role at Chai: Toby and Shmully, as lifelong Lubavitchers, have been exposed to and educated in outreach since birth. "That makes it a Chabad organization by extension," Siegel said of Chai. Shmully himself had said that he left Australia's stock-market world to do "something more meaningful," outreach.
Elbogen agreed. "He is a Chabad Jew," she said, "And certainly [Chabad Jews are] at Yale for a reason. They're trying to show people a side of Judaism and attract people to Judaism and attract a certain type of person."
Ponet also saw Chai as a kind of Chabad house, since its funding comes primarily from Chabadniks or Chabad supporters, its leaders practice Lubavitch Judaism, and its activities involve Lubavitch practices such as keeping the strictest possible kosher. Ponet acknowledged, however, that not every Chabadnik would agree that Chai is Chabad. "They don't necessarily think what Chai Society is about is representative of Chabad and don't think of it as an institution of theirs," he said. Chabad, after all, is full of Jews, and so disagreements abound even within the sect, much less with others. Perhaps, as Ponet suggested, the existence of both a Chabad house, Daniel's Den and a Chai house at Yale reveals such differences and divisions.
Indeed, I had never heard of or envisioned a Chabad house whose members held intellectual debates in a posh house. Bicks and Elbogen, too, saw such features as unique for Chabad; Ponet and Siegel saw them as part of a wider trend of diversification.
"Chabad is reinventing itself, not just here but around the country," Ponet said. "They've got a lot of money, a lot of ingenuity, a lot of cleverness, a lot of energy, and they've captured the imagination of a lot of our people." With necessity being the mother of invention, and American Jews becoming increasingly secular since the Holocaust, Chabad has gone creative in its methods of outreach. "They're now moving away from a strict conformity to their own ideology, at least in action," Ponet said. "They're creating all kinds of frameworks, using Jews and non-Jews, boys and girls, men and women. Chai plays the extra piece of being exclusive, playing off of the whole model of Yale secret societies and semi-secret societies."
Siegel confirmed this trend with a comparison to what he termed the "hip, happening, college-style" Chabad house at the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor. "They have a rabbi who's not that much older than the students but is a very bright guy," he said. "He says, 'Hey guys: your options on Saturday are, you can go see the Wolverines play [at the football stadium], which is a great game, or you can [watch the game] Chabad-style.'" This style involves free alcohol at the Chabad house, always an attraction for college students.
Toby, too, differentiated between the Chai house and the more traditionally Chabad Daniel's Den at Yale. "It's a different forum," she said of the Chabad house. "It's not members getting together on Tuesday nights to just hang out and talk; Chabad is more inclusive." She confirmed, however, that even if she and Shmully never actively tried to make Chai members born-again, outreach would always be beneath the surface. "We're both Chabad, so we'll always have Chabad," she said. "You say 'outreach,' but that's just part of who we are."
I had to give the Hechts credit for reaching Yale consumers with the religious-intellectual product that is Chai, but I wasn't buying into it.