Fifty years ago, Orthodox Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson, known as the Rebbe, instructed young rabbinical students to approach random New Yorkers with the question, "Are you Jewish?"
The question, though provocative, was also regarded as necessary if Jews were to be saved from secularism. At the time, memories of the Holocaust were fresh, and antisemitism was a fact of American life — as was assimilation. So, members of the Chabad movement hit the streets of New York in vehicles used for outreach and education, called "mitzvah tanks."
(The video, courtesy of Chabad, was shot in Crown Heights in 1974.)
Fifty years later, the tradition endures. This month, two young rabbis, Mendel Treitel and Shalom Posner, stood near their mitzvah tank, in the form of an R.V., next to the Container Store on Sixth Avenue in Manhattan, trying to determine which passersby looked Jewish enough to approach.
"You feel it inside your kishkes, as they say," said Treitel. "You get this feeling, 'Mmmm, I smell a Jew.'"
The men of the mitzvah tank endure a daily tide of indifference, and occasional derision ("Get a day job" is a favorite of hecklers, said Posner). It tends to put off feminist Jews, as women are excluded from the ancient rituals that take place inside the tanks, such as the wearing or laying of tefillin.
For progressives, like Rabbi Andy Bachman, the mitzvah tank is problematic in the way it displays images of actual Israeli military tanks and soldiers.
"So does this mean that a soldier defending — at least by charter — a secular state, is actually doing God's work?" he asked. "Some would say I'm over-reading the text but I don't think I am."
A typical response to the mitzvah tank came from Melissa Stern, who recently passed the one in Manhattan and answered the question of "Are you Jewish?" with a smile and a yes, without breaking stride.
"It's not my thing but I don't find them obnoxious or awful, and you know, more power to 'em!"
