What does one do when they find out they’ve been served a non kosher hot dog in a kosher restaurant? Resort to violence of course. Isn’t that what we are taught in the Torah? The first thing you do is start a mob type riot of yelling and screaming at the owner. Then you go over to the owner and punch out his lights out. Personally I think spitting on him would have sufficed as one astute patron did.
What is the matter with these Chasidim? I understand that being served treif in a kosher restaurant is an outrage. But reacting like a bunch of wild animals is an outrage too. As it turned out this whole episode was based on an inadvertent error that was not he fault of the owner. The New York Post describes what actually happened when the restaurant ran out of hot dogs:
Earlier in the night, a non-Jewish restaurant employee was sent out to buy frankfurters from a nearby kosher market. Instead, the worker went to a Golden Apple Farm grocery across the street and loaded up...
Once again we have violence by Chasidim in response to a violation of their standards. That the standard violated this time is universal to all religious Jews does not diminish the Chilul HaShem that results from their response.
What is it about so many Chasidim that motivates them to react in violent ways to things they don't like? There is no way that these patrons can be described as hooligans. These are mainstream Chasidim who went out to eat at a restaurant. Something went wrong and all hell broke loose. Is this the way we resolve a spiritual wrongdoing? By reacting with physical violence? I guess that’s the Chasidic way.
Now no religious Jew wants to be fed Treif meat. And one can understand the outrage at being cheated in this way by a Kosher restaurant. But violence like this doesn’t do anything accept make conspicuously religious Jews look like an uncivilized mob who resort to violence when they don’t like something. The reactions are therefore worse than the crime. And that ends up being a Chilul HaShem.
What makes this even worse is that these people reacted to a perception of being cheated when that was in fact not the case. It was a vengeful act against what turned out to be an innocent man.
When are these people going to learn how to behave in a civilized society?
