Living Chassidus

In a poor effort to compete with the ever-popular Engelson’s shul in Crown Heights, Living Chassidus opened their Temu version of the idea. Billed as a “Chabad House for singles,” this K-Mart imitation exists less to help people get married and more to make sure they never cross paths in the first place. To set the tone for this brilliant strategy, they hosted two separate events for men and women, further reducing the already slim chances of these sad singles finding anyone. The Weisses clearly believe the best way to get people married is to keep them as far apart as possible.

It’s Chassidic nunhood disguised as outreach, a holiness cult with a singles’ mailing list. And that, in a nutshell, is the Living Chassidus miracle: the first singles community designed to keep you single.

They aren’t building a community; they’re building a convent, a sanctuary for the emotionally sedated, a rehab center for attraction, a space where repression is sold as virtue. They’re raising money for a building because apparently repression needs a mortgage. What they call support is really supervision; what they call growth is control. Every dollar they raise becomes another brick in the wall between men and women, another layer of insulation between human instinct and Divine design. What it really is, is a mausoleum for passion, intimacy, and normal human contact, a temple to tznius and a holy asylum for the sexually confused.

They talk about living Chassidus yet flinch every time life shows up. You can’t teach life skills in an environment where life itself is off-limits. Their version of “skills” trains compliant adult-children who thank the staff for scheduling their emotions. They say they help singles “thrive,” but what they really do is help them accept lifelong infantilization under the smiling banner of self-improvement. They’re not solving the singles crisis; they’re doubling it, one “separate event” at a time.

If you want to see the opposite, go one block over. The success of Engelson’s is charisma, not square footage. If Rabbi Eli and Myriam Engelson ran their events from a tent on the Eastern Parkway median, they’d still draw a crowd. The Weisses could buy freaking 770 and still not get a crowd. At Engelson’s there is energy, laughter, and life. At Living Chassidus you feel supervision. Engelson’s builds marriages; Living Chassidus builds dependency. Every event feels like group therapy run by people who confuse control with care. “Life Skills” classes are taught by people who have none, led by a spiritual Mother Superior in Michal Weiss, Crown Heights’s own patron saint of chastity. I guess Michal’s upbringing in heavily-Christian Birmingham, Alabama rubbed off a bit too much. The only thing missing is the habit and the vow of silence; oh wait, they already have that, it’s called female modesty.

It’s not religion anymore; it’s therapy with a mechitza. Living Chassidus has the soul of a missionary church wrapped in sheitel branding. The tone is all holiness, guilt, and confession, just without the crucifix. Their “life skills” are a catechism for purity. Their “safe space” is a confessional booth with sushi. It is Christianity with kugel, preaching salvation through self-denial. The obsession with “guarding the eyes” and “purity” is not Chassidus. It is Victorian sexual panic, but Beis Rivka coded. They’ve replaced avodah with behavior management. This is not Yiddishkeit; it is a sanitized morality play imported from the Sunday-school imagination.

Michal Weiss bills herself as a life coach, but in her world emotional regulation means never having a genuine reaction again. Healing means sterilization; growth means dependency. Her brand of healing is prudish restraint masquerading as holiness. It’s the spiritual Lupron of Crown Heights, injecting faux holiness where vitality used to live. Living Chassidus is where passion goes to get sedated. She offers “support,” “community,” and “guidance,” all of which translate to the same thing: keeping you in line. She preaches healing while teaching people to fear their own humanity. It’s Victorian purity culture with a hechsher, “Chassidic” therapy for those who think desire is treif. They’ve hijacked the language of psychology and turned it into a sermon on avoidance, rebranding tznius as lifestyle, repression as health, and emotional paralysis as spirituality.

And when you wall women off from men long enough, they start finding comfort with each other. The culture of Living Chassidus practically invites it. You can’t keep pushing “emotional connection between women” as a substitute for marriage without attachments that mimic it. That’s what happens when you outlaw human instinct but keep all its circuitry alive. And it doesn’t stop there; the damage follows them past the chuppah. Couples trained to flinch at touch do not suddenly turn into lovers because they have a kesubah. The result is cold bedrooms, broken communication, and a generation of frum therapy clients wondering why holiness feels so numb.

They’ve renamed repression to a smile, nunhood to “boundaries,” celibacy to “tznius.” It’s a soft-focus purity cult wrapped in Chassidic vocabulary. They talk about safe spaces and community, but what they really mean is: don’t feel too much, don’t want too much, don’t live too much. They call it “the Chabad House for singles.” What it really is, is a singles retention program. The goal isn’t to help them marry; it’s to make them comfortable enough in their loneliness to stop asking why. They’ve created a support network for eternal waiting, a shidduch cemetery where everyone smiles politely and pretends to be fine.

Their shidduch “events” are especially bleak. Everyone sits around and “shares what they’re looking for” while pretending they’re not dying inside. It’s frum speed-dating, but only with members of the same sex. They claim “many matches” came out of it, but if that were true, why are all the same people still attending five years later?

And now they want to institutionalize the sickness in brick and mortar. Every cult begins the same way: convince vulnerable people that safety equals dependence. Living Chassidus baptizes that formula in mikvah water. The Weisses have found a way to monetize insecurity by turning basic adulthood into a mentorship program. And of course they hold “separate events for men and women,” because nothing says “helping singles get married” like making sure they never actually meet. Imagine running a matchmaking service whose goal is to keep everyone pure, clueless, and alone. That’s Chassidic nunhood.

Now they want a permanent building for all this “holiness,” a brick-and-mortar monastery where singles can come to feel righteous about being alone. They call it a Chabad House, but it’s really a monastery with a Jewish star, a museum exhibit titled Before the Wedding: How We Taught You to Fear Touch.

The Torah teaches that there is a time and place for everything. A time for peace and a time for battle, a time to guard and a time to give. There is a time to separate, and a time to unite. By their mid-twenties, keeping men and women apart isn’t holy; it’s sabotage, cruelty wearing a poorly-fitting sheitel. We do not need more support groups teaching adults how to avoid attraction; we need spaces where Yidden can remember that attraction is not a sin.

Chassidus was never about sterilizing the physical, but revealing its G-dliness. The Baal Shem Tov did not come to erase passion but to sanctify it. If he saw this nonsense from the Weisses, he would start another movement just to undo it.

Living Chassidus does not teach people to live; it teaches them to hide. It is not a Chabad House; it is a convent with better branding.