Chabad

Growing up in Los Angeles, I'm used to be surrounded by Chabad.  Their annual telethon is advertised all over the city, and they go to extremes to promote Hasidic Judaism.  I have one vivid memory of an encounter with Chabad - when I was only around 10 years old.  My grandparents were in town over winter break, and we went out to a very nice restaurant for dinner.  The moment we stepped outside to get our car, my family was bombarded with members of Chabad shoving pamphlets and Hanukkah gifts in our faces, and then drove away in what they called the Hanukkah-Mobile.  We took them, and I never really thought much of it.  Years later, I have more of an understanding of why that occurred and how it represents Chabad as a whole.

Chabad, to me, is a very interesting group of Hasidic Jews.  It is hard to comprehend what they really are all about - and it shows on their official websites.  What really struck me as interesting was the lack of context and organizational flow on both chabad.org and chabad.edu.  Chabad.org is a very disorganized website - one where it takes 10 separate links to reach the page you would like to reach.  Chabad.edu has no real information about what Chabad has to offer - it is a bunch of different resources for people to find out, but you can't find out unless you use the resources.

I feel like overall, Chabad tries to hide a big part of their message and what they believe in.  Either that, or they try very hard to get people to believe what they believe.  I feel like there is no middleground.  Maybe it's just me, but I feel that this is a very dysfunctional way to organize a religious group, making it hard for people to know what really to believe.