My favorite blog find today is the Chaptzem Blog, which is devoted to news of interest to Brooklyn’s Hasidic community. It’s a great read, written in English with Yiddish mixed in, and it lets you peek at a community smack dab in your midst that seems like it inhabits its own parallel universe. This email written by a nineteen-year-old who wants a wife is great:

What really breaks me into little pieces is that my mother goes around telling all the shadchunim what a big learner I am and that I need a girl that will support me in learning for many years. I don’t know, but I just can’t see myself having to sit in kolel for the next who knows how many years just because my future wife and father in law thinks that that is what I am. I can see myself having a shiur every day after work but not to be stuck in a kolel for many years. It’s just not me.

I love that his email is so heartfelt, but also that even though the situation seems specific to his community, switch a few words and it’s totally something you’d hear from an Asian kid complaining about his mom. Our differences, sometimes they don’t really make us different.