Don’t confuse outer trappings with inner connection. Don’t confuse your “you” with what you wear

IN

Boro Park, in London, in Bnei Brak, everyone under a certain age is bouncing to the same song, a catchy dance number by singer Sruly Green. The chorus is a driving refrain: “I don’t need your beketshe, I don’t need your beketshe / The only thing I need is you.”

When I reached out to Reb Sruly, he explained his intended message: While he’s definitely not against traditional chassidish levush, he wants people to know that not dressing “right” shouldn’t hold anyone back from joining the tefillos, the tish, or the family simchah. No one should feel rejected from Yiddishkeit because he or she doesn’t look exactly like the crowd.

It’s a message that rings true with all of us: Don’t confuse outer trappings with inner connection. Don’t confuse your “you” with what you wear. Don’t overemphasize the uniform — be it a beketshe, a Borsalino, a Bais Yaakov dress code, a specific color (or lack of color) shirt — and forget that what Hashem really wants is a heart pulsing with emotion and commitment.

The message is clearly finding many receptive ears as “I don’t need your beketshe” pumps energetically at weddings, on the road, and in dorm rooms. And not just because of the driving rhythm and earworm tune. At the most basic level, the song is a contagious affirmation that it’s all good — He doesn’t really care what you wear, as long as your heart is in the right place. Which probably explains the coordinating “dance routine” featuring the novel move of casting off a beketshe in sync to the beat.

But attributing the song’s appeal to that basic message sells its fans short; lots of them are deeper than that. They’re not lazy shirkers seeking justification to avoid anything too rigid, too demanding, too othering. With Reb Sruly’s permission, I’d suggest that the song resonates with this set for other reasons.

For those of us attuned to shallowness and hypocrisy, the song sounds a very authentic note. These days, so much money and effort go into achieving “the right look” — and so much status rides on the nuances of every demographic’s unpublished but very real Style Guide — that it’s easy fodder to mock when unaccompanied by a parallel focus on interior perfection. Come on, how does spending all that money on a shtreimel automatically make you a holy Jew? Why assume that a black hat is loftier than a baseball cap, when you don’t know how much chesed their respective wearers perform? If I daven a beautiful Shemoneh Esreh, does it really matter how long my skirt is? And who needs that beketshe anyway?

For those who think along these lines, the exterior is unimportant.

For those who think harder and deeper, it’s not as important as the interior. But it still counts.

Choosing to dress a certain way means choosing to self-identify a certain way. Not just to observers, but also to ourselves. That uniform shows our affiliation and alignment with principles and ideals. It demonstrates our desire to be part of something bigger, more historic, than our small and temporal selves.

Maybe that’s why some people are uneasy with the beketshe song. For all they agree that Hashem values the inner self most, they hear something discordant in the cavalier refrain about an item that’s safeguarded generations of Jews by marking them as different. And they’re decidedly upset to see revelers performatively casting off a garb that carries so much historical and ideological weight.

True, the classic levush doesn’t encompass a Jew’s total or even partial worth, but neither is it absent of value. Real mesirus nefesh has gone into maintaining that “look.” It’s not just a passing style, this year’s plaid that can easily be replaced by next year’s pinstripe. In some ways, these physical garments are stitched to our spiritual identity.

Maybe there’s another reason all those youngsters on the dance floor are drawn to the song. Most teens are drawn to stark idealism. They can’t help but admire those brave Jews among us who consciously chose their path, who’ve actively, mindfully decided: What kind of person will I be? How will my lifestyle reflect my deepest values?

Those heroic Jews don’t operate on autopilot. They don’t do things, wear things, say things just because their parents and grandparents did so. They fight internal and sometimes external battles for every aspect of their identity. And they wholly own the person who emerges.

When you’re born into an identity, you don’t necessarily own it the same way. You can even come to deride the gifts you’ve been given. If someone sweated through all the options and consciously chose the lifestyle and spiritual path that comes along with a beketshe, or peyos worn long and loose, or a certain type of headcovering, that’s something you’ll celebrate. If it was thrown onto you by default just because of the family you were born in, you might have a harder time mustering the same excitement for the “look.” You might even shrug that beketshe off your shoulders when the music gets louder and prouder. How much ownership do you really feel for an inheritance you never chose?

Maybe that dynamic plays into this song’s popularity. It’s hard to value anything that operates on autopilot. It’s hard to feel an attachment for something that was never more than an outer shell.

But even an inheritance acquired without effort can be invested with meaning and tethered with a personalized stake. Yitzchak Avinu was born into davening. It was something he absorbed: In this family we daven. But he innovated his own kneitch to that inheritance: He turned to Hashem during his own time, in his own tone, forging a tefillah that was his own personalized craft. And when both he and Rivka davened for children, it was his tefillah that was answered. He had taken a bequest that could have been an empty shell, a hollow rote, and blew passion and emotion and meaning into every word.

So yes, an empty beketshe doesn’t have much worth beyond the sticker value. It needs a body purified by authentic avodah to give it not only shape and form, but holiness. And its value increases with its owner’s intentionality, his appreciation of what it stands for and how it connects him to a tradition much deeper and more cosmic than fabric and thread.

Hashem doesn’t need your hand-me-down beketshe. He doesn’t need shapeless, limp facades. But a beketshe, or Borsalino, or Bais Yaakov wardrobe you’ve made your own — an outer layer that bespeaks a value system, that broadcasts your bond with the steadfastness of your predecessors, and that envelops an authentically striving self — that just might be something to dance about.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 1089)