I work in SAR High School, a Modern Orthodox co-ed school in the Bronx. You’d think I’d be the furthest thing from having anything to say about gartels. But you’re wrong. Lately, we’ve had a number of men on the faculty, and a few students, who wore gartels for davening. It’s a tiny data point that’s reflective of a larger phenomenon – the increasing attention being paid to chassidut, both in learning and practice, in the MO community. While MO has roots in the Lithuanian yeshiva tradition as filtered through a yeshiva that is also a university, many of whose leaders in the 20th century were rabbis with Ph.D.s, the community has shifted from abstruse and rarefied intellectualism to an embrace of chassidic ideas, concepts, and practice. It might take the form of students visiting New Square on Lag Ba’Omer or Boro Park for a Simchat Beit HaShoeva (both of which my students do.) And it might take the form of Y.U.-educated teachers wearing gartels as they daven.
We could hand-wring over this, as some do, seeing it as a turning away from a more rigorous Judaism to one that is more accepting. We might be resigned to it, as perhaps historians might, as the inevitable result of the homogenization of America mixing together what had been distinct Jewish traditions in Eastern Europe. Or as an example of the endless renewal to be found in Judaism, as each generation finds that which speaks to them. But writ large, the mining of the vast corpus of our text and traditions for that which speaks to the circumstances and realities of our lives is entirely traditional, even as it yields new forms and approaches in each generation.