By Rabbi Josh Wander
I’ve traveled across the planet and stumbled into an alternative reality. It shocked me—not with violence or ugliness, but with something far more unsettling: imitation so convincing it believes itself to be the original.
The only way I can describe it is with a parable.
Imagine a man from colonial America steps into a time machine and lands in modern-day Virginia. He’s taken on a tour of Colonial Williamsburg. At first, he’s amazed. The storefronts look familiar. The signs are written in his language. People wear clothing that resembles what he knows. The music sounds right. The tavern menu looks almost identical to what he remembers.
Almost.
Then the cracks appear.
The words coming out of people’s mouths are strange—half familiar English, half foreign jargon he’s never heard before. The food looks the same, but it tastes wrong. Preservatives. Additives. Something processed. Artificial. It fills the stomach but leaves a sense of quiet betrayal behind.
Everything is technically correct, yet deeply off.
He begins to feel uneasy. Why are these people pretending to be something they’re not? Why recreate the external shell while stripping out the inner substance? At some point the imitation becomes insulting—not because it’s hostile, but because it’s dishonest.
Now take that feeling and walk through Lakewood, New Jersey.
The signs are familiar. Hebrew everywhere. Yeshivas. Shuls. Kosher supermarkets. The language, the clothing, the rhythms of daily life—all recognizable. On the surface, it looks like Judaism.
But something is missing.
What I feel there is not continuity, but costume. Not tradition, but reenactment. As if everyone is playing a role in a meticulously staged production of Jewish life—complete with props, dialect, and choreography—but detached from the living source that once gave it meaning.
And the most disturbing part?
The actors believe the play is real.
They are so immersed in their roles that they no longer recognize them as roles. Generations of exile have trained them to mistake survival mechanisms for ideals, adaptations for destinations. The distortion has hardened into dogma. The plastic has been declared authentic.
Even the rabbis insist this is the real thing. When challenged, they turn the accusation around: You are the imposter. You are the one who doesn’t understand Judaism. The gall. The audacity. The chutzpah.
At that moment, the inversion becomes complete.
Reality is called heresy. Exile is called destiny. A life imposed by foreign nations is reframed as divine preference. And Jews living sovereignly in their own land—speaking their own language, fulfilling mitzvot tied to soil, calendar, nationhood, and history—are treated as deviations from the “norm.”
How do you break it to someone that they are living a false life when their entire world is invested in maintaining the illusion?
How do you explain that Judaism was never meant to be a portable museum exhibit, carefully preserved behind glass, stripped of land, power, responsibility, and national expression? That what they’re defending isn’t the Jewish dream—but a coping strategy forced upon us by exile?
After a while, conversation becomes impossible. Every word you speak sounds like madness to those who have normalized distortion. Every appeal to authenticity is dismissed as extremism. Eventually, there’s nothing left to do but leave—returning to reality while knowing you’ve left brothers and sisters behind in a world that may never let them escape.
Because the cruelest exile isn’t one enforced by chains or walls.
The worst Galus is the one you don’t realize you’re in.
That is GlattKosher bacon: meticulously supervised, carefully branded, passionately defended—and utterly forbidden to the soul.
