I don’t have any excessive passions to which I can say I devote my life with ardent fervor.  I fancy the occasional torrid love affair as much as the next guy, but my formative years were not spent getting inculcated with any excessive jive that would then become my foundation as a person.  My parents were not in a cult; we’re Jews so Jesus was never an issue; actually, even God in the Judaic sense never really figured more than a good Milos Forman feature or a trip to the Baltic beaches.  This was in Russia.  In America, we had bigger concerns such as forging a new life or in my case, post-Kurt Cobain syndrome and ripped fishnets.  
I’ve heard of blind devotion – Manson followers who killed Sharon Tate-Polansky, the Waco, TX compound suicide, Satmar enclaves who attended Ahmadinejad conventions in Iran – but I could never empathize.  I mean, obviously.  Recently, a buddy invited me to attend Chulent, a weekly gathering for former Orthodox Jews who’ve become, as they say, wayward in their departure from the community due to personal misgivings, qualms, doubts and other forms of free-thinking tendencies that the community apparently disproves of.  The kids gather to discuss what they hate and yet can’t ever shake.  

Chulent is a sloppy concoction that can stew through Shabbat when the laws prohibit lighting fires.

An Orthodox Jew from “the community” started this group as an open forum for those very same kids whose disenchantment with their staunch formation drove them away from this community.  What’s fascinating to me is that no matter how far they run (one, for example, enlisted in the army and changed his last name to Anarchy), they can’t run far enough.  This tenuous God and the many ramifications are embedded in their essence regardless of who or what they become.  How does a community inflict its strength so deeply into a child’s mind, that this child will forever be tied to its stronghold despite his ostensible relinquishing of its teachings and ways?   The guy who runs the program calls it anti-establishmentarian, which he claims, is very Jewish.  While that may be true, doesn’t blind adherence inflict that very life by proxy that Guy Debord decried so profoundly in Society of the Spectacle, the only true notion of anti-establishmentarian that we can consider in all seriousness?? To be punk, don’t you have to question the higher authority?  Sure, these kids do or would like to, but there’s no shame to feel the comfort of the familiar.  And if it’s a fear and paranoia that drove them back to these roots, it’s only because they were inculcated with the teachings that instilled their neurosis.  
They found a community within a community that is, in fact, a microcosm of the fucked up real world; there's something misplaced yet strangely connected, like a mystical synergy of many anarchic parts. I guess that's what they mean when they say it's "gevalding."