Tikkun Olam

I just read a guest post by E. Fink on DovBear about Black Hats (capitals intended) being like kugel. He says (as he states, partially tongue-and-cheekly ) that it, like kugel, is a social phenomenon, not a religious one. I tend to agree, and although I am not going in depth (with links and hours of research) into this here, I do want to say something about it. A Black Hat (and shtreimel for that matter) or kapote or bekishe is more reminiscent of 17th century Polish dress (and Jewish dress at that time) which means it is cultural in nature. Just as we in the twenty-first century in the West dress (men, specifically) in pants and shirt/jacket, most men in that era wore long coats (often over knickers, long socks and blousy shirts which some Hassidic sects wear today) and warm hats, appropriate for the cold climate of Eastern Europe, but not so for their Sephardic and transplanted Ashkenazic brethren in the Middle East. Somehow or other, Hassidic sects fixated on a cultural dress of...