nisht: Wouldn’t that be sectses?
Now I feel like Gollum.
just a member: Either this person is looking for a vague difference, in which case he doesn’t want anything too complicated anyway and would tune you out if you tried to explain the subtle differences between a litvak and a chassid because why should he care?, or he’s looking for something really detailed, in which case, go for it.
Honestly, I think it’s a bit like this: I just read The Chosen, which I happened to like a lot, and I then went on a book review website. All of these reviews were about how now they can understand Jews and their different sects and practices, and I was banging my head against the keyboard. But it would be ridiculous to claim that it doesn’t give even a little bit of insight into Judaism and the Jewish community, and if I decided to be well- meaning and write a whole long diatribe about each of the tiny piddling inaccuracies that made it seem so against what I know to be true, people would tune me out. They don’t care. It’s like when someone tried to show me the difference between a real bill and a counterfeit- the differences are there, but they’re so subtle and I don’t care enough about it to really pay that much attention and care that one of them’s wrong.