The first time I used the term Chasidic-egal, I meant a minyan in which men and women would lead and count towards a minyan. This was the minyan to which Prof. David Roskies had his becoming-as-famous-as-we-can-make-it response.

This kind of "egal", gender parity or equal empowerment between men and women, is still important to us. But empowerment between women and men can be explored in many ways in Jewish practice. We want NeoHasid to connect with all kinds of Jews regardless of their practice, including Orthodox, full-on Chasidic, even Mea Shearim-niks, who may care but who may not be able to embrace "minyan egalitrianism".

What was so special about that first minyan is how diverse Yidn who would never have davvened together otherwise joined not just to pray but to learn from each other. No one was rabbi or rebbe, and yet everyone was in their own time.

This is the passion behind NeoHasid - the belief that we can all learn from each other, teach each other, grow and go forward together in our spiritual and religious work, our avodah. The only ideology on this site is to allow people from different Jewish realms and persuasions to stand in some fashion in equal distance to the source. It may never be possible for someone who didn't grow up in a Chasidic group to have the same relationship to the tradition as someone who did. But each of us can have our own intimate and unique prespective on these traditions that illumines Torah and emes, truth, for everyone else.

This is the Izhbitzer model of the circle world of Moshiach-zeit described by Chazal (the sages). Each person stands in a unique relationship to God that is unlike anyone else's - hence points on a circle, each with its own unique view of the center. Everyone is the one and only rebbe of his or her unique insight. Everyone is the student and disciple of everyone else.

This perspective is a challenge not only to traditional gender roles and to traditional hierarchies of who is more religious than whom. (Note: a challenge, not a refutation. It all depends on what one does with those hierarchies.) It is a challenge to the classical rebbe model as well, in which the rebbe alone embodies the divine will and everyone else serves that will in discipleship. In fact the whole Pszyscha-Kotzk-Izhbitz lineage questions that hierarchy, so we have what to stand on, mah lis'mokh alav, as they say in yeshiva.