History often goes in cycles. In the beginning of the 20th century religion, was highly discredited. It was something you did in private or just on the week ends. The whole modern involvement with cults began in the 1960's when going into a cult was the "in thing" to do. Religion had lost its shame and became the popular thing. But a lot of it was directed towards Eastern cults. But some of that energy was dissipated in different directions, and some people instead went into the Orthodox Judaism and other into different varieties of other religions.
Now the pendulum is swinging backwards as people are seeing what is wrong with the religions they went into. Many want to swing into anti-religion and become reform Jews and support the Democratic progressive party which supports Islamic Fascism. This seems to me to be an undesirable option.
And this brings me to the other point about cults and religions. Their major good function is to save one from other cults and religions. This is like the purpose of the original nation states. They did nothing to help one in life's daily problems. All a nation state did was to protect one from other nation states that would take one and kill him or enslave him and rape his wife and then enslave her too.
This is one thing that is good about Torah. It saves from other cults and evil ideologies.
That is until it starts to morph into a cult instead that one joins thinking it will protect him, but the he finds himself enslaved and his wife stolen from him.
In essence this is sad because in fact there is nothing wrong with the basic classical Torah books that are deemed holy. It is only that after Shabatai Tzvi teachings and energies of the Sitra Achara (dark side) got mixed up in it. The Geon from Vilnius tried to prevent that development but he failed. His warning went unheeded until this very day.
I make an exception for Nachman from Uman who I think is very important, and I think he rose above his origins. So my opinion is that the sitra achara [evil realm] is just too much a part of Hasidim because of the many teachings of Shabatai Tzvi that are apart of Hasidim.
