All Who Go Do Not Return (13 page)

And yet, what choice did I have? Mournfully, I removed my thick plastic-framed eyeglasses, the world around me turning into a blur of indistinct shapes and colors, and stumbled onto a city bus, found a seat, and kept my eyes downcast.

The bus to Monsey and New Square, owned by Skverer Hasidim, would be different. It would have a curtain down the aisle to separate the sexes. Arriving just as the bus was about to leave, I rushed on and handed the driver my ticket, and then noticed that the curtain was gathered on its track toward the back of the bus. Surely, I thought, the other riders were simply too tired after a day’s work to bother extending it. Surely, they would appreciate if someone would do it for them, so I laid my prayer shawl and my shtreimel on an empty seat, and set out to arrange the curtain properly.

“What’s your problem?” A man shouted at me. “Isn’t it hot enough in here?”

He, too, was a Litvak, and I remembered the words of one of my yeshiva teachers: “Litvaks don’t care much for matters of holiness and purity.”

Other riders joined in the chorus of complaints.

“Who cares about the curtain?”

“It’s hot enough as it is. You want us to suffocate?”

“Why don’t you just take a seat and close your eyes?”

I was startled, confused, and then angry. “Do you have no shame?” I shot back at one of the men. “No concern for protecting your eyes? The day before Yom Kippur, no less?”

By the time the bus reached the corner of Truman and Washington Avenues in New Square, it was four-thirty. The prayers had just ended, and I watched the swarm of worshipers exit the shul. I rushed inside to wait for the rebbe. He soon made his way out from his little room up front, and I stepped into the middle of the parted crowd.

“My wife had a baby,” I said. “A girl.”

The rebbe slowed as he extended his hand and shook mine with his fingertips, limp, as if my message carried no more significance than the arrival of the day’s mail. “Mazel tov,” he said, his expression unchanged.

I stepped aside and watched as the parted crowds closed behind him.

Our joyous occasions bring the rebbe more joy than they bring ourselves
, Avremel had said over and over during his many speeches. Now I wondered: Was it really so?

Slowly, I walked to my home on Roosevelt Avenue, feeling sleep-deprived, exhausted from the ride, overwhelmed with a combination of joy for the new baby and stress from the day’s events, almost forgetting my hunger. All I wanted was to be home, and for the first time, I found myself missing Gitty, and also missing the child that was born to us that day, with her clear and alert eyes and the peachy fuzz on her soft head and the strawberry patch of skin on the back of her neck.

It was then that I remembered: I hadn’t yet performed the
kapparos. M
y atonement process was incomplete. The chicken was still outside in the cardboard box, in the heat of the sun, without food or water. As soon as I got home, I stepped into the sukkah. The chicken moved its head as I peered into the box. Relieved that it was still alive, I laid a slice of challah carefully inside the cardboard box and refilled the water bowl. Then I went into my bedroom and lay down on my bed, fully clothed. I was desperate for sleep, yet forced myself to remain awake. The day was not over: There was still one festive meal before the fast began, and afterward I would have to rush to the mikveh, then light a candle in the shul for my father’s soul; soon after, the Kol Nidrei would begin. Prayers would go until long past midnight.

A half hour later, as I sat at the table in my in-laws’ dining room, eating my mother-in-law’s challah and gefilte fish and chicken soup, I thought back to the day’s events: the doctor’s brusque attitude, the man who shoved four quarters into my hand without even looking at me, the bus riders who scolded me for my pious intentions, the rebbe’s indifference to my joy. Suddenly, Gitty’s unpretentious family seemed the most beautiful thing in the world.

When Gitty brought our baby home a few days later, we settled into rooms prepared for us in her parents’ home, as was the custom. Mother and baby were in danger of being harmed by Lilith and her demons for thirty days and could not be left alone. On the four walls of our room hung laminated sheets of mystical texts, names of protecting angels and warnings to all the forces of evil to keep their distance.

Our baby was laid in a dresser drawer set upon two chairs—a cradle or crib was not to be used until thirty days after birth—and as we stood silently gazing at the steady and alert eyes of our infant daughter, I looked toward Gitty and she smiled at me. There was something between us that at first I could not identify, a calmness of sorts. Gone was the anxious tiptoeing around each other, and in its place came the feeling that something had changed.

Soon it was time for the baby’s feeding, and Gitty sat down on the bed opposite me, covered her shoulder and chest with a small blanket, and undid the top buttons of her robe. As we chatted about breast-feeding and diapers and the relative merits of pacifiers of various kinds, I realized what it was that had changed.

We had created love.

It was the year of the photo op, hundreds of moments that seemed perfectly staged, waiting for the click of a camera shutter.

Here is Tziri dragging onions and potatoes out of kitchen cabinets.

Here is Tziri on the floor, in each hand a tomato, pilfered from unpacked supermarket bags nearby, her face and nose smeared in red goo and tiny tomato seeds.

Here is Tziri standing precariously with one hand on the trash can, peeking out from behind a small plastic bowl, nose, forehead, and cheeks smeared in chocolate pudding, eyes frozen wide with guilt.

Here she is studiously ripping pages from books she’d emptied off the lower shelves of our dining-room bookcase; here she is on Gitty’s bed, reaching for the cordless telephone on the pillow or scribbling furiously with a fat red crayon over the “Instruction for Brides” pamphlet that Gitty kept on the nightstand.

It was a blessed year. Gone was the angst that had accompanied me through my adolescence and the awkwardness of adjusting to married life. Yet to come were the full burdens of raising a family and its attendant anxieties, the pressures of health and finance, negotiating sibling disputes and wardrobe mutinies, overseeing school projects and homework assignments. Also yet to come were the torrents of doubt about my faith and the anxiety over how to deal with them. Even the nights passed unmemorably; a calm child, Tziri was sleeping through the night by the age of four months.

There were occasional frustrations. When I held Tziri in my arms, I felt as though I’d borrowed her, as if Gitty, generous with the precious thing, was allowing me, under her careful observation, to be a vice-parent of sorts. Springtime came, and Gitty and I would sit on patio chairs outside our door with Tziri in our laps. Sometimes I’d notice tiny goose bumps on Tziri’s arms and say, “I think maybe she can use a sweater.” Gitty would look away, annoyed. It was she who determined whether the baby was too cold or too warm, whether she was hungry or gassy, or whether, as Gitty would sometimes say, “She’s just a bad baby today.” When I offered once to change Tziri’s diaper, Gitty looked at me as if the notion were too absurd for words. I, a young man barely out of yeshiva, still consumed with Torah study and prayer and all those things that were the opposite of domesticity, surely would know nothing of changing diapers.

It stung, the notion that my child belonged more to her mother than to me, but I learned to accept it. I allowed the love for my daughter to wash over me and felt the indescribable, almost painful, joy over her existence. At times, I would not understand where those feelings came from; they were there when I watched her sleep, when I watched her feed, even when she cried, her face scrunched up with wrinkles so fine, her whimpers like a sweet melody.

There would be more babies through the years, all of whom Gitty and I would love deeply, but what I felt with Tziri’s birth would not repeat itself with the others. It was as if Tziri had come to repair something broken, and then it was fixed and the others had lesser roles to play. With my marriage to Gitty, I felt as if I had embarked not on my own journey but someone else’s, living not my own passions but those assigned to me by a world and a community that wanted for me something I had not fully chosen but had broken my will for. In Tziri, I found my consolation. At the end of a day of study, I would return home, and Gitty and Tziri would be out together on the patio. Gitty would be feeding Tziri baby food, applesauce, or mashed-up peas and carrots, and they would both look at me, Gitty with a gentle smile and Tziri with a reflexive wave of her arms and a stream of excited babbles.

I remember holding her at sixteen months, in January 1996, when I brought her home from Gitty’s parents to greet her new sibling, Freidy, our second child. I remember that she had something in her hand—in my memory it is an oblong object, vaguely threatening, like a soup ladle or a rolling pin, although it was more likely a toy of some sort—when she spotted the brand-new infant dozing in the portable crib between our beds. Still in my arms, Tziri looked at the bundle in the crib and then to me and Gitty, and then laughed a nervous adult-like laugh.
Tell me this is a joke
, she seemed to say, and she waved the object in Freidy’s direction, as if wanting to strike it, that
thing
that dared usurp her pride of place. Gitty and I laughed, nervous, but oh, so charmed.

It was Freidy whose birth would make us realize how unprepared we were. Plump-cheeked and colicky, she screamed through her first twelve months. Gitty had her hands full while I was studying and praying and attending the rebbe’s tischen. Gitty and I were both now twenty-one, with two children; before long, we realized that we were into something we hadn’t prepared for.

“Rent is due tomorrow,” Gitty reminded me one morning, and that same evening she waved a pile of bills in front of me. “FINAL TERMINATION NOTICE,” read a letter from O&R Utilities in oversize bold red letters. There was a bill from the phone company and another from a mail-order catalog from which we’d purchased a state-of-the-art toaster oven for three easy monthly payments of $39.99. We owed money at the supermarket, at the fish store, and at the butcher’s. “Mr. Greenberg said we need to pay off something on the account,” Gitty said, and I grew furious at Mr. Greenberg for not realizing that a three-hundred-dollar credit limit on groceries was not enough for a family of four whose head of household was studying Torah for a living.

At first, raising and providing for a family had seemed simple enough. Everyone did it, more or less, and so I imagined there must be a formula, the specifics of which I would learn in due time. The important thing was to start the process. I assumed that the “system,” the birth-to-death cocoon of institutions and support networks available for every Hasidic person, would take care of the rest. There were parents and in-laws to provide a year of dinners and Sabbath meals and a first baby’s needs. There were Sabbath food pantries for the hungry, free loan societies for home buyers, free roadside assistance for car owners, cadres of Hasidic EMT personnel to tend to emergency medical needs. There were grants for marrying off children, a co-op grocery store with discounted prices for school employees and others with large families. Any man could take his meals free in the yeshiva dining room if he chose. There was free coffee in the shul each morning and a shower and bath in the mikveh, with a reasonably clean towel and a shard of flaky soap.

For other expenses—rent and utilities and the odd pair of pants or the occasional wig styling—there was a stipend from the
kollel
, the rabbinical-studies institution that extended from the yeshiva system, in which every young married male, by community ordinance, was to spend the first two years of marriage. I had little budgetary sense of my own but was certain that the kollel had calculated the proper formula and provided accordingly.

A week after our wedding, I headed to the kollel’s administrative offices to enroll. The main kollel building was a drab edifice with a gray-and-pink stucco facade that formed one side of a quad in the village center, between the main synagogue and the rebbe’s home and opposite the elongated, limestone-covered structure of the Great Yeshiva. The elderly kollel administrator handed me a pile of documents to sign as he entered my name and Social Security number into an ancient computer. He then rattled off the rules in a drawling unpunctuated monotone: “Four hundred thirty a month always be on time five minutes late one dollar penalty miss a session twenty dollars two exams per week fifty dollars penalty for missing an exam thank you and be well.”

It seemed plenty: $430 a month. The ordinance required only two years of study, but I would stay for many years, I was certain. Oh, it will be challenging, my friends and I would say to one another, but that would only prove how worthy the endeavor. In the great hall of the kollel, at any given time, one could see men of all ages sparring over nuances of the law: from just-married young men, with peachy wisps of facial hair, to wizened scholars who shuffled on their walkers and canes to the senior-citizens’ restroom just outside the main door.

There were, of course, those disinclined toward a lifetime of study; the weak-willed, the impious, those lacking the passion or discipline for sacred ideals. Those unfortunate souls who, as soon as the two years were up, left the kollel to take jobs as supermarket cashiers, deliverymen for the butcher or the fish store, plumbers, electricians, do-it-all handymen. A few started businesses: selling children’s clothes out of converted basements or setting up child day-care centers in their living rooms. One enterprising friend started a small sandwich shop at the village’s tiny shopping mall, where men would stop for a bagel and egg salad after morning prayers. Another opened a craft store, only to close it several months later when he realized that, really, how many needlepoint and hook-rug kits did each family in the village need?

If I had given any thought to what I would do past the kollel years, earning money was never part of it. My occupation would be of the
klei kodesh
sort, sacred vessels through which holiness passed: cantors, ritual slaughterers, scribes of sacred texts, teachers at the cheder or the yeshiva. I’d always assumed that I would end up among the last category, or perhaps teaching adults—the daily page of Talmud, or an evening lecture on Bible commentaries—perhaps even a scholar of note, teaching other learned men.