All Who Go Do Not Return (18 page)

Because of the merit of three things, Israel was delivered from Egypt: they did not alter their names, their language, or their dress.
This is the midrashic dictum that encapsulates the ethos of the modern Hasidic world, a world characterized by the simple values of cultural fidelity. The objective is self-imposed ghettoization. Distinct language and dress keep interactions with outsiders to a minimum and help maintain separation from the wider world. Restrictions on secular education and outside knowledge keep foreign ideas at bay. Bans on media and popular entertainment keep away temptation. And so the Hasidim are spared the calamities of modernity.

“My father used to listen to the radio,” my friend Motty confided in me one day.

Motty, a former classmate with whom I now had an evening study session, had recently bought a car, a used brown Dodge minivan. In his car, away from the meddling of his wife, he had begun to listen to the radio. He had been raised among Skverer Hasidim in Montreal, and had moved to New Square only for yeshiva studies and marriage, and now he was trying to explain to me that listening to the radio was not all that bad.

“Was my father not pious enough?” Motty flashed me a look, as if to say, how preposterous. His father, who woke each day at dawn to study Talmud for several hours before going off to his office, had been a close confidant of the old rebbe. He gave generously to charity and raised a dozen offspring, the majority of them scholars or married to them. “It’s not the worst sin in the world,” Motty said.

It was true. The prohibition against radio listening was not one of the 365 biblical prohibitions, for which the theoretical punishment ranged from lashes to the death penalty to extirpation. It was not even a truly rabbinic one, as it was not mentioned in the Talmud.

Motty gave me a sidelong glance. “I think you’d enjoy it too, by the way.” He brought all five fingers together in front of his face, then sprang them apart theatrically. “Opens your mind.” He described how captivating it all was, news reports flowing into traffic reports, flowing into commercial breaks and then weather and sports, every moment of airtime perfectly calibrated. “Modern technology. I’m telling you, you’d be amazed.”

In truth, we already had some of that modern technology in our home. In our kitchen, right above the refrigerator, sat a sleek, silver double-deck Panasonic stereo cassette player.

When I had first brought it home, several weeks after our marriage, in the summer of 1993, Gitty had frowned.

“It has a radio,” she said with an accusing glare.

The device, fresh out of the box, lay on the chintzy oilcloth on our kitchen table, and Gitty stuck her index finger at a spot on top, near the volume control.
Tape, AM, FM
were printed in tiny white letters along the ridge of the circular switch. There was no denying it.

“We’ll do what everyone does,” I had said then, annoyed at the suggestion of impiety. Many of my friends had cassette players, and when the device came with a built-in radio tuner, there was a standard procedure for it: Krazy Glue the switch into the tape-playing position, paste a strip of masking tape over the station indicators, and put the antenna out with the next day’s trash. As Talmud students, we were nothing if not resourceful; loopholes and workarounds were our forte.

I assured Gitty that I would disable the radio, but she only shook her head and went back to her housework. The cassette player soon went on top of our refrigerator, where it would remain, through four different apartments and across the births of our five children, for the next decade or so.

But I never disabled the radio. I either procrastinated or I forgot or perhaps I thought it useful to have in case of emergency. Still, we never switched it on, allowing it to serve only as a phantom decadent presence in our otherwise pure and pious home. The tape player would serve mostly to entertain our children, who would haul their Legos, Tonka trucks, and American Girl dolls out onto the kitchen floor, and the cassette decks would spin an endless spool of musical tales featuring Yanky, Chaneleh, and Rivky, good Jewish children who spoke no lies, loved the Sabbath, and always, without fail, honored their parents.

Few radios were to be found when I was growing up, but I remember one incident when I was around ten. It was late on a Saturday night, and my father was being interviewed by a Jewish radio station about his work, teaching secular and unaffiliated Jews about our brand of Orthodoxy. My mother borrowed a radio from one of our non-Hasidic neighbors for the evening, and our family gathered around the table in our small kitchen while my father, in his study down the hall, gave his interview over the phone. I remember little of the interview itself, as I spent most of the thirty-minute segment marveling at the mystery of my father’s voice being transported from the other end of our apartment to a studio in some unknown place and back to us in the kitchen. I remember also that it felt oddly aberrant. Secular influences were such anathema to our lives that the presence of the radio on the kitchen table, right next to the silver Sabbath candlesticks my mother had just cleared off the dining-room table, was jarring.

During my teenage years and the first few years after our marriage, there were no accessible radios nearby. Current events were learned about in old-fashioned ways. In the yeshiva dining room, news of the failed coup against Boris Yeltsin in Moscow and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait were passed along with plates of farfel and slippery noodle kugel. When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of Yasser Arafat on Bill Clinton’s White House lawn, we looked up briefly from our Talmuds to listen to the student who claimed he had the news on good authority—probably from the school’s non-Jewish janitor—and we promptly returned to our studies. Later we repeated the news at home to our wives, who carried it farther to their mothers, sisters, and neighbors.

Over time, however, I came to look up to the radio on the refrigerator with longing. By then, I had already learned two rules of radio. The FM dial, I knew, carried music—secular, vulgar, abhorrent, especially female voices. The sin was so great that I couldn’t even be tempted. It was the AM dial that intrigued me. I learned from Motty that it carried news and opinions and all kinds of fascinating bits of information about the world. My curiosity grew nearly unbearable as I wondered about all that was available to me with only the flick of a switch.

The more I thought about it, the more the temptation grew. Motty was right, I thought. It wouldn’t violate Jewish law but only the restrictions of our community. I would sit at our kitchen table eating the dinner that Gitty had prepared, and my eyes would wander to the red band on the station indicators on the device above the fridge. The dial seemed to hiss and beckon in a seductive whisper:
I’ve got news for you.
But I worried about Gitty. If she caught me, she would scold and sulk at the impurities I was allowing into my heart and, by extension, into hers and those of our children.

Finally, I could no longer resist. Late one night, Gitty and the children asleep in the bedrooms at the end of the hallway, my eyes wandered up to the stereo system. At first, I shoved the temptation aside, as I had done so many times before, but the more I tried to suppress it, the greater the urge became.

In one of our kitchen drawers, alongside utility bills and an assortment of multicolored rubber bands, I found an old pair of earphones. Careful not to make a sound, I moved one of the chairs near the refrigerator, stepped up onto it, and plugged the earphones into the tiny jack. I leaned my elbows on the dust-covered surface above the fridge and began twisting the dial slowly, listening with one ear to the cackle of static as the white indicator floated across the red band, while keeping my other ear tuned for noises from the bedrooms down the hallway.

I switched the dial from one station to another, commercials for medical malpractice attorneys, car dealerships, and department-store blowout sales filling me with forbidden pleasure. The strange jingles, the smooth transitions from traffic to news to commercials, captivated me; the fact that the sale was for
one week only
, or that I was not currently on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which, I now heard, was backed up to the Brooklyn Bridge because of an accident in the right lane, mattered little. I was like a visitor from a different era encountering our modern one, captivated by its very mundaneness.

Eventually, I came upon a talk show. The host was angry, particularly miffed about the antics of someone he called “Alan Dirty-Shirts.” After several minutes, I gathered that “Alan Dirty-Shirts” was a liberal, and liberals were bad. They were in favor of sinful things, such as abortions, and wacky ones, such as homosexuals getting married. I listened as caller after caller berated “Alan Dirty-Shirts” for intending to uproot conservative values from the American heartland. The
American heartland
, whatever and wherever that was, had my sympathy. “Alan Dirty-Shirts” was against people of faith, who, I was happy to learn, existed even outside my own Hasidic world.

“Were you listening to the radio last night?” Gitty asked the next morning, while flipping a slice of French toast in the pan. I stood dumbfounded by her mysterious intuition. I tried to deny it, but she wasn’t fooled.

“You promised you’d disable it,” she said. “It starts with radio, and the next thing you know, you’re eating
trayf
and driving on Shabbos.”

I gave my halfhearted assurance that I would now disable it. Days passed, however, and I knew that I would not do so. I wanted to listen again to that talk-show host. I wanted to hear more news, more traffic reports about cars stalled in the left lane of the BQE, and how we were doing on the Hudson River crossings. More commercials for car dealerships in Lodi or mattress stores in Paramus.

Several nights later, the volume near mute, I spent another hour on the chair near the fridge, earphones pressed tightly against my ears. Once again, Gitty confronted me the next morning. She wouldn’t tell me how she knew. In fact, she wouldn’t say much at all, but the fury in her expression suggested that she was just about ready to toss the device off our second-floor balcony.

But I would not cave. I would be a dutiful Hasid in all respects except this one. Gitty would have to accept me the way I was.

Gitty was right, though. The radio was just the beginning.

One day, I noticed an ad in the local community bulletin:
Used car. Excellent condition. $1,500.

Owning a car was unbecoming for a young Skverer Hasid, especially one with pietistic aspirations. The old rebbe had warned that cars led to bad things. “One press with your foot, and you can be anywhere,” he had said. But I was now out of the study hall, concerned less with being a good and pious Hasid and curious to explore what the world had to offer. If I had a car, I could run errands for Gitty, or take her shopping on occasion. I could get a job outside the village. I could be going places.

It was a gray 1985 Oldsmobile sedan, with unfashionably sharp edges, boxy and long. The air conditioning didn’t work, and the turn signals didn’t light up on the dashboard, but it was otherwise in good working order. After haggling with the owner, a Yemenite Israeli car mechanic, I got the price down to $750 and drove the car home.

The next afternoon, I took the car out again. I had a destination in mind but knew that I should resist the temptation. I thought about the old rebbe’s words.
One press with your foot, and you can be anywhere.
But I could not resist. Still wrestling with the idea, I drove the three miles to the Finkelstein Memorial Library, in nearby Spring Valley, and turned into the underground parking garage, out of sight of Hasidim passing on the busy roadway nearby.

The library was housed in a red-and-white building on a hilltop along Route 59, the county’s main road, halfway between New Square and Monsey. I had passed the building many times before and, through the tall windows across the library’s two-story facade, had seen the many rows of bookshelves within. Stepping inside now, I felt overwhelmed. What did one read first?

“You can borrow up to five books from each section,” one of the librarians told me.

The librarian showed me the list of sections—history, science, philosophy, politics—and with some quick math, I realized I could borrow several dozen books at once. This was like being told you could have all the doughnuts in the doughnut shop, and suddenly you don’t know what to do with so many doughnuts, or if you did, you had no way to carry them home, or a cupboard large enough to store them. The prospect of having so many books was strangely paralyzing.

I lingered for a few minutes around the new releases, and then wandered into the children’s section, near the library entrance. In front of me sat a group of tots reading
Curious George
and
Amelia Bedelia. Nothing to see here
, I thought, ready to move on, and then I noticed, behind the children, along a low shelf, a twenty-volume set of
World Book
encyclopedias.

For the next three hours, I sat on a tiny orange chair at a low green-and-yellow table as the pile of volumes grew beside me. Alongside a little boy paging furiously through
The Berenstain Bears
, I read about Archimedes and Einstein, about Elvis Presley and Egyptian hieroglyphics, about electromagnetism and the history of the printing press and the production of avocados in central Mexico.

In later years, I would think back to the heady delight of those first days at the library. In a world of Google and Wikipedia, the simple pleasures of a basic encyclopedia can be hard to fathom, but the experience at the time was intoxicating. Suddenly, it seemed as if all my curiosity about the world could be satisfied in that little children’s section of the library.

It had been years since I had read a book of secular knowledge. I had always been a reader, but most of my childhood reading was about tales of ancient sages, the tannaim and the amoraim, the Baal Shem Tov and the Gaon of Vilna, scholars and saints who battled the forces of evil, physical and spiritual, and helped their brethren with their wisdom and scholarship and the occasional wondrous miracle.