All Who Go Do Not Return (20 page)

It was a week before Passover when I noticed Chezky Blum in an alcove in the shul, surrounded by floor-to-ceiling bookcases. He stood facing a wall, his open prayer book resting on the ledge of a shelf. It was nearly midnight, and the last prayer group was now ending, the mourners’ kaddish recited by a lone figure at the far end of the sanctuary, the sibilant sounds half-echoing softly in the cavernous, near-empty hall: … yiss-borach,
ve-yish-tabach, ve-yiss-po’er, v-yiss-romem, ve-yiss-naseh
, praised, glorified, and exalted be the name of
kudsha brich hu.

Chezky swayed gently, his string-thin gartel around his waist, repeatedly bowing and rising, faintly tipping his heels each time he straightened up. Bow, rise, bop, bow, rise, bop. Behind him were two large double doors leading to the foyer, where I was headed. As I passed him, Chezky turned slightly and our eyes met. His eyebrows rose faintly in greeting, not a full nod but a subtle acknowledgment, the easy glance between acquaintances during unexpected encounters.

Something made me stop, and for years I would think back to that moment. I did not know him well, and could’ve simply moved on, with no undue violation of courtesy. Instead, I offered him a handshake.

“Shulem aleichem,”
I said. “Haven’t seen you in a while.”

He closed his prayer book and brushed it against his lips. “Just got back from Israel. I’m here for the holiday, then heading back.” He said it with pride, as if our village had little to offer him, a place to which he returned only for brief visits, obliging family and old friends but eager to be done with it all.

Chezky had been an acquaintance back in yeshiva. He was two years younger than I and had been known as a troublesome student. He asked too many questions, they said. He challenged the rabbis and made them uncomfortable. I remembered seeing him often in conversation with the red-bearded Reb Anshel, spiritual counselor for second-year students. I’d never spoken to Reb Anshel myself back then, but it was said that he was a Deep Thinker, the one to talk to when students had Deep Questions. For hours, Chezky and Reb Anshel would stand in the study hall corner, with Chezky doing the talking, his gestures animated, his speech, even when observed from afar, seeming well articulated. Reb Anshel would tug on his long ginger-colored mustache, mostly silent.

It wasn’t long before I stopped seeing Chezky around the yeshiva. From what I’d heard, he’d been expelled, although the details were murky. Too smart for our rabbis, people said. Too smart for his own good. Later I would hear that he had been sent to study in Israel.

“What have you been up to?” I asked as we headed out of the shul.

His initial responses were vague, as if it were all too complicated to explain. Instead, he asked, “Heading up Washington?”

We were going in the same direction, and as we strode together across the shul parking lot, he became more talkative. “I’ve become involved in
kiruv
,” he said.

I was struck by that phrase.
Involved in kiruv.
There was pride in those words, an air of sophistication and worldliness. Kiruv—“bringing near”—was a noble enterprise, the process of encouraging secular and unaffiliated Jews to adopt Orthodox observance. Kiruv workers elicited admiration and respect. They were saving souls, rescuing captive children.

We Skverers were not involved in kiruv. Teaching those unlike us meant engaging the outside world, acknowledging questions best left unasked, lifestyles best left unobserved. Kiruv required an understanding of outside ways and the blasphemy of nonbelievers in order to mount a response, and we did not want to understand anything about them. Yet we couldn’t help but admire those who undertook the task.

As we walked, Chezky described a revolution. In Israel, auditoriums were being filled with thousands of secular Jews, who, after listening to several hours of speeches, streamed forward to don yarmulkes, kerchiefs, and small prayer shawls. Men cut off their ponytails and dropped their gold earrings into large piles that would later be fashioned into Torah crowns. Women stepped forward to don headscarves and vowed to observe the laws of family purity. Institutions were being set up where the newly observant could study all the Torah they had missed in their youth. Former movie stars and pop-culture heroes now sported full beards and spent hours on hard yeshiva benches studying Talmud and Jewish law.

All this, Chezky claimed, was due to the reinvigoration of an old school of thought: rationalist Judaism.

“Heard of Gerald Schroeder? The nuclear physicist? He wrote this book,
Genesis and the Big Bang?
”

He looked at me, as if expecting a knowing glance, but I only shook my head.

“Or Dovid Gottlieb? The Bostoner Hasid who was once a philosophy professor at Johns Hopkins?”

These people, Chezky said, were figuring out ways to synthesize faith and modernity, although I’d never heard of any of them—John Gottlieb or Dovid Hopkins or Schroeder or Schrodinger or Shroedowitz. But I had known people who worked in kiruv.

“My father was involved in kiruv,” I said.

Chezky gave me a look, as if appraising me with newfound respect. “Seriously?”

I told him briefly about my father’s work, his organization that sponsored classes in Judaism and Hasidism, and I could tell that Chezky was intrigued. “I have some of his lectures on tape. You’re welcome to borrow them.”

Chezky walked home with me, and stood near the kitchen door while Gitty, blushing at the sight of a strange male, looked up from the kitchen table. Chezky, now the modern sophisticate, affected an air of courtliness and nodded to her. Gitty, flustered, looked away quickly.

I climbed a ladder through a trapdoor to the attic. Boxes of cassettes were piled haphazardly alongside sukkah panels and boxes of Passover dishes. I grabbed a handful of cassettes from one of the boxes, headed back down the ladder, and handed them to Chezky.

As soon as he left, Gitty threw me a look: who was
that
?

“Chezky Blum,” I said. “Meilich Blum’s grandson.”

“Oh, that one,” she said, and thought for a while. “Still unmarried?”

I nodded, and we shared a knowing glance. Chezky was a cautionary tale. This was what happened when one was too different, too smart, too independent-minded. Prolonged bachelorhood was what happened.

Not many in our community would’ve appreciated my father’s lectures, so I felt pleased watching Chezky take the tapes. When I was a child, my father would leave our home each Tuesday and Thursday evening. “I’m going to the ‘center,’” he’d tell my mother, and she would nod and say,
Hatzlocho
, may you have success.

The “center” was a mysterious place I had never visited but where I knew that my father spoke to people from outside our world. Later, I would learn that it was a synagogue basement somewhere in Manhattan, a “Center for Jewish Studies,” where my father would give classes in Judaism. People who had first heard my father teach at the center would often come to our home for a Shabbos meal or to attend the more advanced classes that my father gave in the synagogue basement. On the men’s heads were stiffly perched yarmulkes, which they would pat to check that they were still there. The women wore their hair uncovered.

They would tell me that my father was brilliant.

“I don’t understand all that he says,” one man told me. “But he says it so beautifully!”

“I don’t even understand many of his
words!
” another man said. “He’s like a walking Oxford dictionary!”

I knew what the Oxford dictionary was. My father owned a set—not the full eleven-volume edition but a two-volume box set, each page laid out with four pages of the original, the letters reduced to a size so small that they could barely be read without the magnifying glass that came in a small built-in drawer at the top. The dictionary was kept in a special room in our home, the “little study,” which, in contrast to the “big study,” was a room that my father preferred I did not enter.

Both studies had shelves filled with books lining all the walls, but each had books of a different kind. In the “big study,” my father had sacred texts; the Talmud figured prominently, as did the
Shulchan Aruch
and the Rambam, Judaism’s primary law codes. Also in that room were many volumes on Jewish mysticism, including the Zohar and the Writings of the Ari. A ten-volume red-and-gold set of
The Words of Joel
, the magnum opus of the late rebbe of Satmar, rested prominently on the shelf above his desk.

The “little study” had an air of mystery around it. The books in it were mostly in English; from their titles, I could tell that they were books about other faiths, philosophical works, containing ideas from outside our traditions. Once, my father caught me in the “little study,” browsing a book that had caught my eye. The title, I remember, had the words “Judaism and Christianity,” the latter a faith I knew nothing about, except that for centuries it represented the persecution of Jews. As I flipped through the pages, I was stunned to read a passage in which it was claimed that early Christians were Sabbath-observant Jews. Just then, my father walked in.

“I don’t want you reading that,” my father said, and he took the book from my hand. “Please don’t come in here when I’m not around.” My father was a gentle man, so when he grew angry, I knew that something had really upset him. He took the book from my hand and returned it to its place on one of the shelves. He turned and patted me on the head, calling me
shayfele
—little lamb—a habit that he retained from when I was very little but that, by then, felt embarrassing. He said, “I know you’re a curious boy. But if there’s something in here you want to read, tell me, and we’ll talk about it first.”

I never did ask him about any of his books, but occasionally my father allowed me into his world for brief glimpses of his work. When I was twelve, he took me along to a conference he was attending at the United Nations headquarters. “It’s what they call an ‘interfaith conference,’” he said, as the taxi went over the Brooklyn Bridge into Manhattan. Rabbis, priests, imams, and ministers were coming together to speak of ideas that were common to people of all faiths. It was unusual for a Hasidic rabbi to be attending such an event, and I knew that my father was an unusual man. I knew also that I could not talk about his work to my friends or to others in our world. Engaging the outside world, at that time, was a new kind of enterprise, and they would not understand.

But Chezky would understand. Chezky, who was now himself engaging with outsiders, would appreciate a brilliant and unusual mind like my father’s.

I looked for Chezky in shul the next evening, and we walked home again together.

“So what’d you think?” I asked.

He shook his head and pursed his lips, then looked away, uncomfortably. “I have a problem with some of the things your father says.”

I was taken aback. I was certain that he, too, would say how brilliant, how inspiring, how erudite were my father’s words, how beguiling his personality.

When I asked Chezky to elaborate, though, he turned evasive. “It’s a long discussion,” he said. It would take a lot of explaining. I wouldn’t understand.

“Can you summarize it for me?”

He had to get home, he said. His mother needed him to kosher the sinks before Passover. His grandfather needed him to pick up several pounds of matzah. He’d promised his little brother he’d teach him a special song for the Four Questions. Around us, men and boys walked briskly, heading home from the shul and the yeshiva and the kollel, rushing to complete the Passover preparations. Across the street, a woman scurried past, as if rushing from her own self in the presence of so many men.

I could not let it go. My father was always spoken of admiringly by all who knew him, and I had to understand Chezky’s objections. “Just give me the gist of it. We don’t have to get into it too deeply.”

Chezky paused, bit his lower lip, then looked at me and nodded.

“OK. Your father says faith is beyond reason.”

“And so?”

“I disagree,” Chezky said. “Faith is fully within reason.”

Chezky was right. It was a long discussion, one we did not have time for that night. He was also right that I wouldn’t understand it. When over the next few days we resumed our conversation, Chezky not only declared that faith was fully within reason but also that a rational approach to faith was the only one that could work in the modern world. It was the reason that so many were returning to the faith.

“The people who are returning,” Chezky said, “are educated. They live in the modern world. They don’t understand the concept of blind faith. They don’t care for
beautiful teachings.
They don’t care for mysticism. They want to know the truth. They want facts.” He tapped the back of one hand against the palm of the other. “They want data, and they want sound reasoning.”

Chezky’s people didn’t tell Hasidic miracle tales. They didn’t practice hocus-pocus rituals—swinging chickens around heads for atonement or grabbing leftovers from the rebbe’s kugel or gefilte fish. Chezky’s people were rational—university professors, philosophers, scientists, men and women of sound thinking—and they needed a different approach. Books were being written to explain how the wisdom of our sages was consistent with the latest advances in science. Statisticians were demonstrating how all events in the universe, past and present, were secretly encoded within the Bible text. Philosophers were presenting logical formulas to prove ancient dogmas. Chezky had met personally with many of them.

With as much enthusiasm as Chezky described this new world, I professed my disdain for it. What he described was at once foolish and dangerous. The sages warned against this:
Filozofia
led to heresy and wickedness. Even the scholarly and the saintly were wary.
Four have entered the garden
, the Talmud says. One died, one went astray, one went out of his mind, and only one, Rabbi Akiva, emerged with his faith, his life, and his sanity intact. The garden was a place of dangerous knowledge. Faith, to the ordinary person, was about discarding reason and trusting the transmission of our heritage. Faith meant not only to ignore but to actively suppress the niggling doubts and the persistent questions that called for understanding what was beyond human comprehension.