All Who Go Do Not Return (25 page)

“I think I’m going to bed,” I said, my eyes tearing up as they did when I felt sleepy.

“What was that?” Gitty asked, cocking her head.

“I said, I think I’m going to bed.”

Gitty held up an index finger. “No—listen. What was
that?
”

“What was what?”

All we heard was the hum of the refrigerator.

“I thought I heard something.”

“It’s in your head.” I stood up and stretched.

“Wait! Listen!”

This time I heard it, too. A shout. Then came crashing sounds, like breaking glass, then more shouting. Then the sound of boots pounding the pavement. The pounding came nearer, until it was right beneath our window, and then quickly faded away.

We rushed to the window, but saw nothing, and so I stepped out the kitchen door to the side porch. Across the alleyway, one of the blinds in a neighbor’s window was spread apart, a face peering out. A moment later, the blind fell back, and everything was as before. Across the road, insects swarmed a streetlamp. A yellow-and-red tricycle lay forgotten at the side of the road. A curbside trash can stood with its cover balanced precariously over an oversize load of white trash bags. Nothing out of the ordinary.

Gitty joined me on the porch. “See anything?”

“No. Must’ve been a few bored
bucherim
doing something harmless.” Yeshiva students were often up late on Saturday nights, after napping for hours during the day.

Gitty and I went to bed. In the morning, when I awoke, Gitty was not in her bed, but I could hear her voice from the kitchen.
“Meshiguim! Chayess!”
she cried. “Morons! Animals!”

I headed to the kitchen, where Tziri and Freidy sat at the yellow Little Tikes table in the corner, empty bowls in front of them, waiting quietly for someone to pour their cereal and milk. Gitty sat at the kitchen table, the phone to her ear and an incredulous look on her face. I could hear through the receiver the excited voice of one of her sisters—from the faint pitch, I could tell it was Bashie, the family’s most reliable source of village gossip.

“Who? What?” I mouthed.

Gitty held up an index finger. I tried to pick up the conversation from the fragments but couldn’t glean much. In the meantime, I got a box of Cheerios from the pantry and poured them into the girls’ bowls. Tziri put her hand over her bowl as I was about to pour the milk. “Only till the middle,” she said. She didn’t like her Cheerios too soggy.

Finally, Gitty hung up the phone, still shaking her head. “Remember those sounds last night?” she asked. “They slashed Amrom Pollack’s tires and smashed his car windows.”

I could tell from her voice that she was angry but also reticent, as if knowing we would end up arguing. Amrom Pollack was a quiet man from across the street, several years younger than I. I didn’t know much about him, except that, like me, he was originally from Brooklyn, and that his father was the rabbi of a small Borough Park shul. Amrom and his wife had had their first baby boy a week ago, and the rumors had begun to spread soon after.

“He’s holding the bris in Borough Park,” people said. “At his father’s shul.”

Some said it sadly, a lament—what had we done to deserve this? Others reacted with anger. “The insolence of him!” Avrumi Gold shouted in the mikveh on Friday afternoon.

Others said it with disbelief, shaking their heads. “I don’t envy him,” Chezky said to me as we drank our coffee from Styrofoam cups before services on Shabbos morning. “Hard to believe he’ll get away with it.”

Later that morning, I saw the damaged car, parked right at the entrance to Amrom’s apartment. A burgundy Toyota Corolla, likely purchased secondhand, all but one of the tires flattened, and all four windows smashed. Glass shards were spread across the pavement, and a handful of young boys were circling, inspecting the damage.

“This is insane!” I fumed to Gitty later that day. “We’re no better than the Taliban!”

But Gitty didn’t like that kind of talk. Earlier, she had been outraged, but now she said that maybe the Pollacks had brought it upon themselves. “They don’t have to live here,” she said. “If you don’t want to go by the rules, you can live somewhere else.”

The perpetrators’ names were well known, three men in their early twenties. Some hailed them as heroes. Others thought they’d been rash. “I don’t hold from doing things this way,” said Shia Einhorn, the leader of the a cappella group that performed each week at the Friday night tisch. “It’s not the Skverer way,” he said. “It’s the Skverer way when there is no other way,” shot back Avrumi Green, the mikveh caretaker. But there was no question of making any of the young men suffer any consequences. Even Amrom Pollack knew not to involve the secular authorities. This was an internal matter.

Later, the question would be fiercely debated among some of my friends: Had the incident been ordered by the rebbe himself? Chezky would argue that it must have been. Or at the very least, by the rebbe’s sons. “And even if none of them ordered it,” Chezky said, “they were definitely pleased.”

I did not think then, nor do I think now, that the rebbe ordered a man’s property damaged for dishonoring him. He didn’t have to—plenty among us were willing to act on their own. But I had to admit, I imagined the rebbe was pleased, proud of the men who would take up the spear of Phineas to fight for his honor. God was a jealous god, and so perhaps in that way, the rebbe and God were similar. Yet it gave me no comfort to realize that, possibly, just as I had misjudged the rebbe, I had misjudged God, too. What did I know of God? Had I seen Him? Heard Him speak? And what else was I taught to believe, without pausing to question it, to ask for its source, to examine its logic?

It was two in the morning, on the second night of Passover, and I stood at the far edge of the rebbe’s seder table. Hundreds of men in white
kittels
watched as the rebbe rose from his seder couch and lifted his gold cup to welcome the prophet Elijah. The oversize front doors of the shul were dragged open by a pair of preadolescent boys in black
kasketels
, and a gust of wind blew into the shul.

Spill Your wrath upon the nations
, the rebbe cried, and the men on the bleachers swayed vigorously in agreement.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, and turned to see Chezky, his arm reaching between the heads of men behind me. “I have to tell you something,” he whispered. As the rebbe chanted on, I slipped away from the crowd, and we retreated to a corner.

“A friend of mine loaned me a couple of movies,” he said. “I thought you might be interested in seeing them.”

Chezky had been working for a year now at the Monsey yeshiva, where he continued his kiruv work. He had new friends now, who didn’t think movies were so bad, and one of them had loaned him a handful of videocassettes. Chezky had watched them and found them so delightful that he could not help but want to share them. He burst into fits of laughter as he described a scene of two thieves taking off with a milk truck full of puppies stolen from a pet shop.

“You just
have
to see this. It’s hysterical.”

“Shh!” Someone hissed from the bleachers.

For they have destroyed Jacob, and defiled his temple
, the rebbe cried.

Chezky lowered his voice. “It’s called
Beethoven.
”

“It’s about music?”

“No, no, no, it’s about a dog. The dog’s name is Beethoven. This family adopts him, after a bunch of puppies get stolen—it’s hard to explain, you have to see it yourself.”

Spill upon them Your fury
, the rebbe cried.

“I have another movie, too. An action movie—although I have to warn you: there’s a naked woman in one of the scenes.”

“Oh,” I said.

“She comes out of a birthday cake. You probably don’t want to see that. We can fast-forward through that part—it’s not important to the story.”

Pursue them with a vengeance
, the rebbe cried.
Obliterate them from beneath the heavens!

“Come by tomorrow night,” Chezky said.

Chezky had left our world in many ways but still had the outward appearance of a Hasid, and we were in many ways alike, Hasidim, or quasi-Hasidim, questioning everything, fascinated by the most ordinary aspects of the outside world. Chezky, too, listened to the radio, read books from the library, and cherished every opportunity to discover something new.

Chezky’s movies wouldn’t be the first for me. At age ten, I had seen
Dumbo
at a friend’s home in Borough Park, projected from an old-fashioned projector onto a white basement wall. My friend’s parents were more lax with such things and allowed an animated Disney film on occasion. I remember being so moved that I cried through much of it.

When I was fourteen, soon after my father died, my sixteen-year-old sister Chani went out and rented a VCR with a television monitor for a day. My father was no longer around to forbid it, and my mother’s protestations fell on my sister’s apathetic adolescent ears. She locked herself in her room with a handful of videocassettes she’d rented from VideoRama around the corner—a store I had passed hundreds of times, never imagining I could enjoy its offerings—and allowed me into her room to watch
The Chosen
and selected parts of
Ferris Bueller’s Day Off.
Every now and then, she would shoo me out, declaring particular segments “not for boys.”

I had seen just enough to whet my appetite for more, and I now accepted Chezky’s invitation eagerly. The next night, after the first days of Passover had ended, I picked up Chezky from his parents’ home and we drove to his place. The yeshiva where he worked had given him a room in the dormitory, a long and narrow two-story building surrounded by immaculate lawns and well-maintained shrubbery—a far cry from the dorms we had in New Square. His room was on the second floor, and the corridor had a faint odor of moldy rugs, the décor resembling that of a low-grade chain motel. Chezky’s twin-size bed was neatly made. A low bookcase stood against the wall, and in the corner, sitting atop a compact desk, was a small television monitor.

“They let you have a TV?” A television in a yeshiva struck me like a pirate in a rabbi’s caftan, but Chezky just shrugged.

“It’s not mine,” he said. “I borrowed it from the office.” He had already explained that this yeshiva was different, but I hadn’t realized just how different.

Chezky slipped a videocassette into the VCR slot, and for the next ninety minutes I sat, riveted, from the first frame of the FBI warning until the very last of the credits.
Beethoven
was a comedy about puppies and goofy dog thieves (later I would know them as Stanley Tucci and Oliver Platt) and an all-American family with handsome parents who slept in one bed and kissed good night before snuggling in each other’s arms. Chezky and I laughed and cried, and when it was done, we rewound the tape and watched it all over again.

Afterward, Chezky slipped in the second tape, an action thriller called
Under Siege.
This one made me feel as if the world had turned dizzyingly, terrifyingly intense, with a ship carrying nuclear missiles hijacked by a band of terrorists for reasons I could not quite make out but that didn’t seem to matter much. I had yet to learn the term “escapist entertainment,” but never before had I felt so transported from reality.

Sometime during that second movie came the scene with the birthday cake. I didn’t get to see much of it. As soon as Chezky saw the giant cake, he grabbed the remote and pressed a button. This was, ostensibly, for my sake, the still-semi-pious Hasid. The tape screeched faintly as the images swished on the screen in a half blur. It was like viewing something underwater through leaky goggles but in fast motion, although I could easily make out the nearly naked blond woman who popped out jerkily from the top of the cake. I turned my head to look away, but the corner of my eye remained fixed on the screen, wanting desperately for Chezky to let go of the fast-forward button but too embarrassed to say anything.

After the movie, Chezky and I sat in his room and talked, snacking on potato chips and Fresca. We discussed plot points and memorable quotes with the kind of enthusiasm we usually reserved for talmudic texts. Soon, however, we grew tired. It was three in the morning. I had told Gitty that I was going to Chezky’s place, without elaborating, and I knew that if I didn’t get home soon, things would get unpleasant.

I wasn’t ready to leave, though. When I had first entered Chezky’s room, I had noticed his small bookcase in the corner, and glanced at the book’s titles. They, too, beckoned, like the movies—except these books felt dangerous. They were books about faith. Not my kind of faith, but Chezky’s kind. The rational kind. The wrong kind.

As I was getting ready to leave, I noticed those books again.

Chezky excused himself to use the bathroom out in the hallway, and in the meantime I put on my coat and shtreimel. A moment later, I heard voices out in the hallway, a conversation between Chezky and one of his dorm mates about a leaky faucet or a clogged toilet. The voices went on for a while, and now, with silence in the room, the night’s featured amusements finished, I looked over to Chezky’s bookshelf. As with the naked woman in the movie, I knew I should look away, and yet I couldn’t.

I stepped closer to the bookshelf. A set of volumes caught my eye. They were titled
Permission to Believe
and
Permission to Receive.
Two slim volumes, one blue and one red, by the same author. I read their jacket covers.

Rational approaches to God’s existence. Rational approaches to the Torah’s divine origin.

“You want to borrow those?” Chezky was back in the room, looking over my shoulder.

I shook my head. “Nah. This doesn’t make any sense to me.”

“Why do you say that?”

I sighed. “We’ve been over this already.”

I’d made this point to him many times. The things we believed could be sustained only by suspending our normal faculties of reason. We believed in a God we could not see or hear. We believed that this God showed up one fine day in a Middle Eastern desert and said to our forefathers:
Here are the rules you must live by, forever and ever.
We believed in an afterlife, in the resurrection of the dead. We believed in the most fantastical occurrences as part of our history. God’s voice from a burning bush. The waters of an entire land turning into a sticky soup of blood. The sudden deaths of every male firstborn Egyptian, at the stroke of midnight, without so much as a sneezing spell beforehand. These things could not be believed rationally, and thinking too much about them could do no one much good.