All Who Go Do Not Return (29 page)

Late one afternoon in the following year, I was sitting on the Monsey Trails bus on my way home from work, hoping for an hour of reading and maybe a short nap. A man named Moshe Wolf, with whom I was vaguely friendly and had seen around Monsey, boarded the bus and headed to the empty seat beside me.

“Vus machsti epes, vus?”
he asked as he placed his briefcase on the overhead rack. “How you doing, how?”

He was a fervent Satmar Hasid, and he spoke with a linguistic tic common among certain Satmars, repeating the first word at the end of each sentence.

How you doing, how?

What’s up, what?

Anything new in the world, anything?

I grimaced inwardly. Moshe Wolf was something of a gabber. There go my reading plans, I thought. And my nap. From my previous interactions with him, I knew he styled himself an amateur sociologist-slash-political pundit. His Yiddish was heavily peppered with big English words: he liked
antithetical
(“aunty-tetical”) and
ideologue
(“idyeh-lug”). He had a fondness for politician-intellectuals, like Senators Daniel Patrick Moynihan and Adlai Stevenson. I would often see him at the Getty gas station on Route 59, eating a bowl of chulent while reading the
New York Post
, which would be spread on the hood of his car. He was an odd combination of worldly and pious, and while I sometimes found him entertaining, I wasn’t eager to engage him at the moment.

“What are you reading, what?” he asked as he made himself comfortable next to me. He leaned in to read the title at the top of the page. I flipped the front cover for his benefit, and he read it out loud, in his heavily accented English:
One People, Two Worlds: A Reform Rabbi and an Orthodox Rabbi Explore the Issues That Divide Them.

“What is the meaning of this, what?”

As the bus snaked its way through traffic into the Lincoln Tunnel, I offered a quick overview of the book. As the subtitle explained, it was a debate between two rabbis about the merits of their respective worldviews, the liberal versus the traditional. The book had been recently published and widely written about in Jewish publications.

Moshe Wolf’s eyes grew narrow. “I don’t understand,” he said. “This is interesting for you, this?”

I said that it was.

“But you’re reading the other guy, too, but.”

The
other guy
, I assumed, was the Reform rabbi, and so I explained to Moshe Wolf that I was curious to hear different views. I was fascinated by varieties of opinion.

I remember his steely look as my words sank in. He was clearly growing unsettled, and I chuckled reflexively, mildly amused. To Moshe Wolf, however, this was no laughing matter.

“This is
kefireh
, this!
Apikorsus!
” His voice was strangely, alarmingly high-pitched. “This is heresy, this! How can you read this, how?” His voice rising, he began gesticulating wildly. “This is a
rabbi
, this? How can he speak to a heretic? Who does he think he is, who!”

“Shh, quiet down, please.” We were attracting stares from other passengers, and I was growing uneasy. I had been amused, for a short moment, but now I was annoyed. Yet I could not stop him. My responses, clearly, were only making things worse.

Moshe Wolf’s eyeballs now appeared like spitfires of rage. What had started as a low insistent whine erupted into maniacal shrieking:
“KEFIREH! APIKORSUS!
HOW CAN YOU READ THIS, HOW? THIS IS FORBIDDEN, THIS!”

The bus fell silent. Passengers stood up in their seats to have a better look. Moshe Wolf, realizing I wasn’t going to engage him further, grew even more enraged, his face bright purple. All of a sudden, he was on top of me, lunging for the book, wrestling me for it, his long arms a pair of clumsy but furious tentacles. I held on to the book, and for a few seconds we had a tug-of-war, like a pair of first-graders. This is stupid and ridiculous and more than a little comical, I thought, but Moshe Wolf clearly thought otherwise. With a sideways shove of my elbow against his chest, I managed to wrest the book from his grip, and then grabbed my briefcase and shoved past him into the aisle. Dozens of eyes watched as I headed toward the back of the bus, and all the while Moshe Wolf kept shouting:
“KEFIREH! APIKORSUS!
HERESY! BLASPHEMY!”

I found a seat in the rear, and for several minutes, I could hear Moshe Wolf carrying on down the aisle. “Who does he think he is, who? Reading a heretical book, he is reading! Right in front of our eyes, he is reading it!” Some of the other men turned to regard me, holding my gaze unself-consciously, a stare-down of the righteous against the wicked.

The bus continued past the New Jersey Meadowlands and up the New Jersey Turnpike, arriving in Monsey. I tried to keep reading in my seat in the back—to demonstrate to myself, if to no one else, that I would not be cowed—but I was shaken by Moshe Wolf’s reaction. As the bus began dropping off passengers in Monsey, I realized that I had been staring at the words for almost an entire hour without reading any of them.

At home, over dinner, I told Gitty about the incident, and she listened quietly. When we were done eating, as she reached to clear our plates off the table, she lingered a moment. Her face flushed, as when she felt embarrassed, and then she looked away.

“Maybe he was right,” she said as she stacked our empty plates one on top of the other. “Maybe it’s best not to read those books.”

In the weeks that followed, I wondered about Moshe Wolf, whom I had always taken to be somewhat worldly and, in fact, of above-average intelligence. This incident highlighted something I had often thought: the most vociferous advocates for unthinking adherence to principles, the ones inclined to protest loudest, perhaps even to resort to violence, were not necessarily those with the weakest minds. In fact, it was often those with superior minds who offered the strongest reactions, as if by doing so, they closed their own minds with that force, precisely because they were more attuned to the challenges.

Zeal compensates for fear. A soldier is whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before battle—because how else does one withstand the fear of death? The religious zealot who shouts, beats, and kills is perhaps not the one who is secure with his faith but the one who is so fearful of the challenges, so aware of the fickleness of conviction, that he has no choice but to strengthen it with the drumbeat of mindless fanaticism.

If you don’t belong in New Square, you just stay out. That’s just how it is.
Those were the words of Matt the car mechanic, from years earlier. I remembered them now, and they sounded strangely prescient, except that it wasn’t just New Square I didn’t belong in but all of the Hasidic world.

Several weeks after the incident on the bus, I heard of a Williamsburg man beaten for leading an Internet group in which matters of faith were raised for discussion. One day, the forum closed down, and the rumors passed via e-mail from one group member to another. The man was lured into a Williamsburg office late one night, and beaten by Williamsburg’s Vaad Hatznius, the Modesty Committee. Was it true? No one knew for certain. Several days later, someone suggested that the man was beaten not for heresy but for sexual indiscretions. But did the reason matter? I knew that such incidents were not out of the ordinary, and it reinforced what I already knew: I would have to keep my own views secret.

It was hard to keep my anxiety at bay, though, and over the following months, my mind went into a tailspin through a gallery of horrors. I imagined walking down the streets of our village, or stepping into the large shul in the village’s center, and people around me staring in silence:
there goes the apikorus.
I imagined a letter in the mail informing me that my children were expelled from school. I imagined Gitty’s parents and siblings turning away in my presence, their disgraced son-and brother-in-law. I imagined a vehicle with tinted windows driving alongside me on the street, a group of men, Vaad Hatznius members, pulling me inside and taking me to an unknown location for interrogations. I imagined Gitty discovering that I was no longer a believer and deciding she could not live with a heretic husband. Estrangement from my children would follow, expulsion from the community, excommunication.

On the Monsey Trails bus to work, I would look around to see who else might be paying attention. Did anyone notice that I no longer prayed with the rest of the men? Was anyone else paying attention to what I was reading? I tried to tell myself that no one really cared, that Moshe Wolf was an exception, a busybody who pried and intruded but that most others were not like that. But I also knew that in our world, people paid attention even without paying attention.

When my brother Mendy married in the summer of 2002, I led him to the wedding canopy in place of our father. As I walked him to the courtyard of a Monsey yeshiva that doubled as a wedding hall, a braided beeswax torch in my right hand, my left arm entwined in his right, I looked around and felt something I hadn’t fully grasped until that moment: I was a fraud.

I saw the faces of those around me, watching as I guided my brother toward creating his Faithful Home Among Israel, and saw what I imagined everyone must have seen: a liar, a man pretending to be pious, to be sharing their faith, when in my heart I was an apostate. At the same time, I imagined my fraud to be ineffective, the word
apikorus
branded on my forehead, with those around me, as a dubious courtesy, withholding condemnation until a more opportune moment.

The deep, dark secret was threatening to burst. I found myself consumed with anger and bitterness, the stresses of a double life channeled into day-to-day irritability and resentment.

The Internet provided a small remedy, a therapeutic outlet through which to express what felt like an unending inner battle over how to negotiate my circumstances. Interacting with others online helped to solidify my identity as a heretic, lending me the confidence to accept the side of myself that I had been suppressing.

Early on, the big draw was chat rooms, where I fell into long debates on matters of religion. Later, when I discovered Usenet newsgroups, I found more of the same, except that now I would encounter not only Jews but also Catholics and Protestants, Muslims and Buddhists. Soon I was in steady correspondence with people whose worlds, utterly strange to me, were also utterly fascinating.

It wasn’t long before I discovered my own fellow travelers. We found one another, scattered across various discussion groups, and proceeded to create our own: “Hasidic and Enlightened,” “Frum Skeptics.” One Hebrew forum for raising challenging questions about faith was called “Stop! We’re Thinking Here.” All of us were hiding in our homes and offices, seeking forbidden knowledge and forbidden connections. From across the world, Brooklyn to Tel Aviv, Montreal to Antwerp, from all sects and subgroups, we were able to say to one another: I, too, am asking forbidden questions.

And yet, paranoia reigned. We stuck to our handles, never divulging identifying details. You never knew who was a spy, and the fear of exposure permeated all discussions. Lives could end in ruin from one carelessly slipped remark.

“You know anything about this blogs thing?” I asked a coworker one day.

We were discussing a report in the news: Google, the search giant still barely five years old, had purchased a small start-up company that created a tool for something I had never heard of before. Blogs. It sounded like something out of a fantasy novel, vaguely Middle Earth-y. Frodo Baggins might get stuck in one. Or maybe fighting one.

“They’re like diaries,” my coworker said. He was a fellow programmer, our workstations face-to-face, and he always seemed to know about tech things before I did. “But they’re online,” he added. “So they’re open to the public.”

A public diary sounded both strange and intriguing. The journals I had kept through adolescence were filled with embarrassing ruminations, confessions of envy and shame and bursts of self-loathing. I would’ve been horrified had anyone read them. Yet I would write as if for an audience, crafting careful sentences, adding a literary flourish here, a flash of humor there, as if nothing was truly worth writing if it wasn’t worth reading.

It turned out that blogs weren’t exactly diaries, at least not the blogs I would come across. It was early 2003, and George W. Bush was preparing the nation for the invasion of Iraq. “Shock and awe” was the catchphrase of the season, and debate raged among bloggers, as among everyone else, about whether the military campaign was righteous, opportunistic, or foolhardy. Instapundit, a popular political blog—which soon inspired the Israpundit and the InstaConfused—epitomized the trend: ordinary folks bypassing corporate media and publishing, the traditional gatekeepers of our cultural discourse, and gaining popular followings.

All at once, there was a whole world of them. Little Green Footballs, Alas a Blog, IMAO. From the left and from the right. In commentary, political cartoons, angry rants, stories, photography, amateur journalism. Most intriguing to me was an emerging Jewish corner of the “blogosphere.” There was the Head Heeb (“knocking down 4000 years of icons”); An Unsealed Room (“a window on life in Israel”); Protocols (three “elders,” “endeavoring for total domination of the blogosphere”). They argued and they kibitzed, and they argued some more. They had readers who commented, and they commented on one another, and together created a kind of community.