All Who Go Do Not Return (31 page)

On the third day, I snapped. “Stop acting like a child,” I said.

She broke her silence with a scream: “A TELEVISION …
IN MY HOME!
”

It burst from her like a force of nature. A shriek that even she could not have anticipated. For a moment, her face contorted into something grotesque, and then she turned away, toward the kitchen sink, a dish towel in her hand. Behind the sink was a window, and she stood there, her controlled posture from behind looking almost peaceful, as if she was gazing out at the birds, at the sky. From the tiny tremors of her body and her shoulders, though, I could tell that she was sobbing. A moment later, she ran from the kitchen, hiding her face in her arm, and locked herself in our bedroom.

The violence of Gitty’s reaction shook me. Over the years, she had begun to accept that I had changed. We had just passed a decade of marriage. For our tenth anniversary, we spent a rare night out, dining at a kosher Italian restaurant in Monsey. We had learned a lot about each other, how to stay out of the other’s way when things were tense and draw closer when the mood was light. There was little passion between us, but there was real feeling. And sometimes, even love.

Still, conflicts constantly arose. Barely a week passed when our differences would not stand in contrast, and each time, I felt resentment all over again toward those who had brought us together.

“This isn’t how I married you,” she would say, sometimes in anger but also on occasion tenderly, her eyes pleading. “It’s not fair,” she would say, and a single tear would trickle down the curve of her nose.

And yet, we’d made it work so far. I imagined that, as with the radio and books and movies and the Internet, the TV would be just another boundary to cross, not easily but inevitably.

I had misjudged. Television was a taboo so entrenched that to violate it was nearly inconceivable. Television was the symbol of all the outside culture we were meant to avoid. The Internet might have become the real culprit for corrupting minds, but the television had been, for decades,
de tumeneh keili.
The profane vessel. So abhorrent that many would not even utter its name.

I was almost prepared to return the TV to Costco, but a few days after Gitty’s outburst, we talked it over. She was still angry but also forgiving. “If you want to keep it,” she said, “I won’t stop you. But I will
never
watch anything with you. And don’t you dare let the children see it.”

She said it as if she knew what was coming—that once she gave in, I would not be content to transgress alone but would try to get her to join me, and then I’d try to reel in the kids. This had happened before. When I first began to watch movies, renting DVDs from Blockbuster and playing them on my laptop computer in the darkness of our dining room, she refused to join me. For months, I would ask, plead, tease, promise to choose something with no objectionable content, no nudity or violence or profanity, until finally she relented, even as she swore that we would never let our children join us, ever.

The old computer cabinet in our dining room had been sitting empty for a while. I had purchased it seven years earlier, with double doors and a lock to hide the computer on Shabbos. Now it would serve as a home for the television set. I would keep it locked at all times, and the children would never know.

I soon began to spend an hour or two each night in our dining room, alone with the TV. Mostly I watched the news, and occasionally one of the late-night talk shows, but really, I was fascinated by all of it, in the same way that I had once been fascinated by the radio. I was riveted by soap operas and public-access programming and late-night infomercials. “Order now, for only $99, and get the full set of Frank Sinatra videos on VHS!” What a deal!

As Gitty grew accustomed to the TV’s presence, I grew bolder.

“Want to watch something with me?” I asked her one night.

She shook her head coolly, refusing even to entertain the notion.

But eventually, she gave in. One night, as I sat alone in the dining room, she opened the door. “Can I join you?” Her expression was bashful. From then on, each night after the children went to bed, we would lock the doors and windows, draw the curtains, and sit together in the corner of our dining room in front of the small television set, the volume on near-mute to avoid raising suspicion with the Greenbergs through the wall.

We would watch whatever was on:
Friends, Charlie Rose, Eyewitness News, Big Brother.
There were no guilty pleasures—we were guilty for all of it:
Masterpiece Theatre
and
Jerry Springer, Nightline
and
American Idol.
Everything, all of it, was part of America’s great crescendo of profanity.

It was during one of those nights in front of the TV that I ended up telling Gitty about the blog. I had implemented a new feature that day: Each time a reader posted a comment, I received an alert on my cell phone. As we sat in front of the TV, watching a rerun of
Everybody Loves Raymond
, my phone buzzed, harshly interrupting the grainy images on the screen. I ignored it, and Gitty kept her eyes fixed on the TV. Frank was haranguing Marie, who was haranguing Ray, who was already being harangued by Debra. All the while, Brad Garrett was musing about “life’s imponderables.” Then my phone buzzed again, and then again soon after. Gitty finally turned her head just slightly and raised an inquiring eyebrow. I shook my head to brush her off, and then my phone buzzed twice more in rapid succession.

“What is
all the buzzing?
” Gitty blurted.

“Nothing. Just alerts.”

“Alerts?”

“Comments. From … this website.”

“What website?”

I turned off the TV and told her all about it. I told her how I’d always wanted to write, and now I was writing, and I had readers, too, lots of them. I was the Hasidic Rebel.

She let out a grunt, as if to say,
Well, how unsurprising.

“What do you write about?” she asked.

“Just … about my life.”

“Do you write about me?”

“Sometimes.”

I could see in her eyes that she was intrigued.

“You’re welcome to read it,” I told her.

The next day, when I came home from work, she sat down and put her hands flat on the table. “I read your site,” she said.

I looked for disapproval in her eyes, awaiting her outrage.

“I kinda like it,” she said.

“You do?”

“Yeah. I mean, if it makes you feel better, maybe it’ll do you good. You know, like therapy.”

“You seem less tense these days,” a friend said to me one day. I said nothing, although I knew it was true. The ability to speak my mind gave me a peace I had been lacking for years. A small community had sprung up around the blog, and it gave me a sense that there was a world somewhere in which my thoughts were appreciated. Reader comments on my posts often went into the hundreds.

I didn’t know these commenters in real life, but their names were soon as recognizable as my real-life friends: Ani Yesheinu, JK from KJ, Susan in Queens. Some commenters earned followers of their own. One man went by Isaac, and soon there was an “Isaac’s Fan.” They came from across the Jewish spectrum, from Hasidic to Yeshivish to the Modern Orthodox to the Reform. There were regulars who were non-Jews. Susan in Queens was Catholic. Evy was Mormon. PadrePaz was a Protestant minister somewhere in the South.

One day, I received an e-mail from a reporter for New York’s
Village Voice.
He wanted to write a story about my blog. Would I agree to an interview?

Several weeks later, at a kosher café near Manhattan’s diamond district, one block from my workplace, we met for lunch. A small tape recorder lay on the table, next to my beaver-fur hat. The writer looked younger than I’d imagined, in his twenties, with hipster eyeglasses and a polite but slightly detached manner. “Can we be friends?” I wanted to ask him. “Can you tell me about
your
life?”

He was a journalist, though, and I knew he did not want my friendship but my story. He asked broad questions, and I offered long-winded philosophical ruminations, which he listened to patiently, smiling and nodding encouragingly. I imagined that every word I said was important to him, not realizing that out of a ninety-minute interview, he would quote me for a total of about ninety seconds.

The article, titled “The Sharer of Secrets,” appeared in the
Village Voice
a month later, accompanied by an image of a Hasidic man in profile, with a bloated torso and a long, tangled beard. The top of the Hasid’s hat was sliced horizontally across, its upper half raised like the spout of an old-fashioned teapot, a cloud of yellow-and-blue six-pointed stars, the Hasid’s secret ruminations, rising from within.

I disliked the image and disliked the article even more. In my blog, I had taken pains to write simply as I experienced my world, subjectively and judgmentally, but also honestly. I had written not with malice but my own truth. The
Voice
, however, had
its
truth, which was clearly different from mine. To them, I was not merely a curiosity, a Hasid offering a glimpse of his world, but a
sensational
curiosity, a Hasid dishing dirt on his own people.

“Have you heard of this website, ‘Hasidic Rebel’?” my friend Zurich asked me in shul a few days after the
Voice
article appeared. He spoke in a low voice, as if sharing a secret.

“I’ve heard of it,” I said.

Zurich didn’t have a computer or Internet access, but he’d heard the news: a renegade Hasid, an Internet website, an article in some newspaper. He couldn’t understand it. “Why would someone do something like that?”

“Do something like what?”

“Write about us that way. Make the non-Jews hate us.”

“Why would it make the non-Jews hate us?”

“Well, he’s telling the whole world how bad we are. And so he’s confirming what all the non-Jews already think.”

I quickly changed the subject. Zurich had no idea that I might have something to do with the website, but there were others who had their suspicions.

“Just so you know,” Yossi Breuer said to me one day, “Some people are saying you’re the Hasidic Rebel.”

Instinctively, I opened my mouth to deny it, but Yossi held up his hand.

“I have no opinion. Just thought you’d want to know.” We were in the basement of the shul, near the mikveh, and as soon as he said it, he turned and walked past the large bins of towels, thick with the smell of industrial bleach, and headed up the stairs.

Chezky, too, called me with a warning. He was one of the very few I had told about the blog, and when he heard talk of it in the coffee room of the Vizhnitz shul in Monsey one morning, he grew alarmed. “They were discussing the Hasidic Rebel. They were talking about hiring private detectives, scheming to draw you out. They’re going to send you e-mails pretending they’re women. They say you won’t be able to resist. You’ve gotta be careful.”

On the Internet, too, I encountered hostile reactions. On Tapuz, a Yiddish forum, one irate commenter going by the name of Muzar found his own creative voice in his condemnation:

The violent imagery shook me, even as it did not entirely surprise me. I also found it perversely amusing.
May we live to see it speedily and with joy.
The same phrase we used for the coming of the Messiah. The thing we’ve been waiting for forever, and will likely go on waiting for forever.

I did not know who Muzar was, but I recognized him, the maniacal language echoing so much of what I’d heard from rabbis and teachers. I also recognized in him aspects of my younger self—the swagger, the lazy resort to overstatement. I knew that we were not as quick to punish offenders as we were to issue threats; and to declare minor sins capital offenses, only to have passions cool the next morning.

At the same time, I remembered the slashed car tires and broken windows of Amrom Pollack, when he chose to perform his son’s bris outside our village, denying the rebbe the honors.

I remembered the tales of Mendel Vechter, the rumors of how he’d been stripped naked, beaten, his beard forcibly shaved by his former Satmar comrades for having absconded to their arch-nemeses, the Lubavitchers.

I remembered the story of Itzik Felder, a former Skverer Hasid who left to follow the rebbe of Rachmastrivka. When he came back to New Square one evening for a family wedding, he was slapped in the face and punched in the gut and instructed to never again defile our streets with his presence.

I remembered my own incident with Moshe Wolf on the bus. I remembered the eruv disturbances in Williamsburg that had driven me to begin writing the blog in the first place.

We must determine the identity of Hasidic Rebel, find out where he lives, and hold a not-so-peaceful demonstration
, wrote another commenter on the same Yiddish forum.

“What will we do,” Gitty asked one evening, “if people find out it’s you? What if something happens?”

I did not believe we’d be harmed, I told her, even as I secretly worried about it.

“What if the children are expelled from school?” she asked.

This was more likely. School expulsions were the primary method for maintaining ideological conformity among parents.

“Maybe we can move to Monsey. Find a more relaxed environment.”

But Monsey wasn’t an option for Gitty. “Whom will the children marry?”

This was the Great Anxiety of our world:
shidduchim
, the system of arranged marriages. Good marriages were available only for those with perfect, unblemished families. Those who would not conform, though, who stood out in ways colorful or unconventional, suffered the heartache of having their children consigned to the scrap heap of the matchmaker’s notebook.