All Who Go Do Not Return (34 page)

“Can I talk to you?” he asked, as I rolled down my window. I pulled my car over to the curb and motioned for him to get in. He settled into the passenger seat. When I looked at him expectantly, he paused, collecting his thoughts, and said, haltingly, “You … are, uh, friends with Leiby, right?”

I nodded, and he looked at me as if trying to discern whether this conversation was really worthwhile.

“Maybe,” he said, “there is something you can do?” His interlocked fingers rested on the velvet bag in his lap. His voice was soft, almost pleading, now. The family was in a crisis, he told me. Leiby had rejected their pleas to stay. Couldn’t I explain to him that his plan was nothing but foolishness?

I watched as boys nearby rode their bicycles, swerving wildly to avoid girls jumping rope or swaying with hula hoops. It was at this very corner that I’d had my last conversation with Leiby. I had urged him to rethink the one part of his plan that I found troubling: severing ties with his family. Why was it necessary? I’d asked, and Leiby responded that it was what he needed to do. His family, he said, would only be a hindrance to his goals, always after him to return to observance. His father had been abusive to him all his life. His mother had experienced several emotional breakdowns, and he did not think she was a healthy presence in his life. He was the youngest of seven siblings, and close to none of them. Leiby was determined to do it his way, and I realized that there was something to his resolve that went beyond reason. He needed to be free, perhaps, before he could return to them.

Now I sat with my arm leaning on the open window, while Yossi waited for my response. I knew I had to hide my own views, my secret pride in Leiby’s courage to forge his own path, but I, too, had felt unsettled by Leiby’s decision, and here, perhaps, was an opportunity to mend the rift between Leiby and his family before it became irreparable.

“There isn’t much I can do,” I told Yossi. “But the family might still have options.”

Yossi looked at me eagerly, while I thought of how best to make my point. I knew I had to weigh my words carefully, to seek a balance between my conflicting sympathies.

“Meet him halfway,” I said. “Focus on the important things, instead of trying to control him completely.”

Yossi’s eyes narrowed with suspicion. “What are you suggesting?”

“Attending college is not a sin. He’ll be no different from thousands of Modern Orthodox Jews. Show him some support for his needs, and in return, ask him to come home for Shabbos.”

Yossi looked at me as if I had suggested something truly awful. Leiby’s family wanted him back, within this community and within the lifestyle in which they had raised him. Compromise hadn’t occurred to them.

“Would you rather he leave and be completely cut off from it all?” I asked. “He’s an adult. He has a plan for his life. Neither you nor I nor anyone else can stop him.”

Yossi looked startled by all this. These were ideas he’d never considered. We spoke for a long time, and by the end of it, Yossi appeared to understand. Going to college was bad, but things could be worse. Then he looked at me as if it had just dawned on him. “Do you think he’s
already
”—he hesitated, as if afraid to mouth the actual word, then gathered his strength—“eating trayf? Not keeping Shabbos?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “But he certainly will soon, if his family doesn’t care to understand his needs.” Yossi nodded slowly. Then he said that he thought Leiby and his family might come to some understanding. He would speak to Leiby’s father and explain it to him.

Later that day came the call to appear before the bezdin. By midnight, I was officially expelled from the community. As I walked home after the appearance before the bezdin, the words of Matt the car mechanic rang again in my ears:
If you don’t belong in New Square, you just stay out. That’s just how it is.

I thought about how I was going to tell Gitty, and then I thought about Leiby, and wondered about my part in his decision. Had I guided him irresponsibly? I had applauded his desire to determine the course of his own life, offered a listening ear and a sounding board for his plans. But Leiby was nineteen, an adult. The army would’ve taken him, if he’d followed through, sent him out into the world to make decisions about life and death, and to place his own life in jeopardy.

In our world, however, adulthood did not exist, not really. Everyone was influenced by
someone
, who was in turn influenced by someone else. Both good and bad behavior were guided not from within but by the books and authority figures who declared one thing forbidden and another thing virtuous. Self-determination was an unrecognized concept. To the bezdin, it was clear: Leiby’s escape was my fault, and mine alone.

Later, I would learn that Leiby’s father had come to them in the very hours following my conversation with Yossi, and demanded that I be held accountable. Yossi had repeated to him our conversation, told him how I had defiantly declared my support for Leiby’s goals. It was clear to them all that I was the story’s main villain. During my conversation with Yossi, I had hoped to encourage understanding between Leiby and his family. In that regard, it was now clear: I had failed.

I wasn’t overly upset by the bezdin’s verdict. For several months, I had been trying to convince Gitty that if I was to continue living an Orthodox lifestyle, then, at the very least, we would have to leave New Square. Gitty had resisted, though, wanting to remain near her parents and her twelve siblings. This was the only community she’d ever known, and she wouldn’t know how to live elsewhere, how to engage with neighbors who didn’t understand people from our world—people who, she was sure, would mock her provincial manner, her flawed English, her outmoded fashions.

Now, however, we had no choice. The bezdin had ordered me out. Unless we decided to end our marriage, Gitty would have to move with me.

Over the next few weeks, as Gitty and I packed our family’s belongings, sold our house in New Square, and closed on a new home in Monsey, I thought back on another time when I had suffered the shame of expulsion.

When I was thirteen, when I first came to know the Skverers, the Skverers thought they might do better without me.

At the Skverer yeshiva in Williamsburg, I had earned myself the distinction of uncooperative student. According to the official yeshiva schedule, we were to arrive each Sunday morning at seven, stay in our third-floor dorm rooms throughout the week, and return home on Friday afternoon for the Sabbath.

I, however, had established my own routine.

On Sunday morning, instead of waking at six and rushing through the cold December and January mornings to catch the bus to Williamsburg, I would stay in bed until ten, then stroll off to the Munkatch shul on Forty-Seventh and Fourteenth, where the ritual bath was open late and prayer groups assembled every twenty minutes. “You have to get to yeshiva!” my mother would cry, but I had few anxieties about it. Most Sundays, by the time I returned home, ate a leisurely breakfast, and determined that it was time to start the day, it would be long past noon. No point in going to yeshiva
now
, I would think, and then I’d spend the day lazing around at home.

On Mondays, I would repeat the routine.

On Tuesdays, I would show up at the yeshiva around lunchtime.

The Skverer teachers, unlike the cheder rebbes at Krasna, were warm and gentle, scholarly and pious, lax with discipline. “I am very afraid I will have to suspend you,” my morning instructor would say to me, and I would nod, sympathetically. He had to do what he had to do. In the end, he wouldn’t bother. “Can you make an effort?” he would ask, and I would say that I would, knowing that I wouldn’t. I studied well, when I was around, but by lunchtime on Thursday, I would decide I’d had enough yeshiva for the week. My tefillin pouch under my arm, I would make my way down Bedford Avenue, to the entrance ramp to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, and hitchhike a ride back to Borough Park.

“I don’t want to use the word
expulsion
,” Reb Chezkel, the dean, said to my mother over the phone. Unbeknownst to either of them, I was listening in from another extension. “He is a very fine boy. But if his week lasts from Tuesday afternoon to Thursday morning, there isn’t much sense in keeping him here.”

“What do you suggest we do with him?” my mother asked. She sounded surprisingly calm, as if arranging a delivery of groceries.

“Maybe a yeshiva out of town,” Reb Chezkel said. There were many options. London. Zurich. Montreal. Jerusalem. My heart leaped. I would travel, make new friends. I was all in favor. He could use the word expulsion, too, if he liked.

My father was ill at that time, in the hospital with a strange condition. For years, following the practices of obscure Jewish mystics, he had lived a life of asceticism and taxed his body severely. The practices were known as
sigufim.
Self-punishment and bodily deprivation. Mystics of old rolled their naked bodies in snow-blanketed fields, hammered holes through ice-covered rivers to immerse in frigid waters. They spent their days in fasting and prayer. My father did not roll his body in snow or break holes through ice, but he slept little and fasted frequently. When he ate, it was with such regimented discipline that it was barely enough to sustain him. Breakfast would be a toasted rice cake and a couple of spoonfuls of plain yogurt. Lunch, a bowl of steamed vegetables; supper, a thin slice of specially prepared rice bread that my mother would bake for him. Sometimes, he also had a tablespoon of peanut butter.

Finally, in the summer of 1987, a month after my bar mitzvah, he collapsed, and was hospitalized. He was six-foot-two, weighing in at ninety pounds. His body had worn away, unnourished. According to my mother, he was suffering from a rare form of anorexia nervosa. He was not only physically ill but psychologically ill.

“He’s gone crazy,” my mother would say, and I would get angry at her. I had always thought of my father not only as brilliant but saintly. A man who truly lived for otherworldly aspirations. I could see no other way to explain his behavior.

“He has become intolerable,” she would tell us, knowing certain things about him that we children did not. Soon she was dropping hints of divorce.

When I argued that she was being unfair to him, she would grow exasperated. “
Shayfele
, your father is a brilliant and unusual man. But he is very, very sick.” She explained that sometimes, those who practiced extreme behaviors for what seemed like religious reasons were really afflicted with psychological conditions. My father, she claimed, was suffering from a mental illness that drove him to treat his body cruelly. Religion and spiritual practices provided the cloak, but underneath was a terrible malaise that was destroying him.

My father would scoff when I’d ask him about it. “Nonsense. Mommy means well, but she reads things in books or hears things from doctors and thinks they must always be true.”

I didn’t know which of them was correct, and I was upset with it all. I loved my father, but I wanted him to start eating and to get better and to stop being crazy and go back to being just saintly. I loved my mother, but I wanted her to stop berating my father and to stop threatening to break up our family. I knew they cared deeply for each other, but if they couldn’t take responsibility for their own lives, they would have no authority to instruct me on mine. When adults misbehave, I reasoned, they forfeit the right to tell children what to do.

“When the two of you shape up your acts,” I told my mother, “I’ll shape up mine.”

The yeshiva in Montreal was not the panacea that my parents had hoped for, nor was it the fulfillment of my own dreams for travel and adventure.

“
Nu! Nu!
Wake up! Wake up for the service of the Creator!” Reb Hillel, the
mashgiach
, would shout as he walked through the dorms at six o’clock each morning. I could see his scowling face even without opening my eyes. These rabbis were not Skverers but Satmars. They shouted, they slapped, they pinched, they thwacked. There was no way to hitchhike home on Thursday afternoons. There was serious studying and serious punishment. The doors to the study hall would be locked at the beginning of each session, and anyone who didn’t make it in time was punished—either fined or, with repeat offenders, slapped. The yeshiva was headed by the Ruv, a rotund and austere man, the scion of great rabbinic dynasties, whose presence in the study hall was so thick that when he was around, the already-high decibel level in the study hall would reach an eardrum-pounding pitch.

In June, the yeshiva moved to the Laurentian Mountains. Our summer campus was a converted resort on the edge of a small lake with a private beach, once used for swimming but now forbidden to us students. Behind several bungalows that had been converted to lecture rooms, past the gravel road that led to the main road, past a large clearing on a hilltop, a path led into the woods. After a five-minute walk, the path forked sharply to the left, where, past tangles of brushwood and scattered thornbushes, stood a tremendous boulder, twenty feet high, abutting a wide creek on the other side. Around the far side of the boulder were a series of ridges, where I could climb to the top for a magnificent view of cascading waterfalls a hundred yards upriver.

On that boulder, during our one-hour lunch break at midday or during the dinner break in early evening, my friend Avrum Yida and I would spend the time in brooding conversation. Avrum Yida was from Williamsburg, the Satmar stronghold in Brooklyn, and he, too, came from a family with troubles. His father, he told me, was a drug addict, and his parents, after years of domestic strife, had recently divorced. We found commonality in our respective miseries.

In July, my mother called to say that my father was in the hospital again and that he wanted to see me. He’d been out of the hospital for a couple of months but apparently had not been entirely cured. My mother didn’t elaborate. She said only that she’d already made flight arrangements and spoken to the Ruv. One of the rabbis would give me a ride to the airport.