All Who Go Do Not Return (35 page)

After the flight from Montreal to New York, after lugging my suitcase up to our second-floor apartment in Borough Park, I opened the door to find my mother standing in the hallway, waiting. She gave me a silent hug, then looked at me sadly, her gaze steady.

“He’s gone,” she said.

My father was dead.

The adults hadn’t shaped up their act. My father hadn’t gotten himself better, and my mother hadn’t been much help, either. Before she had time to follow through on her threats of divorce, my father had died, leaving our family in a state of turmoil.

After the seven days of mourning, I returned to the yeshiva, more apathetic than ever.

“My plan,” I said to my friend Avrum Yida, “is to end up a shaygetz.” A shaygetz drove a sports car or a motorcycle. He cavorted with shiksas. He wore jeans and leather jackets. He didn’t bother keeping Shabbos or kosher. He was, in short, no different from a goy. The shaygetz declared God and His laws irrelevant. The shaygetz was unprincipled—there was no principle in sin. For spite, for temptation, for mindless apathy, for sheer wickedness—the shaygetz defied God, the rabbis, his parents, and all that was good and righteous and noble. I had no clear formula for becoming a shaygetz, but I was determined, in the meantime, to show my general intentions.

Reb Mordche would attempt to put a stop to it.

Reb Mordche delivered his lectures each afternoon, for an hour and a half, in one of the tiny converted bungalows, where we sat cramped against one another on wooden benches around a three-sided arrangement of tables. He sat on the fourth side, facing us. My place was the first to his left, within easy reach.

One day, all of us were restless from the heat, the broken air conditioner a teasing reminder of the comforts we lacked, and Reb Mordche struggled to hold our attention. To my left sat Chaim Nuchem Ausch. Reaching silently from behind, I flicked my middle finger against his left ear. Chaim Nuchem flinched, then looked angrily toward the boy on his left: “Why you flicking me?”

The boy to Chaim Nuchem’s left protested, declaring his innocence, and Reb Mordche threw me a stern glance.

A plastic straw lay on the table in front of me, alongside an empty soda can. I reached for it and held it between my index and middle finger, pretending to twiddle it absentmindedly, while at the same time, I put a small piece of paper in my mouth and let it soak in my saliva for a few minutes. A few minutes later, I shot a prodigious spitball across the room, watching with delight as it whizzed past Pinny Greenfeld’s nose and landed on Yossi Hershkowitz’s forehead with an audible
sprrt.
I remember the laughter, and how it stopped abruptly just as I saw, from the corner of my eye, Reb Mordche’s arm jerk up from where it rested on the table, his open palm headed directly to the right side of my face.

There were no thoughts in my head at that moment, only reflexes, and my right arm went up to block his strike. My arm struck his forcefully. I remember the stunned look on Reb Mordche’s face, his arm still partially raised in front of him. I was aware that the room had gone frightfully silent. I had committed the greatest offense possible for a yeshiva student: striking an instructor.

My punishment would be severe. If I was lucky, I would be slapped senseless. More likely, Reb Mordche would summon Reb Hillel, and together they would beat me as no student had been beaten before.

There was only one thing to do: escape.

I sprang backward up onto the bench. With one arm in the air for balance, I jumped toward the door, pushing it with my free arm midair. The last thing I heard, as the flimsy screen door banged shut behind me, was: “All of you! Go get him!”

I was fast, and I knew where I was headed. By the time my classmates had bounded out of the lecture room and determined the direction I’d gone, I was already halfway up the trail to the woods. By the time I heard their shouts—“Which way? Where’d he go?”—I was halfway up the boulder abutting the creek, hidden behind a dense thicket, climbing to the top and settling into the familiar ridge.

The minutes passed, and the sounds of my classmates receded. From my perch, I watched the rushing cascades of the falls and the pools of white foam in the water below. I wondered what I was going to do now. Certain punishment awaited me back at the camp, but where else could I go? I was hundreds of miles from home. My transportation had always been arranged by the yeshiva, chartered buses that brought all the New York students back and forth over the various term breaks. I had no money for a bus or an airplane ticket.

I wondered what it was that had led me to all this trouble. I wondered why I found myself, over and over again, on the wrong side of adult expectations. Overcome with self-pity, I thought of jumping off the edge and sinking into the rushing torrents. But the water didn’t look very deep, and I wasn’t likely to drown easily. I considered taking off through the woods to the railroad tracks that passed not far from our camp, and walking until I reached some destination or collapsed from exhaustion. I needed to get away, far from the yeshiva and its tedious grind of Talmud studies, far from the rabbis and teachers, with their beatings and their insistent scoldings and their buffoonish piety, far from the friends who sided with a teacher and pursued me into the woods.

I checked my watch. There were fifteen minutes until afternoon prayers, and I realized with a start that it was my turn to lead prayers. If I wasn’t there, a new offense would be piled on to all my existing ones. I listened carefully to the stillness of the forest and to the sounds of rushing water. Here and there, a bird called and another responded. The sounds of my friends had quieted down, but who knew if they were lurking somewhere, behind a tree or a rock?

Then again, what if they were?

It was unfair that life presented only bad options. It appeared that whatever I did, I was bound for trouble. I would head back and face whatever punishment awaited me. Adults were often unpredictable—maybe they’d spare me this time.

Stepping tentatively out of the woods, I looked around and saw no one. The afternoon sun beat down on the trampled grass around the cluster of buildings, the two-story dormitory, the study hall and dining room, the small cottages serving as residences for faculty members, who brought their wives and children with them for the duration of the summer. From above the study hall doorway, set within the transom, a massive air-conditioning unit hummed loudly, a steady drip of condensation falling on all who passed beneath it.

I pushed the door open slowly. My classmates were all in their places. I looked for Reb Mordche and noticed that he wasn’t in the room. Neither were the other instructors, or even the Ruv, who ordinarily sat up on a platform at the end of the hall, eagle-eyed over his domain. Here and there, students began to close their texts, reaching for their hats, offering concluding remarks to their partners as they headed to the sink in the rear to wash before prayer.

The clock on the wall read two minutes to four. No one looked my way. Slowly, I angled my way through the maze of tables and chairs to the front of the hall, and took my spot at the prayer leader’s podium. I turned and saw my friends at the other end of the room noticing me and whispering.

I watched the clock. The moment it struck four, a side door opened and the Ruv walked in, followed by the rest of the faculty. I could not read their expressions. The Ruv looked around at the students, then made his way toward his lectern, opposite the one for the prayer leader, where I now stood. I watched him, my heart pounding wildly, trying to discern his intentions, but he appeared not to notice me. Perhaps he’s saving my punishment for later, I thought. Or, I dared hope, maybe Reb Mordche decided to keep quiet about the incident.

The Ruv was now at his lectern, opening his prayer book. Clearly, my punishment was not at hand. I looked at him, anticipating his signal, ready to launch the opening verse:
Ashrei…. Fortunate are those who dwell in Your houses.

All of a sudden, the Ruv turned to face me, then raised his arm and pointed a pudgy index finger toward the door:
“AROIS FIN DU!”

I froze. The hall fell silent, and I could feel the stares of fifty pairs of eyes on me.

“GET OUT OF HERE!” the Ruv shouted, louder this time. “I won’t tolerate gangsters in my yeshiva! You are now expelled!”

For a moment, I was struck by the word
gangster
, thrown into his furious Yiddish. Was I a gangster? The word was meant to shame me, I knew, but instead I felt proud. A gangster was worse than a shaygetz, and so I had achieved something.

I turned and made my way through the hushed study hall. The students stepped aside to let me pass, through to the rear, past the last tables, where my classmates, the youngest group of students, stood watching me. I nodded to a few of them as I passed, offering a hint of a smirk, and opened the main doors and headed up to my dorm room.

A hour later, I finished packing my things into my suitcase, but not before Reb Hillel appeared suddenly and delivered a slap to my face so forceful that the world went black for a long moment and I thought I was going to faint. When I finally looked up, Reb Hillel stood there in silence, contempt all over his face, and then turned on his heels and left the room.

That night, I slept at the home of a kind rabbi in Montreal, who offered to let me stay until I could get a bus back to New York. As I dragged my suitcase into the small guest room on Durocher Avenue, I felt a sort of melancholic emptiness. I had been expelled twice now—first by the Skverers, and now by the Satmars. After I had been branded an outcast, my plans to become a shaygetz no longer seemed so hot.

Duly chastised, I began to rethink my strategy. I was a Hasidic boy, and I realized that I could be nothing else. I had been shown up for my hubris, and what I wanted most now was acceptance. I wanted back at the yeshiva.

The next day, I called Reb Mordche and offered an apology that was as sincere as it was desperate. Then I called the Ruv and promised to change my ways. A week later, I was allowed to return to the campus in the Laurentians. I hunkered down and set my mind to studying the laws of the Sabbath, when and how one may or may not remove olive oil from a lamp to season a salad—nearly a whole chapter on that subject alone. I was determined to change. I would take my duties seriously and prove that I had what it took to achieve both scholarship and a pious disposition. I would make these rabbis proud. I would be just like them.

I had veered off the path, nearly lost my way, but had gotten right back onto it. After a year in Montreal, the Skverers took me back, and I spent two years at their yeshiva in Williamsburg, and then three more at their flagship institution, the Great Yeshiva in New Square. I had become not a shaygetz but a serious student and later a respectable young man.

Until now, at the age of thirty, when I had veered off the path once again. The reasons were different this time; yet in so many ways, they felt the same, as if I were a child again, a teenager, naturally inclined to rebel against authority. Except that this time, my sins were far greater. And this time, I had no intention of pleading my way back.

A month after the bezdin ordered me out, Gitty and I and the children moved to Monsey, a nearby hamlet with a Hasidic population several times greater than that of New Square. In Monsey, there were not only Skverers but also Vizhnitzers, Belzers, Satmars, and Lubavitchers, all living cheek-by-jowl with old-school Litvaks.

The area we moved to, a hilly road studded with one-story ranch houses and modest colonials, looked like any other suburban neighborhood in Rockland County: backyard swimming pools shaded by dogwoods and Japanese maples, manicured hedgerows along property edges, front lawns so green they seemed almost painted. Behind the halcyon facade of two-car garages and well-maintained landscaping, however, were attitudes not much different from those of New Square. The men wore the same broad fur hats, the women wore the same wigs covered with hats and kerchiefs, and many showed the same suspicion and intolerance for those who were different, for those whose fur hats just weren’t furry enough, or just the right height or weight or hardened sheen.

Walking home from the little shul at the corner one Friday night, I got into a discussion with a neighbor about the challenges of science to religious faith.

“If science contradicts the Torah, it is false,” the man said resolutely.

The man’s son, a chubby, redheaded little boy, pulled on his arm. “Come already,” the boy whined. I could see Chaya Suri looking for me through our dining-room window, her hands cupping the sides of her face, better to see into the dark. But the topic at hand burned inside me, and I couldn’t let it go.

“You can’t say that,” I said to the man. “The study of science is everywhere in your life. It’s in the car you drive. In the medicine you take when you’re ill. It is in the production of your food, in the manufacture of your clothes. You rely on science when you fly in an airplane, or when you visit your doctor. Science has put a man on the moon, for goodness sake!”

The man remained unimpressed. “I see you’re an
oifgeklerter
,” he said. “Only an
oifgeklerter
believes in scientists the way you do.”

An
oifgeklerter.
An enlightened one. Not a heretic but in many ways just as bad. The heretic declares his godlessness openly, and so the righteous can choose to avoid him. But enlightened ones are deceptive, wrapping their heresy in a veneer of plainspoken inquiry.

I was reminded of an old Hasidic teaching, on the verse in Psalms:
God peers down from heaven to ask: Where is the enlightened one who seeks God?

Said Reb Noach of Lechevitch: “
Where is the enlightened one who seeks God?
The answer, of course, is that he is nowhere.” The Psalmist had asked a rhetorical question because enlightened ones do not seek God. They seek only to destroy the faith of those who do.

“They
merely question
,” one of my teachers once said of the Maskilim, the enlightened Jews and the reformers who studied science and philosophy and attempted, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to create a new Jew for the modern era. “In their questions, however, lie their malevolent intentions. They seek to destroy faith, not to uphold it.”