All Who Go Do Not Return (43 page)

The once-insignificant moments of day-to-day life, snippets of conversation, would suddenly come alive in my memory. I would try to put them out of mind, but the spool of them was relentless. All I could do was close my eyes and let them wash over me, painful as they were.

I would remember weeknight evenings, when I’d get home from work at eight, and Tziri and Freidy would be at the dining-room table doing homework. The little ones would be in bed, and I would head upstairs to kiss them good night. Chaya Suri would hug me close to her small frame and refuse to let go. “Stay,” she would plead, and I would lie next to her in silence as she wrapped her arms around me tightly and told me about her day, until finally I’d kiss her good night and pry myself from her grip. Downstairs, Tziri and Freidy would bring their schoolbooks and sit with me at the kitchen table as I ate my dinner, and as we reviewed their studies, they’d pick food from my plate, always complaining that I got better dinners than they did.

I would remember the Friday nights and Saturday mornings in Monsey, when I would take the boys to shul, their company providing a small measure of relief in an otherwise tedious routine. Akiva would sit by my side and move his index finger along the lines in his prayer book, while Hershy ran outside with the other boys. Later, we’d walk home slowly, Akiva always holding my hand, and Hershy running ahead, and we’d gaze at the full moon and occasionally catch the fleeting silhouette of deer passing behind the trees. Then we’d hold hands tightly as we crossed the bridge over the little brook on the path home from the shul.

I would remember Saturday nights in winter, when nightfall came early and the Sabbath ended, and we would order in pizza and French fries and the seven of us would sit around the fireplace, the crackling logs competing with the sound of the wind howling outside. I would remember how, after every snowfall, the children and I would bundle up in our coats and build the largest snowman on the block, the snowballs of its torso so large that the three girls and I would have to lift them together.

People would ask, “Don’t you ever feel guilty? For leaving them like that?” And I would wonder about the question, about their assumptions, casting it all into the inglorious tradition of male irresponsibility. And then I would go on, and plan the next Friday night dinner, because what else was there to do?

I would often think of Gitty and the hardships of raising five children alone, and I’d feel badly for her, and then I would feel angry. She was raising five children alone, but she didn’t have to, not the way she had chosen. When I heard, in 2012, that she had remarried, to a good man, a pious and kind Hasid, a scribe who made his living writing sacred ritual texts—Torahs, tefillin, mezuzahs—and who took my sons to the synagogue on Shabbos and treated them kindly, I hoped that it would allow Gitty to forgive me for some of the pain I had caused her.

In the summertime, as Brooklyn simmered in the heat and Bushwick filled with block parties and backyard barbecues, a group of friends decided to take a break from our frenzied urban lives and participate in the Rainbow Gathering, an annual event of living off the grid for several days with peace, love, and thousands of unshowered bohemians.

We were sixteen men and women in four cars, driving along a dirt road through the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. Our cars whipped clouds of dust around barefoot, dreadlocked passersby, who all waved, flashed us peace signs, and shouted, “Welcome home!” and “Loving you, brothers and sisters!”

We planned to stay for four days. We packed for a month: massive amounts of food, towels, bottles of soap and shampoo, swimming attire, plasticware, rolls of aluminum foil, beach chairs, a portable shower, and gallons and gallons of bottled water.

A man with long flowing white hair in a colorful unbuttoned shirt sat at the head of the trail to the main campsite. He stared at us unself-consciously, with his sagging abdomen and his chest of white hair.

“Welcome home, brothers and sisters!” he called in a thick Southern accent, and looked at our bags. We were hauling carry-ons, suitable for airport corridors and train stations, less so for steep hills of eroded soil and bumpy clots of exposed tree roots.

“Haven’t y’all heard of backpacks?” the man asked with a laugh. “Which camp y’all headin’ to?”

“The Jewish camp.” If we were going to hang with hippies, we preferred the Chosen variety.

After a moment, he said, “Down this trail, across the main meadow. Then take the trail to the right. The Jewish kitchen is called ‘Shut Up and Eat It.’ Can’t miss it.”

We found the camp easily. There were Breslovers with flowing tzitzis mingling with former Israeli soldiers, religious and secular Jews together dragging massive bottles of water, half-naked girls working alongside women in long skirts and headscarves.

After we set up our tents, we headed out to the meadow, where drum circles formed throughout the day, and the crowd of several thousand rocked, danced, and twirled. “Welcome home!” people called. “Loving you!”

The atmosphere at Rainbow brought back memories of my first experience at the tisch among the Skverers, the enchanting songs and the warm welcomes from people I did not know, the strange boys my age who shook my hand and made room for me among them on the bleachers, the gruff middle-aged men who offered me plates of roast chicken and potato kugel and bowls of apple compote, insisting that I eat, eat, because there was plenty more.

That tisch had changed my life, and over the following decade, as my attachment to Hasidic teachings deepened and my religious views matured, I had come to see the tisch not merely as a place for song and dance but as a vessel for experiencing what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences”—the transcendent moments of clarity when the whole cosmic mess we call our universe is suddenly beautiful and orderly and one’s place within it is stunningly clear. In those moments, our very insignificance is magnified in such a way that all we can do is tremble in awe at the wondrousness of our existence.

In the last years before I left, when I was barely holding on to my faith, I would still sometimes attend the tischen, yearning for the feelings I remembered from my earliest days in New Square. I would head to the synagogue on Saturday evening for the third tisch of the week, traditionally held in the dark in the final moments before the Sabbath passed into weekday. Those final moments, the kabbalists tell us, are times of
ra’ava dera’avin
, a time of expanded consciousness of the divine.

But I had no longer felt it—the experience no longer moved me. The words of “Benei Heikhala Dikhsifin,” the haunting poem by Isaac Luria that speaks of the unveiling of cosmic light that comes at that particular time, no longer made the hair on my arm stand stiff. The rebbe’s chanting now sounded irritatingly mournful, whiny, like the sobs of a petulant child. The words were still beautiful but carried only a dim reminder of the ecstatic heights they had once triggered within me. I had developed resistance to their effects, and—heretic that I now was—the experience fell flat.

Soon I would lose my faith entirely—not only in Hasidic teachings but in the concept of the divine or the sacred, or even the idea that we, as humans, can intuit anything beyond the empirical. Still, the memories of the tischen lingered, and as I transitioned to the life of a secular New Yorker who didn’t observe the Sabbath, didn’t keep kosher, didn’t attend synagogue or pray or perform any of the religious rituals that had, in my earlier years, been so meaningful, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where did secular folks go to experience what I once felt at the tisch?

At one point, I wondered if a rock concert might do it. My mother would eventually tell me of her experiences as a teenager listening to Bob Dylan and the Beatles, of being at Woodstock, and the intensity of those experiences, to which she would later credit her religious awakening. I’d heard from Grateful Dead fans who described their experiences as being similar to what they would later feel at a tisch. But when I sought out such events, they evoked nothing at all.

At Rainbow, however, the energy was palpable, and I wondered if, finally, I had found it.

Hai yana, ho yana, hai ya na
, the crowd sang as a small group sat on the ground and banged on their bongo drums. The steady rhythm of percussion instruments of various shapes and sizes attracted a growing crowd, until the group of three or four turned into several dozen. Across an enormous meadow, several thousand people in circles like this one waved their hands and shimmied their hips to the cacophonous symphony of drums, rattles, tambourines, and every other conceivable noisemaking device, conventional or improvised.

Hai yana, ho yana, hai ya na
, the crowd kept repeating, and after every repetition, they chanted a line or verse about the elements of nature, the trees, the mountains, the rivers, the sun, the moon, and the sky. A barefoot young woman, olive-skinned with delicate features, wearing a flowing white sleeveless dress, led the chanting:

And the crowd swung back to the refrain:
Hai yana, ho yana, hai ya na! Hai yana, ho yana, hai ya na!
It was a mantra both incomprehensible and mesmerizing, and I stared at those around me, each of them smiling at no one in particular, some closing their eyes and shaking their heads to the rhythm, waving their hands in the air, back and forth, back and forth. One man sat on the ground in the circle’s center, swaying like a Hasid in prayer. Most others were standing, shifting their feet in a shuffle dance. Suddenly, all I wanted was to join this circle and be part of it, to dance with these people, to feel what they were feeling.

But I was no longer thirteen, no longer able to embrace such experiences without feeling cynical or detached. Though I wanted to join them, I kept wondering:
“We are one with the infinite sun”? “The rivers are our sisters”?
What do these things even mean? The concepts didn’t work for me, even on the level of metaphor. As touching as the sentiments were, I wasn’t sure what I would do with them once I got back to Brooklyn, to alternate-side parking, to my cable bill, and to the perpetually unreliable G train. I now lived deeply and fundamentally suspicious of any hint of dogma or ideology, of subjective values presented as Great Truths. While I wanted to care more about the sun and the rivers and the sky, about loving my fellow humans radically, and about finding the sacred within our universe, I found that I was not moved enough to give these issues further thought.

And so I watched those who sang and danced, and when night fell, I crept back to my tent, where I could still hear the sounds of the drums, the crackling of a nearby campfire, the laughter of the dozen or so people near our tent who called themselves “Goat Camp,” a motley group of freight-train riders who picked up every stray dog and cat along their travels and ended up encamped in the woods next to our group of ex-Hasidim.

Soon I was back in Brooklyn, no longer squatting over a ditch in the woods to relieve myself, no longer bathing in the stagnant water of a shallow creek, no longer smelling unwashed bodies in a cramped tent, and, over the days and weeks that followed, I thought often of that weekend. I wondered about that circle of hippies and my odd attraction to them, and I realized, after a time, what it really was: what I longed for was not the tisch of my past but a return to a time and place when ideas moved me even if they didn’t make perfect sense, a time when I allowed myself to be fired up with passion for something, anything, because it held a “truth” that had made itself evident during a moment of inspired consciousness.

Sometime later, I accepted the invitation of a friend to attend a non-Orthodox Sabbath service at a synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. I thought I had prayed enough to last me a lifetime, but I had never before experienced a musical service, and when the congregation sang the “Song for David,” I found myself unexpectedly moved. When the crowd rose to dance for “Come, My Beloved,” I recalled the dancing at the rebbe’s tisch, the endless circle snaking around the large shul for hours.

The congregation quieted down for the Amidah, the silent prayer into which each worshiper disappears into his or her private meditations. It had been years since I had recited it, and I found myself tripping over some of the words, surprised at my loss of fluency, however minor.

Atah kidashta. You have sanctified the seventh day for Your Name … the end goal of Creation … blessed it of all days, and consecrated it of all times, as it is written in Your Torah. Vayechulu….

I imagined a primordial world in which God, Adam, and Eve had only one another for company, and the two solitary humans looked at the sun and the rivers and the trees and the sky, and declared, as the Talmud tells us they did:
Mah rabu ma’asecha Adonai
, how wondrous are Your works, O Lord.