All Who Go Do Not Return (9 page)

Somebody spoke. We, as a group, would not tolerate the kind of activity we’d heard about. Any one of our friends caught with a forbidden device, a radio or a portable television, or a secular magazine or forbidden musical cassettes, would be wrapped in a prayer shawl and beaten. Association with certain undesirable persons, known transgressors, would also be forbidden. This time, it was only a warning. The next time, we wouldn’t be so tolerant.

Nuta tried to protest: “I didn’t—I have never—I don’t—” We silenced him quickly. His words did not matter.

Other friends were summoned, each told to sit and given the same speech. For each student summoned, before he entered, there was a call around the room—“Who’s speaking this time?”—and someone would volunteer. The things said were the same. The reactions, too, were similar, always the same look of horror as each of those summoned sat wondering what could have turned longtime friends into inquisitors. Only Yossi Rosen declared that he would not be cowed.

“Mi somchu le’ish?”
Yossi shot back at us, citing the verse in Exodus. “Who appointed you as master?”

Menashe Steiner, who was doing the talking, held up his hand and said: “That’s what the cursed Dathan said. And what happened to
him?
” Swallowed into the pit, of course, along with all the other Israelite rebels in the desert, and the thought hung heavy in the air as Yossi was shown out of the room.

A half dozen of our friends had been summoned and released, but we weren’t pacified. Unsatisfied with the relative moderation of warnings, we wanted more.

Mendy Klein had not appeared when summoned, so a handful of students were dispatched to find him. They checked the synagogue, the study hall, the lecture rooms, and the basement dining room, but Mendy was nowhere to be found. His dorm room was reported locked, the persistent knocking on the door unanswered. The thought of Mendy’s locked door ignited our imaginations. A locked door meant something hidden, something forbidden.

“Let’s get in there,” someone said.

We looked at one another in silence. “We can’t go into the dorms,” someone said finally.

All of us in our righteous clique were married, and yeshiva policy—as ordered by the rebbe himself—forbade married students to enter the dormitory area. The reasons were never made clear, but like the rule that two students alone were never to lock the door, this hinted at fears of sexual transgression.

The sense of urgency was now heightened. An opportunity for acting on our zeal was slipping away on a technicality. As we stood outside the study hall, Reb Yankel Gelbman, a rabbi at the yeshiva and one of the village’s foremost scholars, came up the stairs carrying a stack of texts. One of us left the huddle and approached the rabbi to ask the question.

Reb Yankel furrowed his brow, and looked around at our group.
“And thou shalt be rid of the evil within your midst,”
he said finally, quoting the Bible. “An unequivocal biblical command!”

A ransacked room is an ugly thing, but for us it was a thing of beauty. The door smashed in, blankets and linen ripped off the mattresses, dressers overturned, its contents on the floor in disarray, the mob of dozens searching, picking through items, certain that somewhere in that room lay the evidence of transgression and abomination, proof that our zeal had not been in vain, our impassioned assumption of a sacred guardianship justified.

A locked cabinet was discovered, a hammer procured, and the lock smashed. We didn’t know what we were looking for but were sure that the evidence existed somewhere. A cheer went up when someone found a pile of unmarked audiocassettes. A cassette player was found and one of the cassettes inserted. Hebrew music by a male singer came out of the tinny speakers, and someone hit the Stop button in disgust. The singer sounded secular, Israeli, though we weren’t sure; even so, it was not a sin worthy of our zeal. If the singer was female, that would’ve been something else, but it wasn’t, and the cassette was ejected with disappointment. A second unmarked cassette was inserted but was only a scratchy recording of one of Avremel’s old talks.

Someone discovered a pile of photographs, and leafing through it found a photo of Mendy and several other students wearing T-shirts and baseball caps. It was quickly taken as evidence of something illicit. Why else would they discard their long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats for the vulgar sartorial habits of common Americans? Later we learned that Mendy and the others had been on an outing to cut phragmite weeds from the New Jersey Meadowlands to cover the sukkah booths for the Sukkos holiday, and had simply donned clothing more suitable to the task.

We found little else. Soon we heard the sound of an emergency siren. Someone came running from the outside: “Mendy called the police!” The room had all but cleared out in seconds, and my friend Mayer Goldhirsch and I were the last ones in the room. Mayer was still looking through the scattered mess on the floor and I grabbed his arm. “Mayer, let’s go!” But he wouldn’t leave. I let go of his arm to leave on my own, and he looked up and grabbed me. “Shulem, we
have
to find something. I
know
we’ll find something.”

“Find
what
, Mayer? We don’t even know what we’re looking for!”

Reluctantly, he stood up, looked around, and followed me out of the room. The wailing siren had stopped, and we heard hasty footsteps coming up the stairs.

“Quick, the other side!” Mayer cried, and we ran across the corridor to the other stairway. As we pushed open the door, we looked back to see Mendy angrily leading two police officers to his room. Mayer and I bounded down the stairway and ran, panting, back to the yeshiva building.

It hadn’t always been clear that this was to be my path. My father was a pious Hasid but of a gentler, more tolerant sort. He was not a Skverer but a mix of Satmar anti-Zionism, Breslov mysticism, and his own brand of humanism. He was a scholar and teacher, and spent much of his time reaching out to secular Jews to teach them about Orthodox Jewish observance.

And yet, there was much about him that was unorthodox.

One Saturday night, when I was around eleven, my father allowed me to accompany him to a lecture he gave at a Jewish Community Center somewhere on Long Island. My father and I entered a room filled with people who did not look particularly religious, men in bare heads and women in short skirts, knees and elbows showing. It was shocking to me to see that the sexes were mixed. I looked at my father to see whether he, too, was disturbed, but I could tell nothing from his expression. He pointed me to a seat off to the side as he took his place at the podium. The sight of my father, a tall Hasidic man in a fur shtreimel, a caftan down to his calves, and white stockings, brought silence to the room.

“Gut voch,”
my father began. Some in the crowd nodded and smiled. “Before I begin,” he continued, “I would like to ask that men move to one side of the room and women to the other.” I watched the changing expressions in the crowd—astonishment, indignation, bemusement. People looked at one another for hints on how to proceed. My father was not finished. “I would like to say,” he added, “that I understand and respect the desire to avoid such separation. But I do not agree with it.” He repeated his statement a couple more times for emphasis: “I respect it, but I do not agree with it.”

I watched as the audience rose slowly, shuffled around, and took new seats, men on one side of the room and women on the other. I remember that my father thanked them for it and then made a remark that drew laughs, and whatever tension may have lingered appeared to dissipate. After that, he gave his talk, of which I understood little but from the attentive expressions of the audience, and the eager and lengthy question-and-answer session that followed, I knew that his talk was received with satisfaction. A woman later approached me in the corridor, her face glowing, her palm against her chest, her torso bent from the waist as she leaned—almost bowed—to my own eleven-year-old height, and said, “Your father is an amazing man!” I knew then that he had touched his audience in a deep way.

I respect it, but I do not agree with it.
Those words would embody what I saw as my father’s ability to stand by his principles while acknowledging that others lived by different ones, their convictions as strong as his own. Those words provided a counterbalance to the more prevalent view expressed by my teachers and others, of utter contempt for everything but our own worldview. And so I couldn’t help but wonder: Who was right, my father or my teachers? Were we allowed to respect others, or were we obligated to vilify all who believed differently? My father seemed to embrace the former, and my teachers the latter. Which, then, was I to accept?

It wasn’t only other Jews my father had unorthodox views about, but also people of other faiths.

“Judaism accepts,” my father said to me once during a walk to shul on the Sabbath, “that non-Jews have their own faiths. That other religions, too, for their own adherents, can provide a path to God.”

I told my father what my rebbe had told me:
The kindness of the nations is for sin.
A goy, even when he does a good deed, its purpose is for evil.

My father shook his head. “That is not correct,” he said. Later, at home, he took me into his study and opened a book on his desk. “Read this passage,” he said, and I read aloud the row of tiny letters at the tip of his pointed finger:
So said the Prophet Elijah: I testify before heaven and earth, each Israelite or Gentile, man or woman, slave or maidservant, each according to his deed, so rests upon him the holy spirit.

My father sat down in his chair and drew me close with his arm around my back and his hand on my arm. “I know this isn’t what you always hear, but you must still always remember it.”

“But don’t all goyim hate us?” I asked.

My father thought for a moment, and then said: “There are some who do. And throughout history, there were many. But no, not all.”

Yet why did my father choose to raise me among people whose views he disagreed with? I did not know the answer to this question, nor did I know how to ask it, but I knew that I could not accept my father’s view. He was only one against the many who preached differently.

It is a well-known dictum that Esau hates Jacob
, the sage Rabbi Shimon Bar Yochai said. As my rebbes explained, it was a law of nature: The non-Jew will always despise the Jew. History proved that principle correct, my rebbes would remind us. The Spanish Jews in the fifteenth century and the German Jews in the twentieth bore witness to the same thing: a Jew might think himself assimilated, but the goy will always—secretly, if he must, and openly, if he dare—despise him.

The non-Jews in our neighborhood, the
Talyayners
and
Portrikaners
, seemed to reinforce that view. They lived not among us but along the edges of our neighborhoods, and when my friends and I would pass them on the street, they would jeer. “Jews!” one of the Puerto Rican boys would always shout, laughing. If I was walking alone, one of them would approach and flick my yarmulke off my head, his buddies cheering. I’d be sitting on the stoop in front of our home, eating a Popsicle or reading a book, and if one of them passed, I’d cast him a nervous glance.

“Ya motha!” the boy would shout at me.

“Why do the goyim say that?” I asked my mother once. “
Ya motha.
What
about
my mother?”

“It’s a goyish thing,” she said, her eyes on the pot she was stirring on the kitchen stove. “Just ignore them.”

Passing the Catholic church on Sixteenth Avenue, my friends and I would cross to the other side of the street, spit in the direction of the church, and recite three times:
“Thou shalt utterly detest it, and thou shalt utterly abhor it, for it is a cursed thing.”

Thou shalt not walk in the ways of other nations
, we read in the Bible. This, our rebbes explained, meant that we should not play baseball, wear Western-style clothes, or sport popular hairstyles.

On occasion, our non-Jewish neighbors surprised me. At age eleven, two friends and I, overcome with curiosity, asked an Italian boy near our school to tell us “the meaning of F.”

“The meaning of F?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” we said. “You know. The F-word. What does it mean?”

“Oh,” the boy said, a grin spreading across his face. “You don’t know?”

We didn’t. The boy maintained his grin but wouldn’t tell us. He said that it was a dirty word. And we couldn’t help but wonder: Why would that bother him? Didn’t all goyim use such words freely, issuing profanities as casually as they walked their dogs or fiddled with the undersides of their cars?

“Is the rabbi home? Can he spare something for the baby?”

The woman would stand by the door, and one of us children would run to our father’s study and say, “The lady from the corner is here.” We knew her only as that, because she seemed at all times to be sitting on the corner stoop, in front of a decrepit, graffiti-covered apartment building beneath the elevated subway line, chain-smoking and drinking something out of a paper bag. She would often come with her teenage daughter, bringing with her the stench of something we could not identify. Sometimes they would be carrying an infant, although I never knew if the baby belonged to the mother or the daughter.