by Deen, Shulem
It was all over very quickly. After prayers, the rebbe was led around the premises by Reb Chezkel as the student body surged several paces behind. As soon as the rebbe’s car left, taking off with its strobe lights flashing and siren shrieking to announce the rebbe’s departure to the Hasidim of Williamsburg, we took to analyzing each moment of the visit. Every step, every glance, every twitch of the rebbe’s eyebrow, had been carefully observed and scrutinized, and for the rest of the week, it was all the students talked about.
Inside the front cover of the little volume, following the guidance of my friend Chaim Elya, I wrote: In this Book of Psalms, the Rebbe of Skvyra, may he live many long years, recited chapters 91 to 95 on Thursday, the 27th day of Cheshvan, 5748.
It wasn’t until my first visit to the village of New Square that I came to understand what really set the Skverers apart. The death anniversary of the rebbe’s grandfather, Reb Duvidel of Skvyra, was approaching, and the yeshiva organized an official trip to the sect’s headquarters. The rebbe would be leading a memorial tisch, a traditional communal meal.
I wasn’t eager to attend. Rebbes were still not on my mind much. In Borough Park, where I lived, there was no shortage of those who laid claim to the title. They all seemed indistinctive and uninspiring, caricatures of pietistic pretense, each with his gauzy white beard, glazed eyes under thick eyeglasses, blue or white floral caftans: the Munkatcher, the Bobover, the Stoliner, the Skulener, the Rachmastrivker; Hungarian and Polish, Romanian and Galician, even the occasional Lithuanian. On the rare occasion that I would attend one of their tischen, I would listen as they spoke, mumbling in odd singsong voices, always variations on the same themes, about Torah study and prayer and the Sabbath kugel and good Jews and bad non-Jews. There were songs, on occasion, as often as not uninspiring, tepid melodies sung half-heartedly and off-key by sparse crowds. Usually, I would attend only with friends, if it was a special occasion and there was the promise of entertainment—a Purim play in Munkatch, the menorah lighting in Rachmastrivka, dancing till dawn at Bobov on the seventh night of Passover, which was pleasant enough for about five minutes but surely not for five hours. For the most part, little of it held my interest; I was far more concerned that my black caftan would become creased, that my polished black shoes would be scuffed, and that my Sabbath beaver hat would get knocked into a bowl of chicken soup.
Reb Chezkel, however, made it clear that attending the tisch in New Square was mandatory.
The shtetl was only an hour from Brooklyn, but as our yellow school bus made its way through the strange village, I found myself intrigued. Young boys wore black suspenders over dull-colored shirts and black pants, their unkempt sidelocks down to their chests—unlike us Brooklyn boys who snipped our sidelocks at chin-length and kept them perfectly curled. Their hats appeared rain-speckled, and every man and boy appeared to be wearing “Medicaid glasses,” cat-eye frames of thick black or brown plastic. Their gartels, thin black prayer sashes, were wound tightly around their waists over ill-fitting gabardines; their shoes looked worn-out, scuffed at the toes and encrusted with mud. Even the women had a more pious appearance, kerchiefs bound over their wigs more tightly than in Brooklyn, their expressions more severe. There was something slightly repellent about these people and, at the same time, strangely enchanting. I half expected to see a yard full of squawking chickens and a milk cow at pasture.
The bus stopped in front of a large, plain-looking rectangular structure in the center of the village, its only adornment a narrow roofed porch and two concrete square columns at its entrance. This was the village’s main synagogue. Inside the sanctuary, an enormous table was set up, made up of dozens of smaller tables, each covered with what was once a white tablecloth but was now grease-stained and yellowed. Seated on benches with tall backrests along both sides of the table were elderly men, and behind them, leaning on the backrests, were more men, middle-aged, some with small children in their arms or standing beside them. Behind them were rows of bleachers, five stories each, about fifteen feet tall. On the bleachers, young men and teenage boys stood pressed against one another, and more were climbing to take their places among them, all of them looking toward the head of the table, where the rebbe was soon to appear.
I felt a tap on my shoulder. A thin, tall man stood behind me and extended his hand.
“Shulem aleichem,” he said. “Welcome.”
I looked to see if I knew him, but he took off without another word. Soon another man approached to shake my hand, and then another. Some smiled but most didn’t, as if these welcoming gestures were a solemn duty. Some asked for my name and where I was from, but most moved on quickly. The handshakes were as varied as those who offered them: limp, firm, pumping—even a two-handed one from a middle-aged gentleman who smiled broadly as if we were old friends, but he offered no words at all.
Suddenly, there was frantic hushing, and I watched as men and boys of all ages made a final dash for their places. I tried to get a peek between the many hats and heads and shoulders but couldn’t see much past the jostling men in front of me. The rebbe, I presumed, had just entered from a room at the front.
Another tap on my shoulder. Chaim Lazer, one of my classmates, stood behind me.
“Come up onto the parentches,” he said, and pointed to the bleachers, rows and rows of boys our own age.
“It looks full,” I said.
“They’ll make room for you. In Skver, there’s always room for another.”
I followed Chaim as he climbed to the top row of the last set of bleachers. Already cramped, the boys squeezed together to make room for us and reached across to shake our hands. There was a faint musk in the air, from the compressed bodies and layers of clothes; on occasion, my nostrils were hit with a strong whiff of it.
The hall fell silent. All focus was on the rebbe, who now sat on a tall gilded chair at the head of the table, its seat and back of rich red leather, a gold crown in wood relief rising from the chair behind the rebbe’s head. I watched as he raised a large loaf of challah, the size of a small child, and cut a slice for himself. He ripped a small piece and chewed slowly, his head swaying from side to side, as if in prayer. Meanwhile, the attendant took the rest and cut it into smaller pieces. The challah chunks, soon shredded into hundreds of pieces, were passed from hand to hand all the way across the shul. Some received only crumbs, and those crumbs were split into even smaller crumbs. These were the traditional sacred morsels, sherayim, leftovers of the tzaddik’s food, each morsel bringing untold blessings: it healed the sick, brought good fortune, and instilled in one the fear of God.
More food was placed in front of the rebbe, all of it in enormous silver dishes: a whole cooked salmon, chicken noodle soup in a covered silver tureen, a large platter piled high with dozens of chicken legs, and another with brightly glazed carrots. From each dish, the rebbe ate only a few morsels, swaying from side to side as he chewed, after which the attendant passed around the leftovers, which were then passed, hand to hand, through the rest of the crowd.
An elderly man began to sing a familiar song, a coarse and boisterous melody, its simple notes taught in every Hasidic kindergarten: Grant us the good inclination, to serve You with truth, with awe and with love. The rebbe rested his forehead on his right hand, covering half his face. His cheeks were flaming red over his reddish-gray beard as his body swayed softly to the rhythm.
The crowd joined in, and slowly their voices grew louder, more robust, the song filling the sanctuary. Moments later, the rebbe removed his hand from his forehead and began to pound his fist on the table. The crowd responded, stomping their feet in time to the rebbe’s pounding. Even the brass chandeliers vibrated to the beat of the song. The simple passage was repeated over and over, until the crowd was like a single massive organism screaming its desperate plea: Grant us, grant us, the good inclination! Grant us, grant us, the good inclination!
During a pause in the singing, men removed kerchiefs from their pockets and wiped the sweat from their brows
. Above us, latticework panels covered the balcony areas, the women’s section, and here and there a slender finger gripped a wooden strip from behind the partition. Through the slats, I could make out the vague outline of faces, the few women who cared to attend, to observe this otherwise male-only event.
Another dish was placed in front of the rebbe, and then quickly removed for disbursement. The crowd grew tense with anticipation, soft murmurs followed by expectant silence. The rebbe gestured to one of the elderly men at the table. The man began to sing a slow tune set to words I remembered from the penitence prayers of the High Holy Days, a prayer not to God but to his ministering angels:
Remind Him, make it heard before Him,
the Torah study and good deeds
of those who rest beneath the earth.
The crowd took up the tune, again starting out weakly, their voices growing stronger with each stanza. The song came to an end, and the crowd took it up again from the beginning. Some of the men appeared to be weeping. The boys around me swayed vigorously with their eyes closed. Even the children stood remarkably solemn, all eyes on the rebbe:
Let Him remember their love, and keep alive their seed,
so that the remnant of Jacob will not be lost.
For the sheep of a faithful shepherd has been put to humiliation,
Israel, one nation, to scorn and mockery.
The last part was directed to God Himself, as if our restraint had dissolved, the passion of our cry warranting the bypass of heavenly bureaucracy:
Answer us speedily, God of our salvation,
Redeem us from all harsh decrees.
Save, with Your bountiful mercy,
Your righteous anointed one and Your nation.
There were more songs, slow tunes and lively ones, some set to words and others only a steady stream of ya di da di dai. I found myself swept up in the energy, joining hands with the boys beside me, lifting my feet with them and stomping on the floorboards, sharing in their exuberance, smelling the sweat of their bodies and tasting the sherayim of their rebbe’s food.
For the first time, I understood the tisch, not as something a teacher or parent declared important but as something experiential and inexpressible. It was some combination of the people, the food, the bodies pressed tightly together swaying in unison, the Hasidim’s warm smiles that inexplicably captivated me. For the very first time, it occurred to me that being a Hasid allowed for more than the daily grind of studying Talmud and adhering to the minutiae of our religious laws.
Here was the ecstasy and the joy. Here was all that I had been told that we Hasidim once had and lost. “The teachings of the Baal Shem Tov have been forgotten,” the old rebbe of Satmar had famously said, but here among the Skverers, they appeared not to be forgotten at all.
It was soon after that evening that, if anyone asked, I would say, “I am a Skverer.”
Other Hasidim, those I had grown up among in Brooklyn, were different. They cared a great deal about their crystal chandeliers and Persian rugs, their summer bungalows in the Catskill Mountains and and the prestige of their children’s marital arrangements. On Sabbath afternoons, the men paraded through Borough Park in their finest clothes, the tassels of their silk, handwoven gartels flapping at their sides, their gleaming fur shtreimels tall on their heads, with the outer edges shooting up in circles of tiny spires. But they did not cry as they stomped their feet: “Grant us! Grant us! The good inclination!” as the Skverers did. Hasidim in Borough Park remodeled their kitchens frequently and got the best deals on late-model cars, but never had I seen them squeeze together to allow another Hasid to experience the song and dance of a rebbe’s tisch. “Animals!” my friend Shloime Samet’s father screamed when he discovered a light scratch along the side of his brand-new tawny Oldsmobile, and I stood stunned that a scratch on a car could enrage a man so. “Don’t ruin my furniture,” my friend Nuchem Zinger’s father growled as I brushed lightly against the mahogany china cabinet in their dining room. In Borough Park, I had been told tales of men who embraced asceticism and poverty and want, who did not go to bed until they had given their last coin to the poor, and yet we lived as if those tales had taught us nothing. But the Skverers were different; they appeared to live exactly like the pious and modest folk of the old European shtetl, and now I longed to be one of them.
Several months later, my parents sent me for a year of study at a yeshiva in Montreal. The dean was a Satmar Hasid, as were most of the students, but there were also Belzers and Vizhnitzers, and Bobovers, and even one Lubavitcher. I, along with only two others, was a Skverer. A year later, at fourteen, I would return to study with the Skverers, first in Williamsburg, and later, at sixteen, in the Great Yeshiva in New Square. But it was during that year in Montreal, among Hasidim of so many different sects, that my new identity took firm hold.
On the Sabbath, at the third meal, as evening blended into night, we would gather around the tables in the dining room over pickled herring and cooked chickpeas, and I would think of New Square, where the same meal was held in the rebbe’s great synagogue, the lights extinguished, as if it were a Ukrainian town a century earlier, when the candles of the previous evening were burned out and new ones could not be lit until nightfall.
“The sons of the inner chamber, who yearn to gaze at the countenance of Ze’er Anpin,” the boys in my Montreal yeshiva would sing, while I would not sing with them but only chant mournfully, as I had among the Skverers in their shtetl, where hundreds of men and boys would stand pressed together, the blackness of our coats and hats blending with the blackness of the dark hall, creating an eerie otherworldliness, at once melancholic and strangely joyful. “Rejoice! There is goodwill in this hour, no anger or fury,” the rebbe would cry, his sobs reverberating through the pitch-black chamber. A chill would go up my spine until I felt the hair along my temples go straight. “Come near to me, behold my strength, for there are no harsh judgments.”
“Hey, Skverer, where are your boots?” one of my Satmar classmates would taunt me. Skverer men, once married, wore tall peasant boots on the Sabbath instead of the knickers and white stockings of other Hasidim. But I felt not taunted but proud. I would wear those boots, too, when the time came, when I found a girl from a Skverer family to marry, and raise our children as Skverers.
Chapter Four
A dozen of us attended each of Avremel Shayevitz’s sessions of “groom instruction.” Beneath the harsh white light of two long, naked fluorescent bulbs, we sat around a brown Formica table in Avremel’s dining room. Through the closed door to the kitchen came the sounds of children playing, crying, laughing, bursts of raised voices followed by a woman’s scolding: “Shh, Tatti is studying with the bucherim.”
“‘Respect her more than your own self!’” Avremel would cry during those sessions, quoting the Talmud, his jerky arms and fists slicing and pounding the air. “But how do we understand this passage? What does it mean to respect a woman?” Avremel would twist a hair from his scraggly black beard around his finger, pull it out, and drop it absentmindedly on the table between us. “What it really means, esteemed young men, is that we must be vigilant! Respect what she, a woman, can do to a man if he does not remain careful.” He would wag an index finger over his head, “Let down your guard, and she will lead you into sheol tachtis—the abyss of sinful temptation!”
There were other “groom instructors,” too.
There was Reb Noach, with his mangy blond beard and his springy step and ever-present smirk, who would teach me about the female body and the many laws related to its function. There was Reb Shraga Feivish, who would, on the afternoon of the wedding, teach me the mechanics of how to perform “the mitzvah.” There was Reb Srulik, with whom I would consult after the wedding on various questions—embarrassing ones, mostly, about body fluids, and shades of red and brown and ocher, anything that might interrupt our “family cleanliness.”
But before, after, and in between all the others, there was Avremel, the facilitator and clarifi
er of all that information, casting it in its appropriate light, ensuring that it was properly understood and acted upon.
Avremel’s mentorship had begun nearly three years earlier, in our first year at the Great Yeshiva, not to prepare us for marriage but as a general counselor. He was a thin man, with hollow cheeks and dark eyes that opened wide to reveal the whites and narrowed to slits so intense that they were frightening. Avremel was one of a cadre of men chosen by the rebbe to serve as special mentors. In later years, I would see Avremel as a caricature of religious fanaticism, a Savonarola of the Hasidic world; but at the time, I idolized him. His speeches were masterful: he was able, in a single breath, to weave talmudic passages about hell and the afterlife into a scathing comedic rant against one sort of wickedness or another, scorning the sheer idiocy of those who could not resist temptations of the flesh, who veered from “holiness and purity.”
Once a month, for the New Moon feast, scores of young men would squeeze into Avremel’s small dining room and sit around his table or on the battered divan by the wall or cross-legged on the floor. We would dip chunks of challah into bowls of yishke—a concoction of overripe tomatoes, diced onions, and bits of schmaltz herring, drenched in vegetable oil—and wash it down with flat seltzer while Avremel spoke of the evils of gluttony and earthly temptations, sinful thoughts in our sleep, insufficient devotion in prayer or to the rebbe. We would enter through a rear door, to avoid glimpses of Avremel’s wife or his young daughters, but we’d hear their disembodied voices from other parts of the small apartment. Occasionally, one of Avremel’s young sons would join us, and even the youngest knew to close the door behind him quickly. It was the perfect Hasidic home, and Avremel, clearly, was a paragon of Hasidic manhood.