by Deen, Shulem
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 gr
in 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.
My father would rummage through his pockets and withdraw a crumpled bill, and then walk to the door and hand it to her. He would ask how she was doing, and she would moan about her miseries and my father would wish her the best and say that he hoped she felt better.
“Dovid!” my mother would cry. “Why?”
My father would say only, “She says she needs food. It isn’t for me to question her.” And my brother Avrumi would say, “But she’s a goy.” And my father would simply say, “So she is.”
My father’s generosity frustrated my mother, but I thought of him as a tzaddik, his manner reminiscent of the saintly men one heard about in legends. When he prayed, my father would stand for hours on end, often with his eyes half-closed, only the whites visible, as if in a deep meditative trance. I had seen him pray in that same way as far back as I could remember, and still it was mystifying to watch him. For most of my childhood, I had assumed that when he prayed, he, or some essential part of him, went elsewhere, traveling through some exalted and spiritual realm. I have a vivid image of myself at age four, standing next to him in the empty synagogue after prayers, looking up to him and pleading with him to recognize a truth that appeared to have failed him: “Tatti!” I would cry. “All the people have gone home!”
I remember wondering why his erect but still body made no effort to respond as I pulled on the tassels of his gartel, attempting to awaken him from whatever unconscious state he was in.
Over time, I came to realize that our family was different. While my brothers and I spoke to one another in Yiddish, picked up at the schools we attended as far back as our memories reached, our parents spoke to us mostly in English. They showed odd interest in matters no one we knew cared for, their values acquired elsewhere. Unlike my friends, whose homes were elegantly furnished, crystal chandeliers gleaming above their dining-room tables, Persian rugs in their living rooms, late-model cars in their driveways, our family lived modestly. As I grew older, I became aware that my clothes were often a size too small, that our dining-room chairs were mismatched and rickety. I felt embarrassed to have friends over, worried they might notice that we lacked the piece of furniture that existed in every Hasidic home: a china closet, which was a glass-enclosed polished-wood breakfront that typically held a family’s collection of silver—menorahs, ethrog cases, cylindrical megilla containers, kiddush goblets. We had little silver, no china or heirlooms or other precious objects, and so we had no need for a china closet.
Once a week, my parents would take the subway to a place they called “the Village,” where my mother claimed that no Jews lived. They went there to buy organic fruits and vegetables, which were unavailable in Borough Park. I remember frustrating visits to our local supermarket, where I would gaze at blood-red tomatoes and football-shaped green grapes, and my mother would wave her hand dismissively: “If you only knew the chemicals they put in those things.” As if those things were clever plastic imitations. Sugared cereals and candy bars and sweet soda drinks never entered our home. My mother’s notion of American food manufacturers was of fat, cigar-chomping men who put toxic ingredients into their food products to make children want more, more, more, and rot their teeth and poison their bodies while the fat evil men laughed and laughed and raked in the profits. Her attitude was unusual in Borough Park, where middle-class comforts and consumerist attitudes were as entrenched as any other place in America.
It wouldn’t be until late adolescence that I would understand what set our family apart. My parents had spent their youths not in the ultra-religious word of the Hasidim but in secular environments, where they were raised not with fur hats and flowing caftans and floral kerchiefs but with movies and boyfriends and secular educations. They spoke little about their pasts, preferring to shelter us from the knowledge that they had not always been Hasidic, to keep us from knowing that my mother, as a teenager in Queens, was a Beatles fan, and that my father, raised in Baltimore, had spent his twenties in San Francisco participating in civil rights protests and getting high on psychedelics. Both of my parents had spent several years as hippies, and their choices—my mother in her late teens and my father in his twenties—to join the Hasidic community came with high-minded idealism. They retained their disdain for societal conventions.
“Is it true your father is a baal teshuvah?” my friend Yochanan Fried whispered to me in the school bathroom when I was ten. We were standing at the urinals when he said it, and I looked at him in horror over the partition. Baal teshuvahs, or “returnees,” were those raised as secular Jews who later joined the Orthodox. They were given lip service for their courage, but it was no secret that baal teshuvahs were odd for giving up the temptations of their former lives and joining a world of endless rules and restriction. They must suffer a psychological ailment of some sort, it was assumed. Or they were those who couldn’t make it among the goyim and came to try their luck among the Hasidim.
I denied it to Yochanan Fried. I had not learned the truth yet. I knew that my parents were different, and my father’s behavior was unorthodox in a world in which piety and righteousness were to be lived within the parameters of convention. I thought only that he was a man who lived in a world unto himself, extending himself for a few hours a week to interact with the world—to attend shul, to teach his classes, and grant audiences for those who sought his counsel—but soon withdrawing back into his little study with his many shelves of sacred texts and his hours of prayer.
I would realize later that my parents had joined the Hasidic world with knowledge of only its pious exterior. They found its teachings profound. So much love. So much joy. Such inner peace. In their idealism, they overlooked its harsher realities. They hadn’t grown up in this world, hadn’t seen the gruff attitudes with which children were raised, hadn’t been subject to schoolteachers who routinely beat students for not knowing the meaning of an Aramaic word in their Talmuds, or for removing their fingers from the tiny text of the Rashi script in the margins.
“Ich bin a chusid fun aybershten,” my father said one day, when I asked what sect he belonged to. “I am a Hasid of God.”
The boys in my class at the Krasna cheder in Borough Park were from families that belonged to small Hasidic communities—Kasho, Sighet, Tzelem—groups that had no bona fide rebbes of their own but were, by their shared Hungarian and Romanian origin, loosely affiliated with Satmar. And so, at the age of ten or eleven, I wondered: What were we? Being a Hasid of God was all right between my father and God, but it wouldn’t do if the question of our belonging was raised by a friend, a teacher, or an acquaintance.
“Where does your father belong?” Reb Shimon Mauskopf asked one day during lunchtime, as he poured warm cocoa into a row of plastic cups on his desk.
I made a snap decision. “My father is a Breslover,” I said.
My father studied the teachings of both Breslov and Satmar, and those, I thought, were the plausible options.
In truth, though, I wasn’t happy with my father being a Breslover, even if, as the case was, he was
not one. Breslovers were the eccentrics of the Hasidic world. The dead Hasidim, some called them. They’d never chosen a rebbe after their first, Reb Nachman, died in the early nineteenth century. They were the misfits within our world and were known for attracting the misfits from without: former hippies, druggies, ex-convicts, and other social outcasts, all of them drawn to the intensity of the Breslover message, the psychological insight of its long-dead leader and his whimsical tales of beggars and forest dwellers and its New Agey embrace of meditative practices.
It would’ve been better to be Satmar. The Satmars were arrogant and superior and bombastic and proud and entirely scornful of all but their own. They were disdainful of other sects, even friendly ones, and fiercely hostile toward those who opposed them. They were the winners, and it was good to be a winner. Better to be a bully than to be bullied.
But I couldn’t plausibly say that my father was Satmar. Unlike the Breslovers, the Satmars had a rebbe who was very much alive, Reb Moshe, the late Reb Yoel’s nephew and successor. To declare oneself Satmar would require a nod to Reb Moshe’s leadership. Unlike my friends’ fathers and grandfathers, who took occasional pilgrimages to the Satmar rebbe’s shul on Rodney Street in Williamsburg, my father never visited him. It would be too contrived to declare him Satmar. It was more plausible to turn my father into a Breslover, even if at the same time, I would resent it.