by Deen, Shulem
I’d already had a faith crisis once. I was fifteen, at summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, in Swan Lake, New York, when I shared the crisis with my friend Menashe Einstein. Menashe and I were best friends, both of us brooding and dreamy adolescents, anxious about life and our futures. Often we would head into the woods behind the bunkhouses, past dense thickets of shrubs and tangles of brushwood, past discarded and rusting farm implements at least a century old, past steep hills and tall cliffs to a clearing of tall grass and bright sunshine. There, we’d sit on a large rock at the edge of the meadow, hoping to keep as far as we could from the camp’s study hall for as long as possible.
One day, I told Menashe that I was having doubts. I wondered how we really knew the things we knew, whether heaven and hell really existed, whether the rebbe was truly saintly, whether Moses really split the Red Sea for the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians, and whether those Israelites and Egyptians and Moses ever existed at all.
Menashe looked thoughtful as he ran his fingers over a blade of grass rising from a patch of soil between the rocks. “I read somewhere,” he said after a few moments of silence, “that doubts are a result of Strange Thoughts.”
Strange Thoughts was how our books referred to forbidden lust, and I felt embarrassed during that moment because it meant that Menashe knew I was having Strange Thoughts, although Menashe had said it casually, as if he, too, were familiar with my dilemma. I wondered if he, too, had Strange Thoughts. Whether he, too, found the thoughts entering his mind during the silent portion of prayer, as he prayed for God to grant us knowledge and wisdom…. Raise a cure for our maladies…. Return with mercy to Your city of Jerusalem and in his mind would be images of Reb Chezkel’s twin teenage daughters, their chestnut hair in tight ponytails, jumping rope outside the camp’s dining hall. I wondered whether Menashe, too, had a sister, like mine, who brought friends home, and he would find himself thinking about them at night, when he lay in bed and tried to sleep.
After my conversation with Menashe, I tried hard not to have Strange Thoughts because if they led to doubts they weren’t worth it. Strange Thoughts were bad, but doubts were more unsettling. If one doubted that the word of God was indeed the word of God, if none of it was true, then one would, logically, have to become frei, which was as bad as being a goy, and what kind of life would that be?
So I monitored my thoughts for signs of Strangeness. Mornings, when I walked the short distance between the bunkhouse and the ritual bath near the camp’s parking lot, I took a circuitous route. Instead of taking the gravel road that passed along the camp’s dining room, where women and teenage girls, wives and daughters of our teachers, would congregate for breakfast, I would edge along the side of the woods, behind the bunkhouses and the cluster of bungalows for the counselors and teachers, until I reached the mikveh. Afterward, I would return the same way, and remove my eyeglasses in case a girl or a woman appeared suddenly. At night, when I lay in bed, I’d catch a stray fantasy of my sister’s friend Rachy worming into my semiconscious mind, a blurry image of a bouncing ponytail and a knee-length, pleated navy-blue skirt. I would slap my palm against the side of my head, remind myself that I’d gone a full week without waking to a wet reminder of a sinful dream, and that it would be a terrible thing if I let my guard down. I would think of a verse of Psalms or a passage of Mishna and hope that the Strange Thought would disappear. Above all, though, I would think of the creeping doubts and the weakness of my faith, and I knew that I must banish the Strange Thoughts if only to banish the doubts.
Strange Thoughts, however, kept up their ebb and flow throughout my adolescence, often appearing during the strangest times, creeping through the musty yellowed pages of old Talmud volumes, through evenings spent in song and Hasidic tales, through nights filled with dancing at the rebbe’s tischen—always, in a weak moment, they appeared, thoughts of flesh and forbidden passions.
But I conquered the doubts. Apparently, they were unconnected.
He’emanti ki adaber. Avremel Shayevitz would later bang his fist on the table, repeating the words of Reb Mordche of Lechevitch: “He’emanti, I will believe! Ki adaber, when I speak words of faith! Speak words of faith, and your faith will be strong!”
And so each morning at the end of prayers, as I wrapped the black leather straps around my tefillin cases, the smell of French toast and scrambled eggs wafting up from the yeshiva dining room, I recited the Thirteen Principles of Faith, slowly and deliberately, hoping, praying for the conviction of the words:
Ani ma’amin, I believe with perfect faith that the Creator, blessed be He, created and leads all of Creation….
Ani ma’amin, I believe with perfect faith that the prophecy of Moses our teacher is truthful … that all of the Torah now in our hands was given to him….
Ani ma’amin, I believe with perfect faith in the coming of the Messiah. And though he may tarry, still I await him.
Walking each morning from the dormitory building to the ritual bath to the yeshiva study hall, I would repeat to myself the words: Ani ma’amin be’emunah sheleimah. Over and over again, like a mantra, hundreds, thousands of times. “I believe with perfect faith. I believe with perfect faith.” And then I would speak the words of the great master, Reb Mendel of Vitebsk: To have faith is to believe blindly, to demand no proofs, no evidence, no logic. To have faith is to believe without reason whatsoever.
More powerful than mantras, however, more powerful than the words of Avremel Shayevitz, or of Reb Mendel of Vitebsk, was simply this: If my faith fell apart, what was I to do then? If I stopped believing, did that mean I would stop keeping kosher? Stop keeping Shabbos? Waltz into shul without my hat? What, then, would the matchmakers say?
Chapter Twelve
My friendship with Chezky would eventually lead me back to questions of faith, but in the meantime, there were more immediate concerns. In November 1997, our daughter Chaya Suri was born. At twenty-four, with three children, five mouths to feed, and little by way of job security, I could think only about how to make ends meet.
One winter Friday, three months past due on rent, our landlord threatening eviction, Gitty and I pooled our personal valuables. I brought out the gold pocket watch that Gitty’s father had given me after our engagement. Gitty brought out the gold bracelet and necklace she’d received from my mother. We estimated their total original value at about $3,000.
I gave her one last look before I stepped out. “You sure?”
Gitty was kneeling by the fridge, rummaging in the vegetable bins. Freidy, aged three, stood near her, staring into those bins as if they contained some plaything better than the secondhand, off-brand pink plastic kitchen set across the room.
“I’m sure,” she said, without looking up. “When do I even wear them?”
“One day, I will buy you the most expensive pearl necklace money can buy.”
Gitty looked up and smiled, a little sadly, I thought, as I headed out the door to a local pawnshop.
“What’s it say?” the man at the pawnshop asked, as he inspected the engraved inscription on the back of my pocket watch.
“It’s Hebrew. My name. And a blessing.” It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d care.
“What’s the blessing?” he asked, fingering the rough texture of the engraved text.
I wasn’t sure how to translate it. “For an everlasting union … Sort of.”
The man grunted, and took the items to a back room. An elderly woman with a small dog walked in. I watched her go directly to the other side of the counter. For a moment, I thought she was a brazen burglar, until she continued to the back room, and I heard her say, “Did you have lunch, Mor?”
A few minutes later, the man returned.
“Four hundred,” he said.
It was barely a half-month’s rent, but I was desperate. The landlord wasn’t very pleased, but I promised to have more soon, and we survived to worry another day, another week, another month. We never knew quite how we did it, but somehow we managed, always i
n the nick of time, barely avoiding the electricity being cut off or the phone line being disconnected.
Why did it have to be this way? I wondered. And how did others do it?
I knew how others did it: with difficulty. Most of my friends from yeshiva were living the same way, either still studying at the kollel, or teaching at the cheder, and struggling, making do with whatever they could—yeshiva vouchers, food stamps, Section 8. They went from one poor moneymaking idea to the next. One friend bought a popcorn machine, set it up in his basement, and offered home deliveries around the village. Another set up a table outside the shul, selling noise-conditioning devices for people with sleep problems.
My friend Yakov Mayer was the most ambitious of all. He was two years older than I and already had six children, including a set of triplets. He, too, was desperate for a way to feed them all, and his latest idea was selling life insurance.
“There’s decent money in it,” he said, as he tried to sell me a policy and, at the same time, to explain his choice of trade.
“If you can sell policies,” I said. He hadn’t sold a single one yet.
He nodded. “If I can sell policies.” He looked at me keenly, as if pleading for my approval. “It’s only been three months, though.”
Yakov Mayer had found his idea, but I hadn’t yet found mine. Teaching at the cheder hadn’t turned into the career I thought it would. I had grown tired of writing fraudulent progress reports, tired of worrying that the government would come investigating, tired of running after parents for their share of the payment, and so, in July 1997, when my friend Motty proposed that we start a business together, I gave up my work at the cheder and decided to become a businessman.
Motty had the idea that we could package nuts and dried fruits and other healthful snacks and sell them to snack shops and convenience stores across the tristate area. I knew nothing about running a business, but I liked Motty’s idea, and so I borrowed a few thousand dollars from several free loan societies around New Square and Monsey, and pinned our family’s hopes on popular appetites for salted cashews and sugared pineapple chunks.
We kept the business running for about two years, and I would later marvel that we’d kept it that long. I was too timid to push our product on uninterested customers, too impulsive with purchasing new office equipment, too dreamy to pay much attention to the business of running a business and more interested in creating pretty-looking cash-flow reports using a secondhand, DOS-based computer, with its text-based interface and incessant, blinking command-line cursor. I also really enjoyed buying office supplies: desks and file cabinets and staplers that worked so well that you wanted to do nothing but staple all day until the stapler broke and you were forced to buy a new one—an electronic one this time, for double the stapling fun.
In April 1999, Motty and I faced the fact that our business had yet to turn a profit. We put an ad in one of the Yiddish newspapers, and sold it all—the account lists and the computer and our weighing and bagging equipment and our heat sealers and the Chevy cargo van with which we made our deliveries.
Afterward, I rotated through a number of odd jobs. One job, ostensibly as a bookkeeper, lasted three days, until the boss fired me for calling him crazy. He ran a multimillion-dollar operation, buying and selling photocopier and fax-machine toners on the gray market but refused to buy a computer for the office, preferring an old-fashioned double-entry system in an enormous, ancient ledger. I could do bookkeeping as long as I had a computer with a working copy of QuickBooks. But manual, double-entry ledgers? I thought that was crazy.
For some time, I manned the phone lines for a company that provided a telephone-directory service for Hasidic businesses. Callers interacted with voice prompts, unaware that a human—me—was listening on a headset, pushing buttons to deliver the audio listings. I fielded calls from housewives looking for clothing sales, men looking for Judaica bookstores, teenage boys asking about “lindjerie” shops—probably calling from yeshiva dorms, where the most titillating thing was an automated voice listing of local stores selling women’s hosiery and Shabbos robes.
My passion for study, piety, and prayer was mostly forgotten. Now I wondered only how I was going to support my family. After rotating through a half-dozen jobs in as many months, I felt increasingly as if I were not a grown-up but a child. Somewhere, somehow, a decision had been made: Gitty and I were to playact as parents, she as homemaker, and I as provider. Except, while Gitty seemed a natural for her role, I was clearly a failure at mine. Gitty fed and clothed and bathed our little ones as if groomed for the task her entire life. I never saw her hold her head in despair over a burned pot of chulent. I, on the other hand, went from job to job, wondering about all those years I was taught the importance of Torah study and never a word about how to earn a paycheck.
In my spare time, I sat on the plastic-covered chairs at our faux-mahogany dining-room table, and studied computers—how to work with them but also how they worked on the inside. I was fascinated by their parts, how magnetic hard drives worked alongside RAM, connected via motherboard, input and output devices. But most of all, I was fascinated by software, the mind within all that metal and silicon.
“Why are you spending so much time on this?” Gitty would ask, as I brought home book after book from the library on the inner workings of hardware, writing computer code, setting up networks. Gitty thought that I should be doing more productive things, such as inquiring at the fish store about the “Cashiers Wanted” sign in the window. Or maybe selling life insurance. Or starting another business of some sort. “What’s the point of all this computer stuff?”
I would shrug in response. I’d say it was just really fascinating and fun and interesting, and Gitty would roll her eyes. What I really thought—a fantasy I didn’t dare voice out loud: I wonder if I might work as a computer programmer one day.
I didn’t know how one became a computer programmer, but I could not quiet my fascination. The books would pile up around the house, on the kitchen counter, on the bedside nightstand, on the little window ledge in the bathroom. When reading about the binary number system, I was struck by the beauty of mathematics, the symmetry of numbers, concepts I had never thought about before—we’d studied no mathematics past seventh grade, which had pleased me perfectly at the time. But what I was reading now was fresh and exciting: machine language, overlaid with assembly language, overlaid with “high-level” languages—C++, SQL, Perl—nested levels of abstraction built on reusable modules. I was fascinated by the use of a machine to imitate a human brain, to break down human thought processes to their smallest parts and to mimic them through concise lines of computer instruction. Like a mechanical lever, but for the mind, computer code could make a machine outperform humans to near-limitless degrees—and I was learning exactly how it was done.
I would behold a page of code like a work of art. In mapping algorithms and routines, I found a kind of exhilaration that was similar to the logical processes of Talmud study, except these processes were not stretched over ancient rules of textual exegesis but strictly logical premises. At the most basic level, they were staggeringly simple: If balance is greater than zero, funds can be withdrawn. If time is past 6:30, sound the alarm. If snoozed, repeat until unsnoozed. Yet the possibilities, built only on ones and zeros, on and off, true and false, were literally limitless, allowing the creation of complex routines of both beauty and utility. Endless possibilities from one essential binary. In the Talmud, too, there was beauty, but here was a true amalgamation of the human and the divine. If the Talmud was built on the purported word of God, that word struck you as suspiciously human, with ambiguities and layers of meaning and all the arbitrariness of human language. The very idea of faith suggested something man-made—the idea that we must submit to conviction, rather than simply behold the universe in its natural order. In the principles of logic, however, which formed the basis of computer software, the premises were fixed. True was true. False was not. There was no gray, no middle gro
und, no room for ambiguities or contradiction or layers of interpretation. Precision and predictability were key. Prayer was of little help when your executable was stuck in an infinite loop.
Yakov Mayer, I soon learned, wasn’t having much success selling life insurance. When he learned about my interest in computers, he, too, grew curious about them. Yakov Mayer, however, had never learned to read English well, and had a hard time studying on his own. The few books he acquired on the subject didn’t feel sufficient, so he went to look for another way.
An Orthodox organization, Yakov Mayer told me excitedly over the phone one day, was offering courses in computer programming at its offices in lower Manhattan. The organization, Agudath Israel of America, was an advocacy group for Orthodox Jews, and it had set up a division called COPE Institute, to train men in “kosher” professions: accounting, computer programming, networking.
“How about we go for the programming course?” Yakov Mayer asked.
He thought we could become real programmers, but I laughed at the idea. I imagined that one could not become an actual computer programmer without going to college any more than one could become an astronaut or a brain surgeon. At the very least, I imagined that one needed a high school diploma. And really, what good was a course? I had taught myself enough computer programming to write decent code for at least a thousand different business uses. Learning the stuff wasn’t the problem. Finding a way to get paid for it was.