All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  I offered the obvious responses. Every people, every faith, had its founding myths. I was not an expert in the perpetuation of legend, but I was pretty sure that humans were gullible enough to be convinced of anything if the circumstances were right. And so, I told Chezky, his logic failed. As I had predicted it would.

  It was one of those nights when the hours flew by without our realizing it and still we sat in my car, talking, arguing, shouting, pleading for the other to just shut up and listen. Twice we left the car to stroll up and down the parking lot outside Chezky’s dorm, and twice we had returned to the car after an hour in the predawn chill. Soon the sun began to peek through the leaves of Ohr Somayach’s pastoral grounds, and Chezky and I were still arguing. To me, it was clear: It was all precisely as I had predicted. Logic will get you nowhere if it’s faith you’re after.

  Except, now I couldn’t help but wonder: What if, in fact, we all were fooled? After all, I’d just spent seven hours arguing that it was possible.

  Chezky told me later that the “proof” he presented was an argument known as the Kuzari principle, formulated by the twelfth-century Iberian Jewish poet and philosopher Judah Halevi, and now that I’d heard it, I began to look up books on the subject. The more I read, the more I wanted the argument to work, and the more I wanted it to work, the more its flaws became apparent. I went back and forth between thinking that the Kuzari principle was the most ingenious argument I’d ever heard to being dismayed by its apparent sophistry. It wasn’t long before I realized that, whatever its merits, it was not straightforward, and so it was hard to know whether its complexity was that of an elaborate mathematical equation or of an optical illusion, fooling the observer into seeing something that was not there.

  Soon I was creeping into related subjects: arguments for God’s existence, reconciling talmudic assertions with modern science, responses to the claims of Bible criticism. These were subjects that had never bothered me before, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

  At Itzik’s, a Judaica shop on Route 59, I would browse the shelves to find more books on these subjects and others. This was a shop unlike the other Judaica stores in Monsey. It carried books and audiotapes and videos not sold elsewhere, many of them on controversial topics: books about evolution and the big bang and Bible criticism and biographies of sages and saints in which the subjects were treated as human, rather than the superhuman legends produced by Orthodox publishing houses.

  Itzik himself, the store’s middle-aged proprietor, was a blithesome fellow whose love of books was matched only by his irreverence. Alongside Aleph-Bet jigsaw puzzles and silver-plated menorahs was a wall of baseball caps with Yiddish-peppered, subtly subversive slogans, which Itzik himself had designed:

  Official Litvak shtreimel.

  I wish I could afford a Borsalino like my son-in-law in kollel.

  I’m stringent about things you never heard of.

  One day, I went to look for a particular book on modern scholarship on the Bible. I had seen mention of it on the Internet and thought that perhaps Itzik’s might have it, but when I didn’t see it on any of the shelves, I turned to Itzik himself, who stood at the cash register adding up figures in a dog-eared notebook. When I mentioned the name of the book, Itzik looked up and fixed me with a stare I could not immediately decipher.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “My name, you mean?”

  “No,” he said, and shook his head. “Never mind.” He asked me to wait while he headed to his office in the back. Five minutes later, he was back with the book.

  “Yeah,” he said, as he swiped my Visa card. “What’s your name?”

  When I told him, he nodded, and I could see that he was storing something, my identity, perhaps—my face, my name, the book I purchased—into some mental repository. I had been to his store many times, for yarmulkes, Hebrew calendars, religious texts, Jewish musical albums, and novels from Orthodox publishing houses, but I realized that until that day, Itzik hadn’t seen me. His was a popular store, and I was one of a great mass of customers. He was usually too busy shouting instructions to an employee, or answering the phone, or helping some elderly lady find a bar mitzvah gift for her grandson.

  Now, clearly, he’d taken note of me.

  I headed out the door, the plastic bag under my arm, with the friendly “Itzik’s” logo—the image of a bearded man in a golf cap and tzitzis, underneath the store’s slogan: “Because Itzik’s has it all!”

  Soon I would return for other books, and I would learn more about Itzik. The rabbis in our world were fond of book bans, but Itzik was not. In back, he kept a closet in which he stored items too sensitive for public display, which he kept for special customers.

  It appeared that I had joined the ranks of his special customers, which felt like a small consolation for the troubled, feverish inquiry that I had embarked on. What I really wanted was something else. Itzik, give me the book that will make the questions go away, I wanted to plead. Yet in my heart, I knew there was no such one book. There could be no authoritative response, no single all-encompassing theory that would explain it all. I was beginning to realize that every book I read set off a tempest of conflicting thoughts and ideas, and this was not something I could find answers to from outside myself. The answers were not in a book but within. I was on my own.

  Soon I began to spend hours at Chezky’s place, reading his books, listening to his cassettes, watching his videos. Chezky wouldn’t know it until years later, but what I was doing then was hoping for something to get my faith back—and now any kind of faith, blind or rational, would do. A strange thing had happened: once Chezky began to present rational arguments for faith, I tried to disprove them, and yet I found that I was rooting not for my side but for his. I could feel the faith that I had clung to blindly for so many years slowly slipping away, and it was then that I realized that I wanted my faith to be rational. I needed it to be rational. As if a switch had been flipped, I realized that I had lost the ability to simply accept what I had believed for so long. I needed Chezky’s approach to work.

  I came to know a handful of Chezky’s dorm mates, students from Long Island and St. Louis and Los Angeles, born and raised in secular homes, with maybe a spot of Hebrew school, a lavish bar mitzvah, but with otherwise little attachment to Judaism. Only now were they coming to Orthodox observance, through the very books I was reading and the tapes I was listening to. As they moved toward deeper religiosity, I was moving away. The same books, the same lectures, the same video presentations by philosopher-rabbis—the very things that were drawing them close were having the opposite effect on me.

  On Saturday mornings, instead of heading to the seat in shul that I’d purchased for $2,500—and was still making payments on—I would stand with Chezky in the foyer, and we would talk about the books we were reading. I would argue their flaws, no longer because I thought my faith superior but because his kind of faith was quickly becoming the only kind that held any hope for me. I needed for him to defend them. I needed for him to prove my own arguments wrong. As much as Chezky tried, though, I remained unconvinced.

  After shul, we would walk home together, and Chezky and I would stand in front of my home on Bush Lane, with Gitty looking out from the side porch. Unable to let go, we would still be arguing long after the neighbors could be heard singing the Sabbath hymns through their wide-open windows, eating their sautéed liver and p’tcha, their chulent and kishke, and then retiring for their Sabbath afternoon naps. Tziri and Freidy would come walking down the pathway from the side steps of our apartment. “Tatti, Mommy is waiting.” But Chezky and I could find no resolution. The questions had become too urgent, the flaws in the answers too gaping wide. Eventually, we would reluctantly agree to take it up again in the evening, when we would meet at the shul for the afternoon prayers and the rebbe’s final tisch of the day.

  Chapter Fifteen

  Among people who lose faith, I would later learn, many point to scientific knowledge as the catalys
t for their changed worldviews. I, too, found much of what I learned troubling. Wherever I turned, I discovered that ideas I had once taken for granted, trusting in rabbis and sacred texts to convey absolute truths, were dubious at best. The universe was not six thousand years old but closer to 14 billion. Humans shared a common ancestor with apes—and all living things, for that matter—and were not the exalted species created by God’s hand out of clay of the earth on the sixth day of Creation. The sages of the Talmud, by our traditions infallible, were demonstrably wrong in their understanding of the natural world.

  Two great balls of fire descended from heaven, and their names were Abaya and Rava, said the old rebbe of Ruzhin. The two great masters of the Talmud, their names occurring at least once every three pages, were not humans but chunks of divinity. Balls of fire.

  Reading the Talmud anew, however, I discovered that the sages were as flawed as could be expected of any ancient people. They were mired in superstition and misogyny and xenophobia, which did not necessarily mark them as villains but offered troubling indications of ordinary humanness.

  Nothing, however, had a more shattering impact on my faith than the realization that, stripped of religious exegesis, our primary religious text, the Hebrew Bible, had the markings of human rather than divine authorship; it was beautiful, intricate, layered in poetry and metaphor and heart-stopping drama, but human nonetheless.

  According to the Zohar, the eleventh-century work that forms the basic text for the Judaic mystical tradition, God gazed upon the Torah and created the universe. The Torah, divine and eternal, was the blueprint for all existence.

  Now, however, I could no longer see it that way. The very essence of our faith, passed down, it was believed, from generation to generation over 3,300 years without change, was most likely a collection of ancient documents authored and compiled and redacted over many centuries. This was the view of all modern Bible scholars. I didn’t have to take their word for it, but the evidence for their view was compelling. Suddenly, all the strangeness of this text, the contradictions and anachronisms and troubling tales of fratricide and genocide and great family dramas and tales of wondrous miracles, all of it now made sense—but in an entirely new way. Seen through the prism of history and anthropology, buttressed by studies in archaeology and laid side by side with other texts from the ancient peoples of the Near East, the Bible was an endlessly fascinating window into the world of our ancestors. But as a basis for theology, to me, it simply fell short.

  Chezky and I began to drift apart after several years, when it became clear that he was not troubled by these matters as I was. He had the answers, he said, and his faith, rational and sound, was strong. But when I sought that same level of certainty, I could not find it.

  At one point, Chezky gave me the name of a Monsey rabbi to speak to. An unusual Hasid, this rabbi was said to have read all the great philosophers. He knew of all the challenges to faith, and he knew the answers, too, Chezky said. When I went to speak to this rabbi, though, in the book-lined study of his Monsey home, he could offer me little.

  “Oh, it’s all been written about,” the rabbi said, when I asked how a merciful God could order the genocide of entire nations and how the essential command of our faith—you must believe in the Torah because the Torah declares that you must—could be so maddeningly circular.

  How is it, I asked the rabbi, that our understanding of God—benevolent and all-powerful and lovingly, unfailingly attentive to our needs—so conveniently mirrors the ideal qualities we seek in humans? How is it that we attribute to God feelings such as sadness and joy and pleasure, and even want for our love, when one would expect an omnipotent and omniscient being to be far removed from the qualities that signify the frailty of humans?

  “Asked and answered,” the rabbi said, as if, once again, I was meddling in the affairs of greater minds than mine. “It’s a little bit … childish,” he added, pausing before issuing his insult, “to think that your questions are anything new.” I could see his patronizing gaze through the veil of his benign smile. “Go learn. Study. And then, if you look inside your heart, you’ll find the truth.”

  But that was precisely it. My questions did not strike me as novel or profound, but basic and elementary. The evasiveness that characterized so many of the responses, from this rabbi and others, suggested that the answers were a tangled spaghetti of sophistry meant to obfuscate rather than illuminate. And always, there were instructions to look further, elsewhere. I hadn’t read the right books. I hadn’t spoken to the right people. I was asked to place my trust in authorities who had not earned such trust—who had, in fact, declared demonstrable falsehoods as truth, distorted ancient texts to mean things they clearly did not, and recast historical events and figures to align with current ideologies.

  If you look inside your heart, you’ll find the truth, that rabbi said, and I looked inside my heart and discovered that there was no truth, anywhere, not inside my heart and not outside it, only the scalding furnace in which my beliefs were now smoldering embers.

  “What happened?”

  This would be asked years later by strangers, who, for one reason or another, would ask to see my photo ID. Bank tellers. Bartenders. The lady at the Rite Aid store where I’d buy my Marlboro Lights. Even a policeman who stopped me for a routine speeding ticket on the Palisades Parkway. The photo on my driver’s license would be of a Hasid, but before them would be a bareheaded, beardless man in secular garb. Usually, I could tell it was coming. They would look at the photo, then at me, then back at the photo. “That you?”

  I would nod, and they would look at the photo again, then ask, casually, the way you notice a stain on someone’s shirt, or a bruised chin, or a bad haircut: “What happened?” Did you spill your coffee? Did you have a shaving accident? Did you forget to instruct the barber, walked in a Hasid and came out a shaygetz?

  I would offer a curt smile. “Life.” Or, “Long story.” What else could I say?

  Sometimes I would imagine the conversations. I would tell the bank teller everything I learned about the ancient Israelites, about the migration from Egypt that probably never happened, about the walls of Jericho that existed, according to archaeologists, centuries after the Bible declares that they had fallen. I would tell the cop about the United Kingdom of Israel—from the Mediterranean to the Euphrates—that never was. About King Josiah, in the seventh century BC, who cemented the faith of the ancient Judaeans from Canaanite idolatry to Judaic monotheism.

  “You want to know what happened?” I would imagine telling the bartender with the gauged earlobe and the tattoo in the shape of California on her neck. I’d be sitting in a grungy dive in Bushwick and nursing a Pabst, considering whether to tell her about Wellhausen and the documentary hypothesis. About Genesis and all the duplicate narratives; two creation stories, two Adams, two flood narratives, and how Occam’s Razor teaches us to seek simplicity—multiple human authors is more plausible than a divine one who lacked basic editing skills.

  I would imagine these conversations, but I would not have them. That’s not want they want to hear, I would say to myself. They want to hear what happened. What was the incident? The moment that changed it all. But there was no moment, no solid line across time to which I could point and say: That’s when I became a nonbeliever.

  I often think back to particular times—a conversation with a fellow commuter about local elections, an argument with my boss about a work project, the first time I visited a barbershop—and wonder: Was I still a believer then?

  In my memory, it is a blur. I had first become friends with Chezky in the spring of 1996, when I was twenty-two. By 2002, I no longer thought myself a believer. But within that period of six years, when was the moment I became an apikorus?

  My memories themselves are filled with contradictions.

  I remember one particular week with Gitty and the children on a rare family vacation, when we took two rooms at the Chalet Hotel in the Catskills. It was a sprawling property, it
s structures decrepit, the basketball and tennis courts filled with tall grass sticking up from between concrete slabs that had, over the years, as if slipping and sliding, shifted out of place, sinking into the ground in one corner, rising several inches in another. Decades before, the place had served as a vacation resort to a more discriminating clientele, but now it was advertised as a summer getaway for Hasidic families, who didn’t need basketball and tennis courts and were happy just to have gourmet kosher food and a ritual bath and a small synagogue.

  It must have been the lack of routine that got me thinking. At home, going to shul was like brushing my teeth or putting on my shoes. It was what I did, without giving it much thought. But away from home, I felt a sudden need for purpose. I had no routine for going to a little bungalow shul, worshiping with strangers, and using unfamiliar prayer books, and it suddenly all felt so strange: I am no longer a believer. Why am I doing this? I remember holding a prayer book and mumbling the words of prayer, and thinking: This is pointless. There is no one listening.

  Afterward, in the communal dining room, I sat with Gitty and the children and looked at all the other families, each assigned their own table, a modified version of what they must’ve looked like in their own dining rooms, boys on one side, girls on the other, some parents sitting side by side while others sat at opposite ends. They came from all over—New York, New Jersey, Montreal, families of five, ten, fifteen, men in tall, stiff shtreimels, women wearing their best wigs and elegant Shabbos dresses, children in matching outfits. As waiters in crisp black vests brought trays of sautéed liver and egg salad and chulent, I looked around and wondered: Am I the only nonbeliever here? At home, I couldn’t imagine it otherwise, but here, among strangers, it made me wonder.

  And yet, I remember the night of Shavuos that same year, when it was customary to stay up all night studying Torah. I sat for five hours with my friend Motty over the laws of betrothal, the various ways in which a man might “acquire” a wife, rising from our Talmuds only as the sun’s first rays came through the tall synagogue windows. I remember on that Shavuos morning feeling as if nothing mattered but the wonderful pleasure of spending hours immersed in the scholarly wrangling of ancient precepts. Was I not a believer then, even as I sat and studied on the night we celebrated the giving of the Torah?