All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  Duly chastised, I began to rethink my strategy. I was a Hasidic boy, and I realized that I could be nothing else. I had been shown up for my hubris, and what I wanted most now was acceptance. I wanted back at the yeshiva.

  The next day, I called Reb Mordche and offered an apology that was as sincere as it was desperate. Then I called the Ruv and promised to change my ways. A week later, I was allowed to return to the campus in the Laurentians. I hunkered down and set my mind to studying the laws of the Sabbath, when and how one may or may not remove olive oil from a lamp to season a salad—nearly a whole chapter on that subject alone. I was determined to change. I would take my duties seriously and prove that I had what it took to achieve both scholarship and a pious disposition. I would make these rabbis proud. I would be just like them.

  I had veered off the path, nearly lost my way, but had gotten right back onto it. After a year in Montreal, the Skverers took me back, and I spent two years at their yeshiva in Williamsburg, and then three more at their flagship institution, the Great Yeshiva in New Square. I had become not a shaygetz but a serious student and later a respectable young man.

  Until now, at the age of thirty, when I had veered off the path once again. The reasons were different this time; yet in so many ways, they felt the same, as if I were a child again, a teenager, naturally inclined to rebel against authority. Except that this time, my sins were far greater. And this time, I had no intention of pleading my way back.

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  A month after the bezdin ordered me out, Gitty and I and the children moved to Monsey, a nearby hamlet with a Hasidic population several times greater than that of New Square. In Monsey, there were not only Skverers but also Vizhnitzers, Belzers, Satmars, and Lubavitchers, all living cheek-by-jowl with old-school Litvaks.

  The area we moved to, a hilly road studded with one-story ranch houses and modest colonials, looked like any other suburban neighborhood in Rockland County: backyard swimming pools shaded by dogwoods and Japanese maples, manicured hedgerows along property edges, front lawns so green they seemed almost painted. Behind the halcyon facade of two-car garages and well-maintained landscaping, however, were attitudes not much different from those of New Square. The men wore the same broad fur hats, the women wore the same wigs covered with hats and kerchiefs, and many showed the same suspicion and intolerance for those who were different, for those whose fur hats just weren’t furry enough, or just the right height or weight or hardened sheen.

  Walking home from the little shul at the corner one Friday night, I got into a discussion with a neighbor about the challenges of science to religious faith.

  “If science contradicts the Torah, it is false,” the man said resolutely.

  The man’s son, a chubby, redheaded little boy, pulled on his arm. “Come already,” the boy whined. I could see Chaya Suri looking for me through our dining-room window, her hands cupping the sides of her face, better to see into the dark. But the topic at hand burned inside me, and I couldn’t let it go.

  “You can’t say that,” I said to the man. “The study of science is everywhere in your life. It’s in the car you drive. In the medicine you take when you’re ill. It is in the production of your food, in the manufacture of your clothes. You rely on science when you fly in an airplane, or when you visit your doctor. Science has put a man on the moon, for goodness sake!”

  The man remained unimpressed. “I see you’re an oifgeklerter,” he said. “Only an oifgeklerter believes in scientists the way you do.”

  An oifgeklerter. An enlightened one. Not a heretic but in many ways just as bad. The heretic declares his godlessness openly, and so the righteous can choose to avoid him. But enlightened ones are deceptive, wrapping their heresy in a veneer of plainspoken inquiry.

  I was reminded of an old Hasidic teaching, on the verse in Psalms: God peers down from heaven to ask: Where is the enlightened one who seeks God?

  Said Reb Noach of Lechevitch: “Where is the enlightened one who seeks God? The answer, of course, is that he is nowhere.” The Psalmist had asked a rhetorical question because enlightened ones do not seek God. They seek only to destroy the faith of those who do.

  “They merely question,” one of my teachers once said of the Maskilim, the enlightened Jews and the reformers who studied science and philosophy and attempted, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, to create a new Jew for the modern era. “In their questions, however, lie their malevolent intentions. They seek to destroy faith, not to uphold it.”

  The transition to life in Monsey brought our family new challenges. In New Square, I had felt alienated from those around us; now Gitty and the children did, too.

  I had hoped that the children would make new friends. The Mandelbaums, across the road, had three girls; the Illowitzes, next door, had four; the Richters, a couple of houses down, had seven. During the first weeks in our new home, Tziri, Freidy, and Chaya Suri would regularly head over to the Mandelbaum house, a split-level cottage almost identical to ours. After several weeks, I noticed that they went less frequently. Soon they stopped going altogether.

  “Those girls are different,” Gitty said when I asked about it. They spoke English instead of Yiddish. They wore more fashionable outfits. My daughters were shy, uncomfortable around girls so unlike them. In New Square, they’d been surrounded by family and friends, cousins, classmates, children raised as much in one another’s homes as their own, and they’d never felt the sting of outsiderness.

  Gitty, too, missed her parents and her dozen siblings, and scores of nieces, nephews, and cousins. She tried befriending the neighbors but, like our daughters, found it hard to blend in. It wasn’t long before she gave up trying, and kept busy with housework, scanning the advertisements in the Community Connections, or selling old baby outfits on eBay.

  “Can I ask you something?” Gitty asked one evening just as I walked in from work. In her hand was an envelope, and she was reading what appeared to be a credit-card statement.

  “Can it wait?”

  Gitty slapped the statement on the kitchen counter. “What’s this?” she asked, and jabbed her finger at one of the lines on the page: D’Agostino’s.

  I remembered the purchase: I had been in Manhattan late one evening, and I’d stopped at a supermarket to buy a quick dinner of roasted salmon and a side of potatoes from its hot-food bar.

  “Was it nonkosher food?” Gitty asked.

  I told Gitty that I would not give her an accounting for a ten-dollar purchase that could’ve been for anything.

  She turned furious, convinced of my guilt. “Why?” she cried. “Why must you do this?”

  I didn’t know why. Salmon and potatoes from D’Agostino’s weren’t any better than salmon and potatoes from a kosher place, but I no longer kept kosher when there were no neighbors or family members to hide from. I simply no longer felt the need. Manhattan didn’t have nearly as many kosher options for a quick dinner, and it seemed silly to go to such effort when it felt so pointless.

  “Would you rather I lied?” I asked.

  “No,” she snapped, her teeth clenched in anger. “I don’t want you eating trayf, period!”

  During our Shabbos meals, I sometimes prodded my children to think about the weekly Bible portion in new ways.

  “Do you think it right,” I asked my daughters one week, “that an Israelite soldier may abduct a woman from an enemy nation and force her to be his wife?”

  Tziri appeared pensive and said nothing, while Freidy looked up at me, surprised, and shook her head.

  “M’ fregt nish kein kashes oif de Toireh,” she said, and went back to her plate of chulent and noodle kugel. At eleven years old, it was as clear as it could possibly be: one does not question the Torah.

  Freidy needed nothing more, but Tziri looked as though she was still processing the thought.

  Gitty, from the far end of the table, glowered at me. Over the years, she had made it clear: she could imagine no greater betrayal than infecting our chil
dren’s minds with heresy. I tried to be careful, to keep my real thoughts well concealed, but sometimes it was hard to resist a nudge.

  Late on Friday nights, after the Sabbath meal was over and the children were tucked into their beds and Gitty, too, said she was tired and went to bed, I would sit on the living-room sofa and read. When I sensed that the house was entirely still, I would open the creaky door to my study, located right off the living room. I would close the door as quietly as I could and leave the light off so as not to alert the neighbors. In the dark, I would jiggle the mouse, and the computer would come alive, its light casting a soft glow on the mess of papers, the printer, my bookcase filled with forbidden literature. Checking my e-mail and browsing the Internet, I would listen carefully for sounds coming from the house. I would press the keys gently, one at a time, pecking with my index finger instead of touch-typing, anxious not to let the familiar sounds of keyboard typing penetrate the Sabbath silence of our home.

  But all the care I took was no match for Gitty’s intuition. I never understood how, but each Friday night, minutes after I would sit down at my desk, the door would creak open, and Gitty would be standing in the doorway in her nightgown. The glow from the screen would partially illuminate her face and cast a shadow of her profile against the wall. In the dim light, I could see her face ashen, her eyes pleading. “How can you?” A cry of anguish, perhaps even a genuine desire to understand: How could I be so dismissive of God’s law?

  By the glow of my computer screen I would explain, yet again, that I was no longer a believer. The rules were meaningless to me, my private desecrations were my way of carving out a personal space of freedom from a world in which my nearly every move was scrutinized. I was sorry she had to see it, I’d hoped not to wake her, but I wouldn’t accept restrictions during private moments.

  Gitty would grow offended and angry. “You think you’re so much smarter than everyone?”

  In my anger, I would say, yes, that was exactly what I thought. And then we would fight, and then make up, in an endlessly exhausting cycle. Afterward, we would lie in bed for hours and sigh about where to go from here and how to make it work, and always, we would end with the question: What about the children?

  I would feel tenderness for her in those moments, despite all that was tearing us apart. But the next week, the same thing would happen, until eventually I grew bolder and would turn on the light in my study and tap the keys without fear. Gitty would still come down, but it was no longer in the dark, and she would sit on the floor near the door and glare at me and my desecration of the Sabbath.

  “Why do you have to be so different?” she would cry. “Why can’t you be like everyone else?” She would come up with the answer on her own: “It’s all those books, and movies, and newspapers, and the Internet.

  “The rabbis were right,” she would say again and again. “It’s all that garbage that’s changed you.”

  The tension in our home only grew worse. Gitty would continue to scold me for my transgressions, and eventually, in the interest of keeping the peace, I would begin to hide from her, using cash for nonkosher purchases, hiding receipts and creating alibis. At Starbucks, I would carefully calculate my purchases. A five-dollar purchase could be for a latte, which was kosher. A ten-dollar purchase would give away the turkey-and-Swiss-cheese sandwich that I’d bought with it, and so I’d rush to find an ATM.

  I needed to stop hiding. I needed to stop lying. But was there a way to do it without shattering everything?

  I would grow frustrated with Gitty’s unwillingness to bend. When I suggested one day that instead of always requiring me to drive her places, she might learn to drive on her own, she exploded: “Why should I change for you?”

  Most Hasidic women did not drive cars, but still, some did. I did not care so much if Gitty drove, but it annoyed me that she wouldn’t even consider it. As a family, we kept everything in strict accordance with Jewish law. I was careful to keep up appearances for the public, now even more than before. Unlike in New Square, where I’d had my small circle of deviants on Saturday mornings, here I had no choice but to sit through three hours of prayer and Torah reading, to listen to the other men speak without being able to offer my own real thoughts. Much of it felt taxing and stressful; yet I kept doing it because Gitty wanted it for our family. Was it so much to ask that we relax on minor matters of Hasidic custom?

  “Let’s take a vacation,” I suggested to Gitty one day. I thought it would be good for us to get away. “How about Europe?” Gitty had relatives in London. I wanted to visit Vienna and Prague and Kraków.

  Gitty, however, had little interest in traveling. Newness disoriented her. She didn’t care for foreign cities and the stresses of unfamiliar foods and other people’s beds. Through our decade and a half of marriage, we’d taken only one vacation out of state, a week in Florida to visit an aunt and uncle near Boca Raton.

  I persisted, though, and Gitty finally relented. “Maybe just a few days. Somewhere close.”

  We made arrangements for the children to stay with relatives, and Gitty and I took a three-day trip to Niagara Falls. After we saw the falls, rode the Maid of the Mist, and purchased armloads of souvenirs, I wondered if we might get away from the high-rise hotels and the masses of tourists in Bermuda shorts and cheap sunglasses.

  “Look!” I pointed to several brochures I found in the hotel lobby. “Vineyards! Wine tours!” Gitty agreed to go for a wine tour, but in the parking lot afterward, we quarreled bitterly.

  “You drank trayf wine!” she cried. During the tour, I had ignored her dark glances, and had drunk from the small cups offered for tasting—Chardonnays, Cabernets, Malbecs.

  After an hour of arguing, screaming, and crying, we made up, agreed to put it behind us, and drove to our next destination. In the nearby town of Niagara-on-the-Lake, the annual ShawFest was taking place, a celebration of “the witty and provocative spirit of Bernard Shaw,” and I persuaded Gitty to attend a play with me. The play was Hotel Peccadillo, based on a French play by Georges Feydeau. It was, in the words of one reviewer, “a romp about the respectable middle-class behaving less than respectably.” Neither Gitty nor I had ever been to a play before, romp or non-romp. The reviews were good, and we had only one night left. I bought tickets without investigating further.

  When the play was over, Gitty stalked out of the theater ahead of me. No, she said when I finally caught up to her. She did not enjoy the play—could not, in fact, make out the story line, but understood enough to know that it was dirty and disgusting and vulgar and goyish and if I asked her to join me in one more of my stupid and crazy and goyish interests, she would never see me or speak to me again, and then I’d be free to go off on my own and watch all those stupid plays and have sex with the actors, too, if I wanted.

  In an effort to reason me out of my pleas for compromise, Gitty would remind me that she had moved to Monsey for my sake, how unhappy she was to be so far from everything she knew, how unhappy the children were. I knew that she was right; yet I would look at her during those times and feel nothing for her. Old resentments would rise, and I would wonder: Why were we still together? The answer was, for the children, of course. But if they, too, were unhappy, what was the point?

  “I don’t think this is working,” I said to Gitty one day.

  Gitty thought that maybe we could still save things. “Maybe we can move someplace else,” she said.

  “Move again? To where?”

  Gitty looked down, silent. There weren’t many options.

  “Would you live among the Modern Orthodox? The Upper West Side? Teaneck? Flatbush?” The Modern Orthodox allowed the study of secular subjects, they watched movies, boys and girls went on dates. Our children would have more opportunities, and I would perhaps feel a greater sense of freedom.

  Gitty shook her head. “The children need a Yiddish-speaking environment.” After a few moments of silence, she said, “But maybe we can relax certain things.”

  “Like what?”
I asked. “You won’t even get a driver’s license!”

  “I don’t know.” I could see her hazel irises glistening. “What will I tell my parents?” she asked in a near whisper, her voice catching halfway through.

  On a breezy night in November, Gitty and I looked out in silence from behind a low fence at the edge of the Hudson River. The river’s gentle waves broke against the stone wall as the wind blew gently in our faces. A mile or so upriver was the Tappan Zee Bridge, its lights cutting brilliantly through the darkness of the sky and the river. The shops behind us, along the Piermont Pier, were closed, and aside from a lone dog walker up the road in the distance, there was no one in sight.

  It was a night of scheduled intimacy. Earlier that evening, I’d picked up Gitty on Viola Road at the women’s mikveh, the ritual bath that she attended once a month, and when we came home, I suggested we do something. “Want to go for a movie?” I asked.

  She said that she was not in the mood and did not like movies all that much, anyway.

  “How about a drive down to Piermont?” I asked, after we sat in silence for a while longer.

  Piermont was a hillside village ten miles away, right on the Hudson River, known for its trendy art galleries and restaurants and a handful of celebrity residents. At this hour, the waterfront would be empty, and I thought it would be a pleasant place to spend the evening.

  “What are we going to do there?”

  Was there irritability in her tone? I wasn’t sure. Then again, she seemed irritable almost every time we spoke now. I considered giving up. I could go into my study and watch a movie on my own, and we could just go to bed alone. Yet through the years, physical intimacy had remained important to both of us, and I felt it my duty to keep that aspect of our life from going stale.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “We’ll take a stroll. Look at the stars. Gaze at the lights.”