All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  And then came the dreams.

  A rabbi who was close to our family asked me once, several months after my father’s death, “Does your father appear to you in dreams?”

  I understood his question in the context of Jewish folklore. There were many tales of deceased loved ones appearing in dreams, bringing precious messages.

  Go to the bridge in Kraków, and find the treasure.

  My soul wanders in the heavens with no rest. Recite kaddish for me.

  Don’t let Tzeitel marry the butcher.

  So many stories. The dead returning to reveal secrets or provide valuable guidance. Especially the saintly—they were the ones who knew the most. This rabbi wanted to know if my father, too, had appeared to me. Did I know any otherworldly secrets?

  “Yes,” I told the rabbi. “He comes to me.”

  “And what has he told you?” the rabbi asked.

  I pretended to be too shy to offer the details, and the rabbi did not press for more. He only shook his head and said, “Pssh. Such a holy thing. He comes in the dream, eh?”

  My father, however, did not appear to me in dreams. Or at least not in the way the rabbi meant it, as an apparition at my bedside with secrets from another world. Rather, I would dream that my father was alive again. In my dreams, which would recur for years, my father would be in the kitchen of our home, getting a cup of yogurt from the refrigerator, or sitting on our back porch with a glass of tea and speaking to one of his students, or praying at the shul in his usual spot in the last row, carefully enunciating each syllable. I would see him and smile and say, “Oh, you’re here! I thought you were dead.” And he’d say, “Oh, no. I was just traveling. I’m back now.” In my dream, I would feel an unusual sort of happiness, the kind that comes after hearing terrible news and then hearing that no, a mistake was made, that terrible thing did not happen, it was all an unfortunate miscommunication.

  Then I would wake and realize it was a dream. There was no mistake. My father really was dead. I would lie in bed for a long time, trying to go back to that place, where my strange and erratic and brilliant and loving father was back, perhaps even scolding me, or just being impatient because he was busy and had to get somewhere and I was getting in his way.

  And that’s when I knew that I really, truly missed my father.

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  On a Tuesday in September 2009, I rented a U-Haul truck and packed up my things. I left my long dark coats and beaver-fur hats to gather dust in a friend’s basement, along with my small collection of religious texts and audiocassettes of old Talmud lectures. I took my tallis and tefillin and my shtreimel with me, too sentimental to part from them, and moved to an apartment in Bushwick—Brooklyn’s newest bastion of hipster faux bohemianism. I moved to be closer to friends, many of whom I had made over the past year, collecting them like seashells, one leading to another and then another, cherishing each one, after having spent my first year out in near solitude.

  It was an odd thing, to live suddenly among secular people, Jews and non-Jews, where there were few synagogues and no kosher supermarkets or large families with boys in yarmulkes and sidelocks, girls in long skirts and long-sleeved blouses. Instead, there was a colorful variety of types: young postcollege hipsters and settled yuppies living side by side with Dominicans and West Indians.

  I tried to forget the events of the previous year. I met more people. I hosted parties. I smoked pot and tried MDMA, and, once, a spot of cocaine. I learned how to ask women on dates, and fell in and out of love. I took a trip to Spain and Greece, traveling on my own for the first time. For a while, in an attempt to try on a new persona, I went by a new name: Sean. I soon realized that an ex-Hasid with an Irish name does not an Irishman make, and reverted back to Shulem.

  Schooling now seemed a luxury I could no longer afford. During my one semester in college, I had paid my own tuition, but now, with my job security gone, all I could focus on were my child-support obligations and my own basic living expenses. Over time, I found sporadic freelance programming work, and soon I would return to writing as well, publishing articles and essays relating to Hasidic life and the journey away from it.

  My mother and my siblings had not rejected me, and I remained grateful for their acceptance. My brother Mendy and his wife would invite me to their Monsey home for Shabbos meals, without asking questions about how I got there, even as they knew that I now drove on the Sabbath and probably parked my car only a short walk from their home. My sister, Chani, too, would invite me to spend time at her home with her family, and insist that I take part when her own daughters celebrated their marriages and the births of their own children.

  My brother Avrumi, who had followed me to the Skverers when we were teenagers, would call frequently, and ask whether and where I had prayed that morning. When I would remind him that I no longer prayed, he’d say, good-naturedly, “Eh, I’m sure you do when no one’s looking,” and then he’d inform me of all the births, marriages, and deaths among the people of New Square, where he was still a member in good standing.

  My mother, who had moved to Jerusalem a decade earlier, was pained by the path I had taken but even more so by the fact that Gitty would no longer allow the children to see or speak to her. Gitty, I would learn, sought to punish my mother for not having raised me right, even as my mother remained as devout as anyone Gitty had ever known.

  In January 2010, I started an online journal with some friends. We called it Unpious, a play on the Yiddish phrase uhn-payess—“no sidecurls”—and we published stories and essays related to the fringes of ultra-Orthodox society. Slowly, a community rose from the many who had made the journey out, the numbers exploding in recent years—mostly because of the Internet and the existence of Footsteps, which provided an anchor for hundreds who might otherwise have drifted into a strange world with few resources. Every few months, there would be a new crop, finding one another through interconnected networks: blogs, Facebook groups, or underground gatherings around Brooklyn and Manhattan.

  Within our fledgling community, there were those who would undertake projects around issues related to both the world we came from and the community to which we now belonged. Ex-Orthodox activists set up new organizations to advocate for education reform in Hasidic schools, for Orthodox victims of child sexual abuse, for women trapped in forced marriages, for gay and lesbian members of the Orthodox community who loved their communities and traditions but were not accepted for who they were. We would write articles and appear in TV and radio interviews, speaking out about our journeys and our experiences, what we had learned and what we could share with others.

  Malky, too, had made it out. We had first met in April 2008, and, finally, nearly two years later, I heard that she had left—and had taken her daughters with her. Her father and her then husband’s threats had turned out to be empty. A group of us were gathering for Friday night dinner, and our host had invited Malky to join us and spend the weekend in Brooklyn.

  When I walked in and saw her again, for the first time in two years, it was my turn to be stunned. Her hair had grown in and she now sported a short bob. Gone was her tight kerchief and her skirts and long-sleeved blouses, and in their place were slim jeans and a fashionable sleeveless top. “You look like a regular shiksa!” I said, as we hugged and laughed.

  Soon we were sitting for dinner, a dozen friends, men and women, all of us former Hasidim who’d finally made it out. “Let’s drink to this!” someone said.

  “Let’s do picklebacks!” someone else said. He’d learned it from hipster friends. We were in Williamsburg, America’s capital of hipsterdom, and so we were often the beneficiaries of its concoctions. The rest of us had never heard of picklebacks, though, and our friend explained. “A shot of Jack Daniel’s chased by a shot of pickle juice.”

  “Pickle juice?” The strangeness of the outside world still took us by surprise.

  “Regular store-bought pickle juice. The stuff that’s left in the jar after you eat all the pickles.
”

  We filled shot glasses of whiskey and shot glasses of pickle juice, and held them up. To freedom! To choice! To opportunity! To friendship! We did one round and then another, and the cheer in the room rose. Soon we were singing, banging fists on our host’s table in time to Hasidic songs from our youth, from Chabad and Belz and Vizhnitz, about the God we did not believe in and the Torah we did not follow. The songs were still beautiful, and we rose and rested our hands on one another’s shoulders and swayed to old favorites, as if we were still in the synagogue or at the rebbe’s tisch.

  Ata sakum terachem tziyon.

  Raise up and have mercy upon Zion.

  Ki va mo’ed. Ki va mo’ed. Ki va mo’ed.

  For the time has come. For the time has come. For the time has come.

  We’d made our choices and were proud of them and, despite the challenges, lived with few regrets.

  The hours passed, and Malky and I found ourselves talking on the sofa. We had so much to catch up on. In a flash, it was six in the morning, and Malky walked me to the door as I prepared to leave. From the kitchen came the smell of chulent, stewing in a Crock-Pot—or what was left of it, after we’d raided the pot hours earlier. In the next room, Malky’s daughters, aged three and five, were fast asleep.

  At the doorway, Malky pulled me toward her, and put her arms around me. “Shulem,” she said. “Now I can hug you again.”

  And yet, through it all, I could not forget what I had lost.

  “Don’t you miss your children?” some friends would ask.

  I would shrug and say, “It is what it is.”

  “I suppose you get used to it,” they’d say, and I’d say, “Yeah, pretty much.” I wouldn’t tell them that, no, in fact, you don’t get used to it at all, at least not for a very long time. So many memories were sparked by sights and sounds around me—a mother and daughter on a movie screen, a father and son playing catch in the park, parents and children on the subway. These small moments would evoke feelings I did not know were possible, a kind of grief that would, at times, strike me with such force that it would impair my daily function, throwing me for hours, days, into a nearly catatonic depression.

  The once-insignificant moments of day-to-day life, snippets of conversation, would suddenly come alive in my memory. I would try to put them out of mind, but the spool of them was relentless. All I could do was close my eyes and let them wash over me, painful as they were.

  I would remember weeknight evenings, when I’d get home from work at eight, and Tziri and Freidy would be at the dining-room table doing homework. The little ones would be in bed, and I would head upstairs to kiss them good night. Chaya Suri would hug me close to her small frame and refuse to let go. “Stay,” she would plead, and I would lie next to her in silence as she wrapped her arms around me tightly and told me about her day, until finally I’d kiss her good night and pry myself from her grip. Downstairs, Tziri and Freidy would bring their schoolbooks and sit with me at the kitchen table as I ate my dinner, and as we reviewed their studies, they’d pick food from my plate, always complaining that I got better dinners than they did.

  I would remember the Friday nights and Saturday mornings in Monsey, when I would take the boys to shul, their company providing a small measure of relief in an otherwise tedious routine. Akiva would sit by my side and move his index finger along the lines in his prayer book, while Hershy ran outside with the other boys. Later, we’d walk home slowly, Akiva always holding my hand, and Hershy running ahead, and we’d gaze at the full moon and occasionally catch the fleeting silhouette of deer passing behind the trees. Then we’d hold hands tightly as we crossed the bridge over the little brook on the path home from the shul.

  I would remember Saturday nights in winter, when nightfall came early and the Sabbath ended, and we would order in pizza and French fries and the seven of us would sit around the fireplace, the crackling logs competing with the sound of the wind howling outside. I would remember how, after every snowfall, the children and I would bundle up in our coats and build the largest snowman on the block, the snowballs of its torso so large that the three girls and I would have to lift them together.

  People would ask, “Don’t you ever feel guilty? For leaving them like that?” And I would wonder about the question, about their assumptions, casting it all into the inglorious tradition of male irresponsibility. And then I would go on, and plan the next Friday night dinner, because what else was there to do?

  I would often think of Gitty and the hardships of raising five children alone, and I’d feel badly for her, and then I would feel angry. She was raising five children alone, but she didn’t have to, not the way she had chosen. When I heard, in 2012, that she had remarried, to a good man, a pious and kind Hasid, a scribe who made his living writing sacred ritual texts—Torahs, tefillin, mezuzahs—and who took my sons to the synagogue on Shabbos and treated them kindly, I hoped that it would allow Gitty to forgive me for some of the pain I had caused her.

  In the summertime, as Brooklyn simmered in the heat and Bushwick filled with block parties and backyard barbecues, a group of friends decided to take a break from our frenzied urban lives and participate in the Rainbow Gathering, an annual event of living off the grid for several days with peace, love, and thousands of unshowered bohemians.

  We were sixteen men and women in four cars, driving along a dirt road through the Allegheny National Forest in Pennsylvania. Our cars whipped clouds of dust around barefoot, dreadlocked passersby, who all waved, flashed us peace signs, and shouted, “Welcome home!” and “Loving you, brothers and sisters!”

  We planned to stay for four days. We packed for a month: massive amounts of food, towels, bottles of soap and shampoo, swimming attire, plasticware, rolls of aluminum foil, beach chairs, a portable shower, and gallons and gallons of bottled water.

  A man with long flowing white hair in a colorful unbuttoned shirt sat at the head of the trail to the main campsite. He stared at us unself-consciously, with his sagging abdomen and his chest of white hair.

  “Welcome home, brothers and sisters!” he called in a thick Southern accent, and looked at our bags. We were hauling carry-ons, suitable for airport corridors and train stations, less so for steep hills of eroded soil and bumpy clots of exposed tree roots.

  “Haven’t y’all heard of backpacks?” the man asked with a laugh. “Which camp y’all headin’ to?”

  “The Jewish camp.” If we were going to hang with hippies, we preferred the Chosen variety.

  After a moment, he said, “Down this trail, across the main meadow. Then take the trail to the right. The Jewish kitchen is called ‘Shut Up and Eat It.’ Can’t miss it.”

  We found the camp easily. There were Breslovers with flowing tzitzis mingling with former Israeli soldiers, religious and secular Jews together dragging massive bottles of water, half-naked girls working alongside women in long skirts and headscarves.

  After we set up our tents, we headed out to the meadow, where drum circles formed throughout the day, and the crowd of several thousand rocked, danced, and twirled. “Welcome home!” people called. “Loving you!”

  The atmosphere at Rainbow brought back memories of my first experience at the tisch among the Skverers, the enchanting songs and the warm welcomes from people I did not know, the strange boys my age who shook my hand and made room for me among them on the bleachers, the gruff middle-aged men who offered me plates of roast chicken and potato kugel and bowls of apple compote, insisting that I eat, eat, because there was plenty more.

  That tisch had changed my life, and over the following decade, as my attachment to Hasidic teachings deepened and my religious views matured, I had come to see the tisch not merely as a place for song and dance but as a vessel for experiencing what the psychologist Abraham Maslow called “peak experiences”—the transcendent moments of clarity when the whole cosmic mess we call our universe is suddenly beautiful and orderly and one’s place within it is stunningly clear. In those moments, our very insignificance
is magnified in such a way that all we can do is tremble in awe at the wondrousness of our existence.

  In the last years before I left, when I was barely holding on to my faith, I would still sometimes attend the tischen, yearning for the feelings I remembered from my earliest days in New Square. I would head to the synagogue on Saturday evening for the third tisch of the week, traditionally held in the dark in the final moments before the Sabbath passed into weekday. Those final moments, the kabbalists tell us, are times of ra’ava dera’avin, a time of expanded consciousness of the divine.

  But I had no longer felt it—the experience no longer moved me. The words of “Benei Heikhala Dikhsifin,” the haunting poem by Isaac Luria that speaks of the unveiling of cosmic light that comes at that particular time, no longer made the hair on my arm stand stiff. The rebbe’s chanting now sounded irritatingly mournful, whiny, like the sobs of a petulant child. The words were still beautiful but carried only a dim reminder of the ecstatic heights they had once triggered within me. I had developed resistance to their effects, and—heretic that I now was—the experience fell flat.

  Soon I would lose my faith entirely—not only in Hasidic teachings but in the concept of the divine or the sacred, or even the idea that we, as humans, can intuit anything beyond the empirical. Still, the memories of the tischen lingered, and as I transitioned to the life of a secular New Yorker who didn’t observe the Sabbath, didn’t keep kosher, didn’t attend synagogue or pray or perform any of the religious rituals that had, in my earlier years, been so meaningful, I couldn’t help but wonder: Where did secular folks go to experience what I once felt at the tisch?