All Who Go Do Not Return (26 page)

“Read the books,” Chezky said. “Maybe they’ll change your mind.”

I wanted to. In fact, I was burning with curiosity, but to read these books felt treacherous, like stepping onto a tightrope across rocky river rapids with no tightrope-walking skills. This was exactly what the rabbis had warned about.
Chakirah
, they called it. Rational inquiry. And it led, they warned, to bad things.

Rational inquiry increases vanity and leads to sin
, said Jacob Emden, an eighteenth-century German rabbi.

The Greeks
, wrote Reb Elimelech Shapira of Munkatch,
invented rational thought. And what did they bring to the world? Darkness! Heresy!

God forbid—I should be like the Greeks?

“No, thanks,” I said. “And you probably shouldn’t be reading them, either.”

Chezky shrugged. “Just remember this: when blind faith is all you have, you end up slashing people’s car tires for not inviting the rebbe to a bris.”

“Tell me,” Chezky said, a few days later in the foyer of the shul, where we met each week before Friday night prayers. “Has it occurred to you that it is simply an accident that you were raised with your beliefs? That if you were born Christian or Muslim you’d be just as convinced about those faiths being true? If blind faith is all you have, doesn’t it make it all so arbitrary?”

It was a simple question, but I had always assumed that such a question needed no answer. The many great thinkers of the Jewish tradition had already figured it out, I was sure. Who was I to start asking the obvious?

I walked home from shul with a mild feeling of resentment toward Chezky. Why was he so insistent? Why did he keep asking these questions? Yet the question unsettled me, like a scab you know not to scratch and yet you can’t help it. Indeed, what
was
the answer? In spite of myself, I began to wonder: If I hadn’t been born and raised into Judaism, would I have chosen it? If I had not been taught to recite the Shema at age two, Torah Tziva at three, prayers and Psalms at four, the Bible at five, and Talmud at eight, would I have believed in it all as I did now?

Later that evening, while I recited the kiddush before our Shabbos dinner, sang the Sabbath hymns with my two young daughters, and mumbled my way through
bentchen
, Chezky’s question continued to bother me. Afterward, as I sat with friends and studied
Ohr haChaim
, the classic Bible commentary by the Moroccan Jewish scholar Chaim ibn Atar, I continued to wonder: Would I have chosen this, if I had had a choice? Would I have accepted the existence of God, if I hadn’t been raised with it? Would I have believed in the Torah as His word? Would I have chosen to be Orthodox? To be Hasidic? To be Skver?

Chezky and I soon made a habit of going out on Saturday nights. Often we’d head to Jerusalem Pizza on Route 59, where Chezky liked his slices burned to a crisp, and the owner, a genial Vizhnitz Hasid with a silvery beard and wire-rimmed glasses, would come by and chat for a few minutes. Occasionally, we’d drive to Blockbuster afterward, and Chezky would head inside and rent us a movie, which we would take back to his room and watch on the small television monitor he kept borrowing from the office. I would never go into Blockbuster with him, though. New Square’s Vaad Hatznius, the Modesty Committee, was known to come after individuals for lesser offenses.

One Saturday night, we sat in my car talking, cracking sunflower seeds between our teeth and filling an empty coffee cup with their shells. Again, as so often happened, we came to questions of faith. And this time, finally worn down by Chezky’s insistence on his superior approach, my resistance dissolved. “Fine,” I said to Chezky. “Give me your proofs.”

He looked at me, startled. I’d given no warning that I was about to change my position, but I’d been thinking about it over the previous days, and decided that I would hear him out.

“Give me the proof that God showed up on a mountain and gave the Torah to the children of Israel. Give me the
rational
view.”

Chezky appeared to be softly biting the inside of his lower lip, as if gathering his thoughts. “You really want to hear it?”

“I do.”

“OK,” he nodded, silent for a moment. He then fixed his gaze on me intently. “It’s simple. You can’t invent a historically memorable event, unless it really happened.”

I shook my head, confused. “What does that mean?”

“The giving of the Torah was a mass revelation. No other religion claims that, and that’s what makes Judaism different. You simply can’t get people to believe in an event of historical significance if the event didn’t actually take place.”

“Why not?”

“Because no one can stand up and tell an entire people: Your grandparents once stood at a mountain and saw God and heard His voice. The people would turn right around and say: I think our grandparents would’ve mentioned it.”

There was something strange about the logic he was positing, as if the clarity of it lay just beyond reach, attainable with only a little hard thinking. It didn’t make perfect sense, but I was intrigued enough to want to hear more.

“Think of Jesus,” Chezky said. I knew almost nothing about Jesus, but Chezky claimed to have read the New Testament, and was familiar with Jesus’s miracles. He was unimpressed. “There’s a reason why Jesus’s miracles were claimed to have been witnessed only by small numbers.” He waved his hand dismissively, as if curing lepers and healing the blind were things he did routinely himself.

“Same thing with Islam,” Chezky said. “Muhammad claimed that he was visited by the angel Gabriel. So? You either believe it or you don’t. It’s not a very bold claim.”

But the Jewish claim was bold. It took chutzpah to tell an entire nation that 3 million of their ancestors were witness to the most astonishing event in human history. It took such chutzpah, in fact, that it could not be done, Chezky said, unless the event in question had actually occurred.

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:

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.