All Who Go Do Not Return (17 page)

The car turned from Washington Avenue onto Wilson, out of sight. But Wilson Avenue was a dead end. This car had no escape. A sizable crowd had formed by now, and people pointed excitedly down Washington Avenue.

“Shkutzim! Shkutzim!” The chorus of shouts now came from all directions, in a deafening clamor.

“There they are!” someone shouted, and the crowd tensed up as we watched the headlights appear. The car turned, coming full speed, back onto Washington Avenue. As we bent to grab large rocks and other items to throw, the car, still several hundred yards away, rolled to a stop, like an animal cornered. Those within had seen the mob and were weighing their options.

For a moment, we all stood frozen. Then, like a charging bull, the car accelerated with a roar. The mob of men scattered to the sides of the road, and in a flash the car was between us. A deafening shout went up and a barrage of rocks pounded the car. We heard the shattering of glass, and as the car sped away, we saw it covered with pock-marks, both taillights smashed. As it sped past the yeshiva building, a wrought-iron bench, well worn from years of use in the study hall, came hurtling off the roof and landed right on top of the car, leaving a deep dent on impact, then falling behind and landing with a thud on the cracked asphalt.

The crowd charged. A cluster of men stood at the intersection of Jefferson Avenue, and as we ran, yelling obscenities, we watched a lone figure sprint toward the car. It was my friend Mechy Rosen, and in his hand, high above his shoulder, was a long steel pole. With perfect timing, Mechy smashed the pole through the front passenger window, like a savage aiming a spear at a wild animal. The sound of shattering glass mixed with the high-pitched wailing of a woman inside the car.

The car skidded around a bend in the road. The crowd pursued from behind, the clamor reaching a battle-cry pitch. We could not keep up with the car, but still we ran in pursuit. From all directions, more men came running from their homes and joined the growing stampede of black and white.

The crowd kept pursuing the car, even as its taillights dimmed, even when we could no longer see it past the final bend of Washington Avenue. We ran and ran, even as we knew we would never catch up.

As we turned that final curve—with the main road, Route 45, in view—we saw the car at the end, standing still. Then we heard shouts and screams. As we neared, we saw that the car had failed to make the turn onto Route 45 and had crashed at high speed into an enormous oak tree that stood facing the village entrance.

Traffic on Route 45 was beginning to back up, and drivers were emerging from their cars to inspect the wreckage, just as our mob, now several hundred men, came rushing toward the intersection. The first thing I heard was a man shouting obscenities, and then I got a good look at the car, smashed up against the tree. A teenage girl, one side of her face smeared with blood, sat on the ground, wailing near the open driver-side door. A teenage boy stumbled out of the back, then limped around to the other side of the car, in a daze. The shouting came from another man, who stood near the passenger side of the car, making wild gestures, pointing at us, the mob, now lined up on the other side of the road. He didn’t look injured, only angry. And all I could think was:
He
is mad at
us?
Our furies had dissipated in the face of this just punishment, and I stood struck by the man’s rage. Soon came the flashing lights of police cars and ambulance sirens, with traffic on the road backed up as far as we could see. The teenagers were taken away in ambulances, and our attitudes were gleeful. We’d taught them not to mess with us.

“The rebbe will be in to the tisch in five minutes!” someone called, and the crowd headed back down Washington Avenue. A short while later, we stood, a thousand men or more, on rows and rows of bleachers, the shtreimels of the uppermost row of men brushing against the rafters of the rebbe’s Great Sukkah. As the rebbe recited the kiddush, my mind raced.
He who has chosen us from among all people, and exalted us from every tongue, and has sanctified us with His commandments.
Chosen. Exalted. Sanctified. What did it mean?

I thought of the difference between us and those who despised us. Those teenagers in the car, I had taken for granted, were common anti-Semites, Hitler’s spiritual progeny. They would’ve caused us bodily harm if they’d been able to, I was certain of it. And yet, what
really
differentiated us? What made us so quick to rally a mob and pursue a group of young people for what really were, in this incident, no more than harmless insults?

And if we had caught up with the car, what would we have done to them?

Several months later, I visited a body shop in Monsey, where a young mechanic named Matt worked on my car. As I stood near him, we found ourselves chatting.

“You from New Square?” Matt asked, reading the address on the work order form.

I nodded.

“I was there last night,” he said. He was a volunteer firefighter, and there’d been a fire emergency that night. “Real interesting place.”

“How so?”

He looked up from fiddling with something under the hood. “Well. You know. I wouldn’t be allowed in New Square otherwise, so it was just interesting.”

“What do you mean?” There were always people in New Square who didn’t live there: construction workers, janitors, taxi drivers, supermarket employees. I’d never heard of anyone being denied entry. By communal ordinance, it was forbidden to sell property to anyone outside the community, but New Square was a public village, a legal municipality. Anyone could enter its streets.

Matt turned to look at me again, as if he were teaching me something elementary about the world. “You can’t go into New Square if you don’t live there. You’ll get beat up.”

“That’s not true,” I said, a touch defensively.

Matt straightened up and leaned a hand on the hood’s latch. In the other hand, he held a rag, black with grease, which he held out as he pointed to my chest. “You,” he said, waving the greasy rag up and down to indicate my Hasidic garb, “can go in there. But if I go in there without having any business there, I’ll get beat up.”

I must’ve laughed, because I remember Matt saying, “You think it’s funny? They’ve got their own laws, their own rules. You go into New Square and you don’t belong there, you’re in trouble.”

He turned back to his work, then looked up at me again. “Don’t get me wrong. I respect all people.” He took his rag and wiped something under the hood of the car. “But if you don’t belong in New Square, you just stay out. That’s just how it is.”

Kol bo’eho lo yeshuvun.

All who go to her do not return.

So says the Bible regarding a woman of loose morals. So said the rabbis of the Talmud regarding heresy.

Heretics, the rabbis said, can never repent. “We do not accept their return, ever,” wrote Maimonides, the twelfth-century sage known for his rationalist approach to faith. “We do not accept the repentance of heretics because we do not believe them. If they appear to have repented, we maintain they have done so fraudulently.”

Others say that heretics cannot repent because heresy is a force so potent that an individual is powerless to combat it, an insidious trap from which there is no escape. One never knows where heresy lurks. It can lie in the seemingly innocent words of a stranger, in knowledge outside the Torah, or in the writings of anyone who has not been vetted by the sages of his generation. It can lie in a seemingly innocent tale, when told in the wrong language, by the wrong person, or through the wrong medium, its nefarious intent so subtle as to pass almost unnoticed.

I was thirteen, during my year at the Dzibeau yeshiva in Montreal, when I learned a lesson about this danger. It was evening, after a full day of study, nearing bedtime. Yeedel Israel stood at one end of our dorm room polishing his shoes, and Sender Davidovitch sat on his bed clipping his toenails. Moshe Friedman, who occupied the bunk beneath mine, stepped out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. I, too, should’ve been preparing for bed; instead, I lay on my top bunk reading an English-language book,
Akiba
, a fictional reimagining of the life of the second-century sage Rabbi Akiva, by the German Jewish author Marcus Lehmann.

The Talmud tells the story of Rabbi Akiva in brief. Until the age of forty, Akiva was unlearned, a poor and ignorant shepherd, who tended the flock of the Jerusalem aristocrat Kalba Savua. When Akiva fell in love with Rachel, Kalba Savua’s daughter, she insisted that she would not marry him unless he promised to devote his life to Torah study. Akiva promised, and the couple was married. Soon after, Akiva left home to study Torah with the sages Nachum Ish Gamzu, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, and Joshua ben Hanania, the great masters at the academies of Lod and Yabneh.

For twenty-four years, Akiva remained in the house of study while his wife was home alone. After twenty-four years, Akiva returned to his wife, accompanied now by twenty-four thousand students. Now he was
Rabbi
Akiva, the greatest rabbi in all of Israel, in all of Jewish history, perhaps. Rachel, living in poverty and solitude all these years, received word of her husband’s return, and set out to greet him. Upon seeing him, she fell to her knees and bent to kiss the hem of his cloak.

“Get away!” Rabbi Akiva’s students shouted to the woman kneeling before the great master. But Rabbi Akiva recognized her. “Let her be,” he said to his students. “For all that is yours, and all that is mine, belongs to her.”

“Why aren’t you undressed yet?” an angry voice bellowed.

In the doorway stood Reb Hillel, his unkempt jet-black mustache growing over his lips into his sprawling black beard, ferocious-looking despite his slight frame. Reb Hillel was one of the most feared rabbis at the yeshivas. His slaps were legend—they always came twice in succession in one fluid motion, palm striking left cheek, then returning sharply for a backhanded strike to the right. Until that night, I had studiously avoided him.

“And
what
do we have
here?
” Reb Hillel asked, pointing his beard at my book.

Outside I could hear students rushing about, the bathroom door in the hallway being opened and banged shut as my dorm mates prepared for bed.

“It’s—a
biechel
,” I said. A book. A
little
book. Not a book of Torah or its commentaries but of general knowledge. A storybook.

“A
BIECHEL!
” Reb Hillel cried. “Don’t you know what the Chasam Sofer said about a
biechel?
”

I didn’t know what the Chasam Sofer had said about a
biechel
, although I knew other things the Chasam Sofer had said, chiefly this: “All that is new is forbidden by the Torah.”
All that is new
covered many things, including modern dress, modern speech, modern names, modern ideas.

“Biechel
, the holy Chasam Sofer says, stands for
‘Kol bo’eha lo yeshuvun!’”

Biechel. Beis, yud, kof, lamed.
B-Y-K-L.
Kol B’o’eho Lo Yeshuvun.

All who go to her do not return.

So said the Bible regarding a woman of loose morals. So said the rabbis of the Talmud regarding heretical ideas. So said the Chasam Sofer regarding
little books
—which I imagined meant
little books of a certain kind
, books of unknown provenance, written in strange languages by strange people. The book I now held, because it was in English, not Yiddish or Hebrew, looked suspicious to Reb Hillel.

But the book I was reading was kosher.

“It’s a
ma’aseh biechel
,” I said. “It’s about Rabbi Akiva.” The tale of a sage. Not Torah, but close enough.

Reb Hillel stood very near my bed, his flared nostrils right up against my face as I lay with my head glued to my pillow. Reb Hillel raised his hand and I flinched, but he only reached to take the book. I watched as he studied the front cover, then the back, then flipped through the pages. I realized then that he could not read it.

After a few moments, he tossed the book back onto my bed. He turned briefly to stare at Sender and Yeedel, who sat frozen on their beds, and turned back to me: “You couldn’t find a book about Rabbi Akiva in Yiddish?”

If my little book contained no heresy, Reb Hillel’s point was well taken. Foreign reading brought foreign ideas and foreign influences, and before you knew it, you were speaking ill of God and His anointed one.

All that is new is forbidden by the Torah
, said the Chasam Sofer, an Austrian rabbi far from Hasidism’s Polish and Ukrainian origins. His principles had no connection to Hasidic teachings and, in a sense, ran counter to them. Hasidism, when first formed in the mid-eighteenth century, had come to liberate the Jewish people from a worldview ossified under centuries of legalistic arcana. Hasidism came to eschew the artificial and the pretentious and the formulaic. To raise the spirit of the law over the letter of it and to find infinite layers of that spirit. To celebrate the mystical experience over scholarly wrangling. It declared matters of the heart and mind superior to pietistic excess.

Yet the principles of the Chasam Sofer rather than the Baal Shem Tov came to characterize the modern Hasidic worldview. With the spread of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new challenges created new priorities for observant Jews. The teachings of Hasidism, many realized, were quickly becoming irrelevant in the face of the devastation wrought by the Enlightenment movement, and so Hasidim rallied around the Chasam Sofer’s battle cry and rushed to carry his standard.

All that is new is forbidden by the Torah.

Years later, I would read the works of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel and wince at their romanticized portraits not only of Hasidism, the teachings, but also of Hasidim, the people, as if all those who bore the name surely lived by its principles. In fact, other than a small cadre of mystics and the remnants of early Hasidic practices—dedication to the rebbe and communal events with song and dance—Hasidim in the twentieth century seemed to know little of the mysticism, the ecstasy, the melancholy and the joy of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples. Instead, it regressed to the heavy-handedness and the rigidity that Hasidism had come to eradicate.