All Who Go Do Not Return (19 page)

Occasionally, secular books were to be found by accident. When I was eleven, I discovered an abandoned pile of Hardy Boys mysteries in the back of a dusty and cluttered variety shop two blocks from my school. The books had been tossed into a large black trash bag that lay behind a stack of boxes of other useless merchandise. This was Borough Park, and the owner must’ve realized that those books weren’t going to be sold anytime soon. For several weeks, I returned to the store each day after school and stood in the back, in a hollow space in the corner between the shelves lining the two adjoining walls, and went through the entire pile until there was nothing left to read.

We also had a small number of secular books in our home, most of them belonging to my sister Chani. Girls did not have the obligation of dawn-to-dusk Torah study, and so she was allowed a limited amount of secular reading material, mostly books considered to be from a more wholesome era. Often, I would sneak into her room and take books from the small white-and-pink bookcase near her door—
Pippi Longstocking, The Little Princess, Little House on the Prairie
—and hide them between my bed and the pine wainscoting of my bedroom wall, and then read them until late at night with a small flashlight.

I’d also stumbled upon books at the homes of more worldly neighbors, families who lived with fewer restrictions, whose children played sports and watched an occasional Disney movie. Often, after an afternoon visit, when a neighbor family would be eating dinner, I would be hiding in one of their bedrooms, deeply engrossed in
The Wind in the Willows
or
My Side of the Mountain.

Soon, however, I would turn thirteen, and all of that would end. For a boy past thirteen, anything other than our holy texts was frivolous, at best.

I returned several times to that set of encyclopedias, and the children’s librarian, a pleasant middle-aged woman, began to notice me and smile when I entered. Suddenly, I felt self-conscious: a grown Hasidic man sitting each day on the tiny orange chair at the green-and-yellow tables. So I moved on, hesitantly, to the adult sections upstairs, where the encyclopedias were heavier and denser, with fewer illustrations, the different sections like a maze in which the purpose was not to find the way out but to linger and stroll into each dead end and to gather as many treasures as possible along the way.

I do not remember the first books I brought home from the library, but I remember the disquieting silence from Gitty whenever I brought something home, the countless times she would finally, after holding it in for hours or days, burst out: “I don’t want these trayf, goyish books in my home!”

Sometimes she’d say it angrily, and sometimes with sadness; sometimes she’d be nearly convulsing with fury, and sometimes with deep but gentle anguish. The words, though, were always the same: “I don’t want these trayf, goyish books in my home!”

There was nothing particularly dangerous about what I was reading. They were mostly books about politics or history or science or of the various religions and cultures of the world. I would plead with Gitty to understand that I was doing nothing truly wrong, and if I was, my religious failings were on my own account, not hers. But Gitty would not be appeased.

“If you don’t approve of it, don’t read it,” I would tell her, and she’d grow angrier and angrier, more entrenched in her belief that I was corrupting not only myself but the purity of our home.

Books would soon be the least of it. Newspapers and magazines followed shortly after. To Gitty, they were an even greater offense. When we’d first married, it was I who had declared the evils of newspapers. I had refused to read even the
Monsey Advocate
, which came free in the mail, half English and half Yiddish, published by Hasidim in Monsey. “If it’s written on ‘newspaper sheets,’ it’s bad news,” the old rebbe had said. Even
Der Yid
and
Di Tzeitung
, Yiddish weeklies published by the Satmar Hasidim in Brooklyn, were not sold in New Square.

Now, with my battered gray Oldsmobile, I’d drive each Thursday night to a nearby gas station for a copy of the
Jerusalem Post
and the
Jewish Daily Forward
and an occasional
New York Times.
In the beginning, I would read them in my car, sitting for hours in the parking lot outside the Refuah Health Center near the entrance to the village. After a while, I decided that it was unfair for me to be banished from my own home. At first, I would hide the newspapers in a bag in one of my bedroom drawers, and read them only in the bathroom or behind the closed door of our dining room. It wasn’t long before Gitty discovered them, and as she did, I grew bolder and began to read them openly. We fought constantly over the books and the newspapers and the radio. When I accidentally left a newspaper on the kitchen table, Gitty would reach for it with her fingertips, disgust all over her face, and toss it into the trash.

The radio and books and newspapers were just the beginning. At the home of a friend who owned a computer, I found myself browsing through a computer mail-order catalog, and discovered a sudden urge to buy a computer myself. I was still working with students at the time, and thought that I could use it to create educational worksheets, using word processing and desktop publishing software.

Several weeks later, I placed the order, and the computer arrived several days later in a great big box. Gitty and the girls stood in the doorway of the dining room as I set it all up on a small desk in the corner.

In the package of bundled software was a 3.5-inch floppy disk with a label:
America Online. 30-Day Free Trial.

“What’s that?” Gitty asked.

I was as clueless as she was, but the instructions said to connect a cord to the phone line and install the software. Curious, I did as instructed, and the four of us listened to the wheezy, whiny tones of the dial-up modem.

“Welcome!” a female voice announced.

“You’ve got mail!” said a male voice.

Colorful icons and graphics appeared on the screen, a dizzying array of links, each of which opened up a whole new world: News. Shopping. Chat rooms. It was all so bright and inviting, I could only marvel at the world that opened up before me.

“Look at this!” I called to Gitty a few days later. “I’m having a conversation!”

Gitty came and glanced at the screen.

“Watch,” I said. “I type something, then this guy types something, then I type something, and so on. And it shows up instantly!” I couldn’t contain my excitement, but Gitty looked confused.

“So … it’s like a phone, except you type instead of speak?” she asked.

Like a phone? For a second, I wondered: Was that all it was? But of course it wasn’t.

“This is a stranger! A random person!”

“Why would you want to speak to a random person?”

There was no way that Gitty would understand. She did not share my curiosity, did not care to learn about the world the way I did. All of a sudden, I was connected to millions with whom I could interact, and soon I discovered a world of people entirely different from anyone I knew. I encountered Jews who ate pork and drove on the Sabbath, Christians who did not appear to be anti-Semitic, Muslims who weren’t terrorists.

One conversation stood out for me. A Jewish man living somewhere in the Midwest, whom I encountered in AOL’s “Jewish Community” chat room, shared with me his passion for Jewish learning. He told me of his regular study sessions in Talmud and Maimonides with his local Conservative rabbi.

He was not Orthodox. He kept the Sabbath sometimes, he said, when he was able, although to him, keeping the Sabbath meant not so much living by the rules but something about “reflection” and “refraining from creative activity.” Sometimes the man kept kosher but often did not. His comments were infuriating to me.

“You’re not making any sense!” I typed furiously. If the rules were not fixed, then what determined our obligations? “Do you just pick and choose the things you like? That’s not Judaism.”

“Perhaps not to you,” he said. “But there are other ways to look at it.”

I could not understand it. Here was a man who shattered the narrative I had been given. I knew that non-Orthodox Jews existed, but I had assumed that they were unlearned, and so they didn’t know any better. If only they studied the Talmud and Maimonides and all the other works of the great Torah sages, they would see that there was only one way to live a Jewish life. Here, however, was a man who studied it all; yet his practice was so different.

“How can you study the Talmud and not keep Shabbos?” I asked him. “How can you eat trayf if you know it’s forbidden?”

The man was patient. “There is more than one way to live a Jewish life. I do not think of the Torah as the literal word of God but only as a man-made document of divine inspiration.”

Maybe Gitty was right, I thought. Speaking to people outside our world made me think too much, and, as we all knew, too much thinking led to problems.

Yet I could not resist. Every night, for hours, I would log on to America Online and strike up conversations with people from outside our world, always wanting to prove to them that their way of life was wrong, but also madly curious about their views and the worlds that they lived in.

When I first purchased the computer, in the spring of 1996, it was a piece of office equipment, considered no more a threat to anyone’s faith than a water cooler with a stack of pointy paper cups. Certainly no worse than a photocopier or a fax machine. As the years passed, however, word got around. DVD drives would soon come standard. That and a Netflix subscription were all a Hasid would need to access a world of popular culture that had once been entirely out of reach. With the Internet, a Hasid could go even further—not only observe and consume but also interact.

This was no longer a piece of office equipment. It was a mind corrupter, fast catching up with the reigning champion for the “Vessel of Profanity” title—the television set.

Gitty, as was to be expected, was growing displeased about the Internet in our home.

“The rabbis have banned it,” she took to reminding me.

It was true. The rabbis had banned it just that month, after they’d banned it the previous month and the month before that. Banned and banned and banned, and still, it was said, Internet usage among us was only increasing, as if with each new ban posted on the synagogue door, scores of Hasidim rushed to the nearest computer store to see what the fuss was about.

Gitty agreed with the rabbis, even as she herself was not immune to the Internet’s allure. While I was away during the day, she would log on to AOL, search for shopping coupons, for discounts on shoes, diapers. One day, she mentioned something she’d read in a chat room.

“In a
chat room? You?
” I could not have been more surprised.

“I only pop in to see what people are saying,” she said, defensively, as if the fact that she did not herself interact with anyone mitigated the sin.

Yet she found much to disparage. When, in 1997, we learned about Princess Diana’s death, I showed Gitty the reports on the Internet. Neither of us had heard of Diana before, but as we looked at the images that would become so ubiquitous over the next week or so, Gitty sputtered with indignation.

“What a disgusting person!”

All she saw were naked arms and bare shoulders and a bold, shameless clavicle.

“It’s all
shmutz.
The entire Internet—filth, filth, and more filth.”

“Why do you use it, then?”

“Only because you do. If you stop, I will.”

But neither of us stopped, and soon we had corresponding screen names, area codes tacked on as surnames: Shulem914 and Gitty914. One day, she told me of a man who chatted her up via AOL’s Instant Message, a man I had encountered before in the “Jewish Community” chat room. He claimed to be a Hasid from Brooklyn. “Are you Shulem914’s wife?” he asked when he saw her screen name. When she said that she was, he referenced the few facts he knew about me, and drew her into conversation.

Later that evening, she told me about the encounter. “He ended the conversation with ‘Kiss,’” she said, and pursed her lips to stifle a giggle.

I laughed. “Clearly, you liked that.”

She turned a deep shade of crimson. “
That’s
why the Internet is so bad!”

“Why must you do these things?” Gitty asked one Friday night, when we sat alone talking after our Shabbos dinner. The children were asleep. The candles flickered at the end of the table, almost burned down, flames dancing over wide pools of molten wax in our tall silver candlesticks. Behind them stood the computer cabinet, its doors now closed and the computer hidden, locked so that a child would not accidentally pull the door open and spoil the Shabbos atmosphere.

I didn’t know why I did these things. I didn’t know why I could not resist listening to the radio or reading newspapers or visiting the library or interacting with strangers on the Internet.

“What would happen if you stopped?”

Gitty was a practical person with practical questions. Couldn’t I make a list of pros and cons, and see, as she did, that I would lose nothing?

“Maybe you need to study more,” Gitty said.

My interest in religious texts was waning, and I grew lax with my evening study sessions with Motty. At first, I’d begun showing up ten minutes late, then twenty. Some days, I wouldn’t make it at all. Soon Motty, too, would show up late or not at all.

Still, every so often, Motty and I would recommit, tell each other we had to take our studies more seriously. I would make a renewed effort to attend prayer services more diligently, instead of rushing through them like a chore. And as I’d sway over my Talmud, or during prayers, or on the bleachers during the rebbe’s tischen, I would think about the fact that I was allowing new ideas into my head.

Biechel. Kol bo’eho lo yeshuvun.
All who go to her do not return.

I would remember the words of Reb Hillel, and wonder if indeed something was changing, and I would realize that Gitty was right. Something was being lost, an innocence slipping away while I stood and watched, one moment reaching out to hold on to it and the next moment letting go, only to reach out again for a final futile grasp.