All Who Go Do Not Return (2 page)

Now, once again I walked up the familiar flight of stairs onto the weather-beaten wooden porch and knocked on the door. Through a window I could see the light on, and from inside came voices, vehement ones, argumentative, disturbed. I waited a few moments and knocked again, and the door was opened by Yechiel Spitzer, who gestured to a small room off to the side.

“Wait there,” he said curtly, and disappeared into the dayan’s office across the hall. I sat in an old chair near a small table and listened to the hum of voices coming from the next room. After a few minutes, Berish Greenblatt joined me. Berish and I had been close for years, ever since he had been my teacher at a Brooklyn school when I was a teenager and he’d invited me to his home for the Sabbath when my father was ill and in the hospital. Now, years later, we had grown apart—he, still the pious scholarly type and I the rumored heretic. Still, his presence was comforting, even though neither of us knew what to expect.

Soon we were summoned into the dayan’s office. The dayan sat at the center of a small table strewn with religious texts, surrounded by two other rabbis of the bezdin and four other men, leading members of the community.

The dayan smiled warmly, almost beatifically, his face framed in his sprawling gray beard.

“Sit, sit,” he said, and pointed to an empty chair facing him across the table.

I sat and looked around, while Berish took a seat behind me. The men facing me were pressed tightly together, nervously fingering the books on the table, stroking their beards and tugging at their mustaches. A few exchanged whispered remarks, and soon one of the men began to speak. His name was Mendel Breuer, a man known for both shrewdness and piety. It was said that he was as comfortable negotiating a voting bloc for an elected official as he was delivering a Talmud lecture to a group of businessmen each morning.

“We have heard rumors,” Mendel began. “We have heard rumors and we don’t know if they’re true, but you understand, rumors alone are bad.”

He paused and looked at me, as if expecting me to show agreement of some sort.

“People say you’re an
apikorus.
People say you don’t believe in God.” He raised his shoulders to his ears, spread his palms, and opened his eyes wide. “How does one not believe in God? I don’t know.” He said this as if he were genuinely curious. Mendel was an intelligent man, and here was a question that, given the time and inclination, one might seek to discuss. But now was not the time, and so he went on to tell me more about what people were saying.

I was speaking ill of the rebbe.

I was no longer praying.

I disparaged the Torah and the teachings of our sages.

I was corrupting other people. Young people. Innocent people.

In fact, people were saying that I had corrupted a yeshiva boy just last week. Corrupted him so badly that the boy left his parents’ home, and—Mendel didn’t know if this was true, but so people were saying—went to live with goyim in Brooklyn. It was rumored that the boy planned to attend college.

People were saying, Mendel further informed me, that something must be done. People were very concerned, and people were saying that the bezdin must act.

“If people are saying that the bezdin must act, you understand, we can’t very well do nothing.”

Yechiel Spitzer, sitting at the very end of the table, twirled a few hairs beneath his lower lip and absentmindedly placed one hair between his front teeth. The three rabbis sat with their eyes downcast.

“You understand,” Mendel went on, “that this is not about causing pain to you or your family.”

Here he paused and looked at the dayan, before putting his palms flat on the table and looking at me directly.

“We have come to the conclusion that you must leave the village.”

I was being expelled, though in those moments, I wasn’t sure how to feel about it. My initial thought was to defend myself, to declare it all lies, hateful gossipmongering. But the truth was, I no longer belonged here. This was a community of the faithful, and I was no longer one of them.

And yet, to be expelled was different from leaving voluntarily. To be expelled is to be rejected, and to be rejected is to be disgraced. There were also Gitty and the children to think about. This village was the place Gitty and I had called home for the twelve years of our marriage. It was where our five children were born and where they had dozens of cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents, all within a ten-minute walk from any point in the village. This was our hometown. Only two years earlier, we’d purchased a four-bedroom semi-attached townhouse, imagining we’d be living there for a good portion of the rest of our lives. It was not a luxurious home, but it was spacious and sunny and fresh—we bought it new, the smell of paint and polyurethane still in the air the day we moved in—and we had grown fond of it. We’d planted a tree in the front yard. We’d gotten a good price on the house and an excellent rate on the mortgage.

And so I told the rabbis that it wasn’t at all a straightforward matter.

“I am happy to go home and discuss it with my wife. And then, if we agree to leave, I would have to find a buyer for my home.”

I knew the rabbis wouldn’t be pleased with my response, but unlike those who had been expelled in the past, I was bolder. I was more informed. This was America in the twenty-first century. You couldn’t force people from their homes unless you were the government, and the bezdin wasn’t the government.

The men looked at one another gravely. Even the dayan—who had been nodding along throughout Mendel’s little speech, occasionally glancing my way with a faint smile, his expression empathic, as if to say,
I’m sorry, my friend, sorry it has come to this
—now looked perturbed.

Mendel looked at one of the other rabbis, who seemed to think for a moment and then said,
“Nu.”
Mendel withdrew a folded white sheet of paper from the breast pocket of his coat. “This,” Mendel said, pushing the document across the table, “is what we will have to publicize if you don’t comply. You may read it.”

The document took the form of an open letter, the kind that could be published in newspapers, hung on synagogue doorways, and stuck to the walls above synagogue sinks. It was written in florid rabbinical Hebrew, heavy with biblical and talmudic wordplay.

The document went on to call on all God-fearing Jews to dissociate from me in all matters. I was not to be hired as an employee or allowed residence in their homes. I was to be excluded from their prayer quorums and denied entry to their synagogues. My children were to be denied admission to their schools.

My hands trembled as I finished reading the document and laid it back on the table.

“We’re not sending this out
yet
,” Mendel said, as he placed the document back in his coat pocket. “Comply with our orders, and we’ll keep this to ourselves. Otherwise, you understand, we’ll have no choice.”

I looked around at the rabbis. The dayan looked at me with sad eyes, while the other rabbis looked away.

“That is all,” Mendel said.

I waited for the rabbis to rise. But they just sat there, and so I sat there, too, vaguely stunned.

One of the rabbis looked up at me. “I hope you’ll come back to visit,” he said.

The dayan nodded along: “Yes, yes, come back to visit.”

“You can stay at my place, your whole family,” the other rabbi said, and for a moment I thought, how kind of him, this rabbi who hadn’t said a word through the whole meeting and with whom I’d never spoken before. But I didn’t yet know how to feel about this, and I didn’t yet know how to feel about this rabbi or the bezdin. But mostly, I was thinking about how I would tell Gitty and the children. There would be tears. There would be cries of shame. There would be pleas to ask the bezdin to reconsider.

But it was just as well. I no longer belonged here, in this village, in this community, among these people. It would not be easy, but this was bound to happen. It was time to go.

I have an image in my mind of the moment I realized that I was a nonbeliever. I don’t remember the day, or the month, or even the exact year, but only where I was and what I was doing. It was morning. I had woken late and was rushing through my morning routine. I was no longer praying at the shul, but I still prayed, alone at home, choosing only the important passages—the first and last sections of the Verses of Song, the Shema, the Shmoneh Esreh—and skipping the rest. I no longer found prayer meaningful but still kept up the routine, partly out of habit but also out of fear of displeasing Gitty. If she knew that I no longer prayed, there was no telling how she would react.

I remember that I was in the dining room, and through the thin walls I could hear Gitty busy in the kitchen: “Akiva, finish your toast,” “Freidy, stop bothering the baby and get dressed,” “Tziri, brush your hair and get your backpack.” The sounds all blended together. One by one, each of the children recited the morning blessings, groaned about unfinished homework assignments, lost shoes, misplaced hair accessories. I swung my prayer shawl over my shoulders, whipped up my sleeve, and wrapped the leather straps of my tefillin around my arm. And as I stood there, the black leather cube on my left arm bulging against the sleeve of my starched white shirt, my body enveloped in the large, white, black-striped shawl, the thought came to me:

I no longer believe in any of this.

I am a heretic. An
apikorus.

For a long time, I had tried to deny it. A mere sinner has hope:
An Israelite, although he has sinned, is still an Israelite
, the Talmud says. But a heretic is lost forever.
All who go do not return.
The Torah scroll he writes is to be burned. He is no longer counted in a prayer quorum, his food is not considered kosher, his lost objects are not returned to him, he is unfit to testify in court. An outcast, he wanders alone forever, belonging neither to his own people nor to any other.

It was at that moment, sometime between fastening the knot of my tefillin against my occipital bone and racing through whatever chapters of prayer I still chose to recite, that I realized that my heresy was simply a fact about myself, no different from my brown eyes or my pale skin.

But being a heretic was not a simple matter. Gitty and I, along with our five children, were living in New Square, a village thirty miles north of New York City inhabited entirely by Hasidic Jews of one particular sect: the Skverers. The village had been established in the 1950s by the grand rebbe of Skver, Reb Yankev Yosef Twersky, a scion of the Chernobyl and Skver Hasidic dynasties. Stepping off the boat in New York Harbor in 1948, the rebbe, who had been raised in the town of Skvyra, Ukraine, took in the city’s aura of decadence and said to his followers, “If I had the courage, I would get right back on that boat and return to Europe.” Instead, he set out to build his own village, an American shtetl. He was told that it was impossible, that America was not a place for shtetls, and that his plan would surely fail. It almost did.

For decades, his followers would tell of endless obstacles in building the village: hostile neighbors, an uncooperative town board, building materials stolen by the very truck drivers who delivered them, endless problems with sewage systems and badly paved roads. But the rebbe persisted. According to legend, a county clerk, listening to a group of bearded Jews declare that they wanted their new town called “New Skvyra,” wrote “New Square” instead, and this Anglicized form of the name was now official.

But if the name sounded American, the village itself was anything but. Some people would later say to me: “Of course you became a heretic. You lived in a place so sheltered, among such fanatics.” It was often Hasidim who said this: Satmars and Belzers and Lubavitchers, no strangers to fanaticism. New Square was a place that even extremists thought too extreme, where even fanatics shook their heads in dismay.
This
, they seemed to say, is taking it too far.
This
is just crazy.

At first, I questioned only the authority of the rebbe, the wisdom of the Hasidic masters, and the particulars of our ultraconservative and insular lifestyle. Soon, however, I was treading on more fraught territory: I wondered whether the Talmud truly contained the word of God, and then I wondered about the Torah itself. Was any of it true? And God Himself, where was He and who was to know what He wanted or whether He existed at all?

In the beginning, all I had were questions. But even asking questions was forbidden.

“Isn’t Judaism all about asking questions?” people would later ask. “Isn’t the Talmud filled with questions?”

The Judaism that is familiar to most liberal Jews is not the Judaism of the Hasidim, nor is it the Judaism of the Baal Shem Tov, or Rashi, or Rabbi Akiva. The Judaism of our ancient texts allows for questions, true, but they must be of a certain kind and they must be asked just so.
He who inquires about these four things
, says the Talmud,
it is better if he were never born: What is above, what is below, what is the past, what is the future.
If one is plagued by questions for which there are no answers, it is not the fault of our faith but the fault of the questioner, who has surely not prayed enough, studied enough, cleansed his heart and mind enough so that the wisdom of the Torah might penetrate his soul and make all questions fall away.

“What made you change?” people would ask in later years, and the question would frustrate me because the things that made me change were so many and varied that they felt simply as life feels: not a single moment of transformation but a process, a journey of inquiry and discovery, of beliefs and challenges to those beliefs, of uncomfortable questions and attempts to do away with them, by brute force if necessary, only to find that that was not possible, that the search was too urgent and necessary and giving up was not an option. Yet I found no neat answers but only muddled and contradictory ones, until hope gave way to disillusion, which would in turn give way to hope once again, but dimmer and weaker each time, until I would swing back to confusion and disillusion in an endlessly maddening cycle.