All Who Go Do Not Return (21 page)

“Faith,” said the master Reb Mendel of Vitebsk, “is to believe without reason whatsoever.” Anything else leads to an erosion of our pure faith and, ultimately, to heresy.

Chezky ended up staying in New York. “There is kiruv work in the U.S., too,” he said. He got a position on the faculty of Ohr Somayach, a kiruv yeshiva in Monsey. The yeshiva had been founded in the 1980s, in a few dilapidated buildings on a sprawling property at the corner of Route 306 and Viola Road in Monsey. Now, in the late 1990s, with the kiruv enterprise gaining popular support, it had upgraded to state-of-the-art facilities, with new, beautifully constructed study halls, dormitories, and library.

Through Chezky, I came to know more about this yeshiva. It targeted college kids of the MTV generation. The students were law- and med-school graduates from prestigious universities, with homes and two-car garages in the suburbs, content with their professional lives but looking to round them out with a bit of tradition.

This yeshiva was “open-minded,” Chezky explained, and to describe just how open-minded it was, he told me of a student who was expelled for wearing a hat.

“There’s a process,” Chezky explained. “Not everyone’s ready for a hat. You need the dean’s permission.”

This was not a Hasidic institution, and it didn’t want students going off to explore streams of Orthodoxy that it had not itself advocated. All inquiry must be done just so.

Chezky and I soon became close friends, although it was not an easy friendship. Chezky’s views threatened mine. In spite of myself, we would often circle back to discussions of faith, how best to maintain a religious worldview within a modern world.

“I’m afraid that he’ll change you,” Gitty would say, and I wondered whether she was right. There were days when I was determined to cut ties with him. There was something powerfully alluring about his views, and I worried that his arguments would cause my own convictions to falter. The very possibility that there existed a rational basis for our beliefs was intriguing, and I couldn’t help but wonder: Can faith claims really be proved? Can one use logic to comprehend fundamentally incomprehensible notions? Could we really understand God’s existence as a
scientific
or even a philosophical matter? Could one possibly provide evidence for the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai? For the crossing of the Red Sea? I couldn’t imagine it, but if it was possible, as Chezky claimed, then wouldn’t it only strengthen my faith? A part of me felt a burning curiosity, but the Hasid in me knew that it was a muddy path to tread; I might come out with my faith intact but dirtied beyond real cleansing. My pure and simple beliefs, still sparkling and unsoiled, would suffer. I didn’t want to go there.

I’d already had a faith crisis once. I was fifteen, at summer camp in the Catskill Mountains, in Swan Lake, New York, when I shared the crisis with my friend Menashe Einstein. Menashe and I were best friends, both of us brooding and dreamy adolescents, anxious about life and our futures. Often we would head into the woods behind the bunkhouses, past dense thickets of shrubs and tangles of brushwood, past discarded and rusting farm implements at least a century old, past steep hills and tall cliffs to a clearing of tall grass and bright sunshine. There, we’d sit on a large rock at the edge of the meadow, hoping to keep as far as we could from the camp’s study hall for as long as possible.

One day, I told Menashe that I was having doubts. I wondered how we really knew the things we knew, whether heaven and hell really existed, whether the rebbe was truly saintly, whether Moses really split the Red Sea for the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians, and whether those Israelites and Egyptians and Moses ever existed at all.

Menashe looked thoughtful as he ran his fingers over a blade of grass rising from a patch of soil between the rocks. “I read somewhere,” he said after a few moments of silence, “that doubts are a result of Strange Thoughts.”

Strange Thoughts was how our books referred to forbidden lust, and I felt embarrassed during that moment because it meant that Menashe knew I was having Strange Thoughts, although Menashe had said it casually, as if he, too, were familiar with my dilemma. I wondered if he, too, had Strange Thoughts. Whether he, too, found the thoughts entering his mind during the silent portion of prayer, as he prayed for God to
grant us knowledge and wisdom…. Raise a cure for our maladies…. Return with mercy to Your city of Jerusalem
and in his mind would be images of Reb Chezkel’s twin teenage daughters, their chestnut hair in tight ponytails, jumping rope outside the camp’s dining hall. I wondered whether Menashe, too, had a sister, like mine, who brought friends home, and he would find himself thinking about them at night, when he lay in bed and tried to sleep.

After my conversation with Menashe, I tried hard not to have Strange Thoughts because if they led to doubts they weren’t worth it. Strange Thoughts were bad, but doubts were more unsettling. If one doubted that the word of God was indeed the word of God, if none of it was true, then one would, logically, have to become
frei
, which was as bad as being a goy, and what kind of life would that be?

So I monitored my thoughts for signs of Strangeness. Mornings, when I walked the short distance between the bunkhouse and the ritual bath near the camp’s parking lot, I took a circuitous route. Instead of taking the gravel road that passed along the camp’s dining room, where women and teenage girls, wives and daughters of our teachers, would congregate for breakfast, I would edge along the side of the woods, behind the bunkhouses and the cluster of bungalows for the counselors and teachers, until I reached the mikveh. Afterward, I would return the same way, and remove my eyeglasses in case a girl or a woman appeared suddenly. At night, when I lay in bed, I’d catch a stray fantasy of my sister’s friend Rachy worming into my semiconscious mind, a blurry image of a bouncing ponytail and a knee-length, pleated navy-blue skirt. I would slap my palm against the side of my head, remind myself that I’d gone a full week without waking to a wet reminder of a sinful dream, and that it would be a terrible thing if I let my guard down. I would think of a verse of Psalms or a passage of Mishna and hope that the Strange Thought would disappear. Above all, though, I would think of the creeping doubts and the weakness of my faith, and I knew that I must banish the Strange Thoughts if only to banish the doubts.

Strange Thoughts, however, kept up their ebb and flow throughout my adolescence, often appearing during the strangest times, creeping through the musty yellowed pages of old Talmud volumes, through evenings spent in song and Hasidic tales, through nights filled with dancing at the rebbe’s tischen—always, in a weak moment, they appeared, thoughts of flesh and forbidden passions.

But I conquered the doubts. Apparently, they were unconnected.

He’emanti ki adaber.
Avremel Shayevitz would later bang his fist on the table, repeating the words of Reb Mordche of Lechevitch: “
He’emanti
, I will believe!
Ki adaber
, when I speak words of faith! Speak words of faith, and your faith will be strong!”

And so each morning at the end of prayers, as I wrapped the black leather straps around my tefillin cases, the smell of French toast and scrambled eggs wafting up from the yeshiva dining room, I recited the Thirteen Principles of Faith, slowly and deliberately, hoping, praying for the conviction of the words:

Walking each morning from the dormitory building to the ritual bath to the yeshiva study hall, I would repeat to myself the words:
Ani ma’amin be’emunah sheleimah.
Over and over again, like a mantra, hundreds, thousands of times. “I believe with perfect faith. I believe with perfect faith.” And then I would speak the words of the great master, Reb Mendel of Vitebsk:
To have faith is to believe blindly, to demand no proofs, no evidence, no logic. To have faith is to believe without reason whatsoever.

More powerful than mantras, however, more powerful than the words of Avremel Shayevitz, or of Reb Mendel of Vitebsk, was simply this: If my faith fell apart, what was I to do then? If I stopped believing, did that mean I would stop keeping kosher? Stop keeping Shabbos? Waltz into shul without my hat? What, then, would the matchmakers say?

My friendship with Chezky would eventually lead me back to questions of faith, but in the meantime, there were more immediate concerns. In November 1997, our daughter Chaya Suri was born. At twenty-four, with three children, five mouths to feed, and little by way of job security, I could think only about how to make ends meet.

One winter Friday, three months past due on rent, our landlord threatening eviction, Gitty and I pooled our personal valuables. I brought out the gold pocket watch that Gitty’s father had given me after our engagement. Gitty brought out the gold bracelet and necklace she’d received from my mother. We estimated their total original value at about $3,000.

I gave her one last look before I stepped out. “You sure?”

Gitty was kneeling by the fridge, rummaging in the vegetable bins. Freidy, aged three, stood near her, staring into those bins as if they contained some plaything better than the secondhand, off-brand pink plastic kitchen set across the room.

“I’m sure,” she said, without looking up. “When do I even wear them?”

“One day, I will buy you the most expensive pearl necklace money can buy.”

Gitty looked up and smiled, a little sadly, I thought, as I headed out the door to a local pawnshop.

“What’s it say?” the man at the pawnshop asked, as he inspected the engraved inscription on the back of my pocket watch.

“It’s Hebrew. My name. And a blessing.” It hadn’t occurred to me that he’d care.

“What’s the blessing?” he asked, fingering the rough texture of the engraved text.

I wasn’t sure how to translate it. “
For an everlasting union …
Sort of.”

The man grunted, and took the items to a back room. An elderly woman with a small dog walked in. I watched her go directly to the other side of the counter. For a moment, I thought she was a brazen burglar, until she continued to the back room, and I heard her say, “Did you have lunch, Mor?”

A few minutes later, the man returned.

“Four hundred,” he said.

It was barely a half-month’s rent, but I was desperate. The landlord wasn’t very pleased, but I promised to have more soon, and we survived to worry another day, another week, another month. We never knew quite how we did it, but somehow we managed, always in the nick of time, barely avoiding the electricity being cut off or the phone line being disconnected.

Why did it have to be this way? I wondered. And how did others do it?

I knew how others did it: with difficulty. Most of my friends from yeshiva were living the same way, either still studying at the kollel, or teaching at the cheder, and struggling, making do with whatever they could—yeshiva vouchers, food stamps, Section 8. They went from one poor moneymaking idea to the next. One friend bought a popcorn machine, set it up in his basement, and offered home deliveries around the village. Another set up a table outside the shul, selling noise-conditioning devices for people with sleep problems.

My friend Yakov Mayer was the most ambitious of all. He was two years older than I and already had six children, including a set of triplets. He, too, was desperate for a way to feed them all, and his latest idea was selling life insurance.

“There’s decent money in it,” he said, as he tried to sell me a policy and, at the same time, to explain his choice of trade.

“
If
you can sell policies,” I said. He hadn’t sold a single one yet.

He nodded. “If I can sell policies.” He looked at me keenly, as if pleading for my approval. “It’s only been three months, though.”

Yakov Mayer had found his idea, but I hadn’t yet found mine. Teaching at the cheder hadn’t turned into the career I thought it would. I had grown tired of writing fraudulent progress reports, tired of worrying that the government would come investigating, tired of running after parents for their share of the payment, and so, in July 1997, when my friend Motty proposed that we start a business together, I gave up my work at the cheder and decided to become a businessman.

Motty had the idea that we could package nuts and dried fruits and other healthful snacks and sell them to snack shops and convenience stores across the tristate area. I knew nothing about running a business, but I liked Motty’s idea, and so I borrowed a few thousand dollars from several free loan societies around New Square and Monsey, and pinned our family’s hopes on popular appetites for salted cashews and sugared pineapple chunks.

We kept the business running for about two years, and I would later marvel that we’d kept it that long. I was too timid to push our product on uninterested customers, too impulsive with purchasing new office equipment, too dreamy to pay much attention to the
business
of running a business and more interested in creating pretty-looking cash-flow reports using a secondhand, DOS-based computer, with its text-based interface and incessant, blinking command-line cursor. I also really enjoyed buying office supplies: desks and file cabinets and staplers that worked so well that you wanted to do nothing but staple all day until the stapler broke and you were forced to buy a new one—an electronic one this time, for double the stapling fun.

In April 1999, Motty and I faced the fact that our business had yet to turn a profit. We put an ad in one of the Yiddish newspapers, and sold it all—the account lists and the computer and our weighing and bagging equipment and our heat sealers and the Chevy cargo van with which we made our deliveries.