All Who Go Do Not Return (33 page)

One Saturday morning, I discovered that the yeshiva building across the plaza was unlocked. The building was cleared of its usual bustle, and I wandered the corridors, peering into empty lecture rooms in which, all week long, students gathered to study the laws of betrothal and divorce, property damages and court-ordered floggings, sacrificial lambs and burning red heifers. At the end of the corridor were the doors to the cavernous study hall, now completely empty. It was the perfect place for a heretic to pass the time while everyone else prayed.

The first few weeks, I brought along a book, but soon I realized I was not alone. In an alcove of the study hall, or in some of the farther lecture rooms, I began to find other men passing the time, sometimes in twos and threes. Each was there for his own reason—some simply disliked the crowds in shul, others just didn’t care for prayer—and within several months, we came to form a group that gathered each Saturday morning. While the rest of the village men spent three hours praying, reading from the Torah, and engaging in the tedious call-and-response between prayer leader and congregation, I, along with Yitzy Ruttner, Hershy Brizel, the three Dunner brothers, and several others, would gather to discuss the important topics of the day—general news, Hasidic politics, community gossip—identical to the discussions one heard in the ritual bath, in the shul’s coffee room, or the yeshiva dining room.

There was one difference: this was one place in which I could speak my mind. We were all deviants in one way or another, of various ages, but mostly twentysomethings. Most of these men were unmarried and drifting toward the fringes. Some of them watched movies, listened to secular music, and occasionally sneaked out of the village to play blackjack at Atlantic City casinos. They were an intelligent group, and while few of them had given issues of faith much thought before, they were not bothered by my views. The fact that I considered the parting of the Red Sea a fanciful myth, that I was fairly certain that our prayers reached no heavenly ears, that I saw our worldview as backward and fanatical—it was all fine with them.

One week, we had a newcomer: Leiby Einstein. Nineteen years old, he had a boyish smile and dark chocolate-brown sidelocks framing his mildly acne-ridden face.

Leiby was not a stranger to me. His father had been the yeshiva dean in my time, and his older brother Menashe had been my classmate and best friend. Leiby and I weren’t formally introduced, but I noticed from across the table that I’d caught his attention in some way. He kept looking toward me, throwing me uneasy glances, nervously raising his right hand to twirl the base of his sidelock, sometimes wrapping the lock of hair tightly around his index finger and releasing it into a perfectly coiled spring. He said little. Every few moments, he would bite his lower lip, as if uninterested in the conversation but expecting something more momentous to happen. Finally, during a lull, when Yitzy and one of the Dunner brothers left to fetch coffee from the enormous urn in the coffee room near the dean’s office, Leiby came around to my side of the table.

“I’ve been wanting to talk to you,” he said.

We stepped away a few paces from the group. He was interested in computers and computer programming, he said. He’d heard that I worked as a programmer. Could we chat about it?

“Sure,” I said. “We can talk computers.”

He looked at me as if unsure where to go with that. Over in the corner, the group laughed raucously over a comment someone had made. Leiby looked back nervously, and then turned back to me.

“There are other things.” He raised his hand to pat his sidelock, and chuckled. “I don’t know what you believe. Maybe you’ll disagree with me.” Looking away, as if speaking to some invisible presence off to the side, he said, “Yitzy told me you might be a person I can talk to. I don’t believe in any of this anymore.”

“Don’t believe in what?”

He looked at me directly now and shook his head. “None of it. God. The Torah. This whole lifestyle. There’s no truth to the things we’re taught. We just accept it, without thinking. But none of it is based on truth.” His eyes searched mine for a sign of understanding, his fingers never leaving his right sidelock. When I asked how he had come to all this, he told me that he’d found his way onto the Internet several months earlier—he’d managed to get himself a laptop and discovered an old phone jack in his bedroom, to which he was able to hook up a dial-up modem—and had begun to research how we knew the things we knew.

“I don’t know your beliefs,” Leiby said again, almost apologetically. “But it’s pretty clear, the rabbis have been making shit up!” His voice now had an edge to it, betraying an inner rage that had until now been suppressed. “For thousands of years, they’ve been making shit up! And we just believe it!”

The next week, and the week after, Leiby joined our group, and each time, he would call me away to share his thoughts. He needed someone to talk to, someone who wouldn’t judge him. I was nearly thirty. I had a job in Manhattan. I could read English books. I was the elder man of wisdom.

Finally, one week he told me, “I want to leave. This place has nothing for me.” His father had only recently stopped beating him, he said, when he realized that Leiby, at nineteen, could easily overpower his paunchy five-foot frame. Now, his father only abused him verbally, calling him a “bum” and a “small-brained
am hu’uretz
,” illiterate in matters of Jewish learning. Leiby had no interest in sticking around for more of his abuse. He already had plans to leave and was just waiting for the right moment. He was going to join the army, he said.

As we chatted, Leiby and I moved toward the front of the study hall. The windows faced the shul across the plaza, and through them we could see hundreds of swaying worshipers, the late-morning sun glistening off the silver brocade adornments of their prayer shawls.

“Why the army?” I asked.

“Where else could I go? I want to learn about the outside world. Goyish culture. I want to see what it’s about.” The army, he thought, would give him the structure he needed for a soft landing—feed him, house him, and give him access to a social life he would otherwise struggle to find. I was impressed with how much thought he’d given to this.

Services were soon over, and through the windows we watched as a trickle of men left the shul. Moments later, the trickle turned into a sea of white prayer shawls and black shtreimels.

“I might have another suggestion. Let’s get out of here, we’ll talk on the way.” I grabbed my prayer shawl, still lying folded on a nearby table, flung it over my shoulders, and we headed out, joining the masses of men and boys heading home. We walked along Washington Avenue, alongside the bright blue posters taped onto lampposts and mailboxes designating it the “Men’s Side.” Leiby looked at me eagerly as we walked. “What’s your suggestion?”

“Have you looked into going to college?”

He looked at me as if I’d suggested something at once brilliant and baffling. “I—I don’t—” he stammered, but then looked as if something had just clicked in his mind: “You think I can get in?”

Like most boys in New Square, Leiby had little secular education. He had taught himself to read English but could barely speak it or write it. I told Leiby what I knew about college, which wasn’t much. My own secular studies had been better than his, and I’d taught myself a lot over the years, but my education still contained vast gaps. Still, in a village where grown men turned with grudging admiration to anyone who could read an English-language newspaper on his own, I was the expert on all things worldly.

“The army is a fine idea, if that’s what you want. But know your options. In the outside world, most kids your age are headed to college. Look into it.”

Several weeks later, Leiby told me of his decision. He had discovered an organization in Manhattan called Footsteps, which offered educational assistance to ex-Hasidim. Through it, he found tutoring help for English and math and assistance with applying to college. He spoke excitedly about his plans, of GEDs and college admissions and FAFSAs. He still had many hurdles but was determined. Through Craigslist, he found a place to live in Brooklyn, a three-roommate share in Brighton Beach, and was planning, as soon as he passed his GED exam, to enroll in Kingsborough, a two-year community college.

“I’ll probably major in some liberal arts field,” he said, and when I nodded approvingly, he said. “You know what a major is, right?”

“Of course,” I said. I was only vaguely familiar with the term and wasn’t sure what liberal arts were, but it sounded as though he was on the right track.

I remember parting from Leiby that day, lost in my thoughts, a powerful pang of envy hitting me. Leiby’s desire to join the army had struck me as fancifully adolescent, but college was a different matter. I had encouraged him, partly driven by my own wistfulness for the opportunity. Now that his plans were taking shape, I couldn’t help thinking about myself.

A short while later, Gitty and I sat down to our Shabbos lunch with our children. As I watched my daughters bring out dishes of hummus, sour pickles, egg salad, and chopped liver and lay them across our dining-room table, I thought of the chaos that would ensue, were I, too, to split from the community. I imagined the friends who would no longer acknowledge me on the street, the shuls in which I would no longer be welcome; imagined my family broken apart, my children traumatized by the knowledge of a father ostracized from the only world they knew. I imagined my mother’s tears, the pleadings of my siblings to reconsider, to spare them the shame. Not only would I become a pariah, but my children would also be forever stigmatized, the offspring of a heretic, their reputations blemished by the sins of their father and unfit for marriage with the devout. Most likely, my children would be forced to sever all contact with me, the only way in which to redeem themselves.

We took our seats around our dining-room table: Gitty and I at either end; the girls—Tziri, Freidy, and Chaya Suri—on one side; the boys—Akiva and Hershy—on the other. Together we sang the opening verses of the kiddush before the blessing over wine, the boys’ voices loud and eager, the girls, less enthusiastic, mouthing the words lazily, tapping their fingers lightly on the white tablecloth. Gitty swayed along silently.

I cut open the golden-brown challahs and passed around slices. Gitty disappeared into the kitchen and returned with platters of gefilte fish, jellied p’tcha, and a large bowl of steaming chulent. I remember watching as my family went about their ordinary Sabbath lunch, watching as if I were not part of them, as if through the glimmering sheen of a thick pane of glass between us.

A single sour pickle remained on a dish in the middle of the table, and Chaya Suri reached for it, while Tziri and Freidy, forever mothering her, gave her disapproving looks.

“There are plenty more pickles in the fridge,” I remember Gitty saying, with the calm grace that seemed to envelop her on the Sabbath.

I remember how, facing the girls from across the table, Akiva held up the edge of one of his ritual fringes and brushed it lightly into Hershy’s ear. Hershy, startled, slapped his ear with the back of his hand, as if to drive away an insect. I remember the girls laughing, now forgetting their quarrel over the pickles, and Gitty, suppressing a chuckle herself, scolding Akiva, who smirked, red-faced. Hershy forked a piece of gefilte fish into a small dish of beet horseradish, and then, noticing the girls’ laughter as he brought his fork to his mouth, barely missed his nose.

Through it all, I could think only: How could I possibly leave all this?

We finished eating, then sang the hymns for the Sabbath meal, the children following along in their
bentchers
, the small hymn-readers passed around as mementos at family weddings.

I looked at my children around the table and knew that I could never leave. Leiby would go on to live a free life, but I would remain, in our suburban American shtetl, its men consumed with the study of ritual law, its women scurrying aside on the streets so as not to tempt them, its children content without art and science,
Star Wars
, and video games.

The call to appear before the bezdin came several days after Leiby’s departure. Word traveled fast, and for days the village was abuzz with the news that Leiby Einstein had left his parents’ home to “live with goyim and go to college.” Leiby would tell me later that before he left, he visited a barbershop outside the village, where his long dark sidecurls were swept off the barbershop floor and into the trash can. After his haircut, he visited a nearby shopping mall, where he bought a pair of jeans, several T-shirts, and a pair of sneakers. He moved out of his parents’ home without so much as a glance at his wide-brimmed hat and long coat hanging in his bedroom closet along with his black pants and white shirts.

“Word has it that it’s all your fault,” my friend Yitzy Ruttner told me on the phone.

Leiby and I had been seen together on several occasions, and it was rumored that I’d talked him into his decision. Even prior to this, people had begun to say that I was no longer a Hasid, that I scorned our traditions, that I was an
apikorus
, a nonbeliever. My act had begun to disintegrate. Until Leiby left, however, the idea that there lived a heretic among them seemed too strange to New Square’s residents. “There are no real heretics nowadays,” people were accustomed to saying. Now, it appeared, they had changed their minds.

On the day that the call came from the bezdin, I had a conversation with Leiby’s brother-in-law, Yossi Pal. I had been driving down Bush Lane in my Honda Odyssey, a block from my home, when Yossi, walking home from the kollel with his blue-and-gold velvet prayer-shawl pouch under his arm, was walking toward me. Our eyes met as I drove. His eyebrows went up in a flash of recognition, and he waved for me to stop.