The Penitent

by Isaac Bashevis Singer

  Although the Jewish political leaders strove to be exactly as diplomatic and dialectical as the Gentile—this didn’t diminish the age-old hatred of the Jews. No matter how much the Jew has tried to imitate the Gentile, he has remained alien and despised. He still could not be forgiven the sin of not cutting himself off completely from his old heritage, his “arrogance” at refusing to integrate fully with those who burned his holy books and murdered his children. In their hatred of the Jews, there was no difference between the Hitlers and the Stalins.

  That night, I slept in the kibbutz. I had passed by the building where the meeting was being held and I overheard an old comrade accuse the audience of having cooled on the socialist ideals and of leaning toward nationalism. He spoke with fervor, he ranted, he slammed his fist against the table. He called the rabbis in Israel reactionary clericals, black crows who wanted to turn back the wheels of history. I wanted to ask him, “Where do the wheels of history lead? How can you be so sure that the wheels of history won’t get bogged down in blood and marrow again?” But I went to sleep instead.

  Sleep—that’s a joke. Actually I hardly slept that night. I seemed to see Jews digging their own graves while the Nazis stood around and drove them on with whips: “Faster! Deeper!” I saw them lead Jewish men and women to the ovens. I saw drunken Germans torturing Jews with every possible method devised by that “distinguished author,” the Marquis de Sade, and by other such “greats.” They were all integral parts of the worldly culture—Hitler and Stalin, Napoleon and Bismarck, all the whores, pimps, pornographers, all those who threw bombs, carried out raids, sent whole peoples to Siberia or to the gas chambers. Even Al Capone and Jack the Ripper were part of this culture. There isn’t a scoundrel about whom the professors don’t write books, do research into his psychological makeup, provide countless excuses for his deeds …

  That night, I came to the final conclusion that not only must I abandon the culture that had spawned and justified all this evil and falseness but I must also turn to the very opposite of it. I must become someone as far removed from this kind of culture as our grandfathers had been. I must become that which they had been: Talmud Jews, Jews of the Gemara, of the Midrash, of Rashi, of the Zohar, of The Beginning of Wisdom, of The Two Tablets of the Covenant. Only such a Jew is separated from the wicked. The slightest compromise that you make with the pagan culture of our time is a gesture toward evil, a nod to a world of murder, idolatry, and adultery.

  I must confess that at the time that I made this resolve, my faith wasn’t yet that strong. I was still completely riddled with doubt and with what I might even call heresy. I went away from evil, you might say, not so much out of love for Mordecai as out of hate for Haman. I was filled with a raging disgust against the world and against the civilization of which I was a part. I ran like a beast runs from a forest fire, like a man fleeing from a pursuing enemy.

  The very first thing the next morning I took the bus to Jerusalem.

  12

  I wandered through the narrow streets of Jerusalem. This was long before the Six-Day War. Old Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Arabs and it seemed that we would never get it back. But Meah Shearim was ours and that is where I went. And as I walked along, the Evil One harangued me: “Joseph Shapiro, where are you going? Those Jews believe every word in the Shulhan Arukh, while your head is filled with what the Bible critics wrote and the materialists preached. You can no more become one of the pious than you can become a Turk.” But I kept on going. I came to a building and saw a house of prayer. It was a study house of the Sandzer Hasidim.

  Before I go on, I must tell you that during my week and a half in Tel Aviv I had encountered quite a bit of snobbism toward me and my kind. Those born in Israel, the so-called Sabras, consider us Diaspora Jews aliens, especially if we don’t speak Hebrew with their pronunciation and with all the new words they’ve invented. The leftist Jews disdain the rightest Jews. Among the leftists themselves there are many distinctions. A member of Mapam considers a member of Mapai a reactionary. They both consider a General Zionist a bourgeois. To a Communist, they are all a bunch of fascists whom it would be a good deed to exterminate. I often heard the leftists make vicious slurs against America and American Jews. They claimed that American Jews were a bunch of moneybags and worshippers of the Golden Calf. When I reminded them that American Jews supported all the institutions in Israel, and that without them the State of Israel wouldn’t exist, they replied that the American Jews gave the money to avoid taxes and were actually indifferent about Israel.

  I heard many jeering attacks against the Hadassah women, against American rabbis, against everybody in general. I often thought: We are a small people, half of which has been annihilated, yet the remnant is consumed with such divisiveness, such antipathy. It struck me that if the Israeli Jews were no longer obliged to come to the American Jews for aid, they would spit in their faces.

  I went inside the Sandzer study house thinking that I would feel more of a stranger here than anywhere else. I was dressed in modern fashion, I had no beard, I wore no earlocks. To these Jews, I was nothing more than a blight against Jewishness. But what happened was the very opposite. I came in and felt myself transported back to my youth. Jews like my grandfather—with gray beards, earlocks, skullcaps on their heads, and wide ritual garments with long fringes—came up and greeted me. Their eyes seemed to say: “It’s true that you are alienated from us, but still you are our brother.” I saw in their eyes something that I had never seen among modern Jews: love for Jewishness, love for a fellow Jew, even if he was a sinner. It wasn’t a feigned love, it was real. Everyone can tell real love from fake.

  Several men and youths sat at tables studying the Gemara. Some studied silently, others aloud. Some sat bent over and others swayed and their earlocks swayed along rhythmically. I saw children no more than twelve or thirteen already studying the Gemara on their own. An odd kind of nobility exuded from their faces. They didn’t have to pass any tests; they didn’t need the Torah for their careers. They studied because this was the reason for which the Jew had been created. They would never receive any honors for it, and chances were they would remain paupers all their lives.

  I took out the tractate of Betzah and tried to study. I knew how little relevance it had, dealing with an egg that a hen laid on a holiday. Could the egg be eaten or not? The School of Shamai said yes, the House of Hillel said no. I need not tell you that all the Enlightened, all the enemies of Talmud, use this tractate as an example of how removed the Talmud is from the world, how little it has to do with logic, with the times, with social problems, and so forth and so on.

  “But,” I asked myself, “how is it that I feel like a stranger among modern Jews and like an intimate here?”

  When the Sandzer Hasidim saw that I had taken out a book, they grew closer to me. Men came over and greeted me and asked me where I was from. When I told them from America, they began to inquire about the Jews in America as one would ask about brothers, not about “moneybags,” “reactionaries,” and “worshippers of the Golden Calf.”

  The modern Jews only wanted to favor me with their “ideals,” but these Jews sought to attend to my body. They asked me where I was staying, and when I told them I hadn’t yet checked into a hotel, they recommended a place where I could spend the night. Unbelievable as it may sound, several of the men invited me to their homes for dinner. I could spend the night in their homes as well, they told me. They didn’t feel that one shouldn’t inquire into another’s private affairs. On the contrary, they asked me what I did for a living, if I was married, if I had children, and how long I planned to stay in Israel. They spoke to me as if they were my relatives. To the one who asked me if I had a wife, I lied by saying I was divorced, and he promptly proposed a match for me. Naturally, I assumed that he might be trying to earn a matchmaker’s fee. A young man came up and asked me for a donation. But all this was done without superciliousness and with courtesy. Since I was a Jew who looked into a Gemara, I was
one of them.

  I studied a good number of pages that day. I prayed at the evening services with the men. Between one service and the next, a circle of elderly men and youths formed around me. In America, young people look upon the older person as someone to be thrown to the dogs. There is no worse insult there than to say about someone that he has aged. When parents invite a guest, their children are rarely present. Young people in America ignore their parents. I must say that I saw the same thing among the modern people in Israel. To be young for them is considered the greatest achievement.

  I didn’t detect a trace of this among the Sandzer Hasidim. On the contrary, the youths showed genuine rather than put-on respect toward the elderly. Modern man is a thorough believer in the material world. The elderly person has already used up a great share of this world and has little left to eat, or to fornicate. But the young man still has a large reserve, and for this alone he is entitled to respect and recognition. Besides, the young person is identified with the latest fads. He is the newness, the vogue, the progress that is the idolatry of modern man.

  I spent that evening at the house of a head of a yeshiva who had invited me for dinner. I was afraid that his wife, when she saw he had brought home a guest without letting her know first, would be upset. But she was apparently used to this. I was given a skullcap and shown where to wash my hands for dinner. There was no bathroom in the apartment and the towel was not the cleanest. The mistress of the house had a wrinkled face. I gathered from her talk that she was barely past fifty. In America and even in Israel, I had seen women her age having illicit affairs, drawing alimony from husbands they had deceived, wallowing in luxury, and indulging themselves in adultery and in other wickedness. But this pious woman had long since accepted the onset of age as part of the honor of being a mother of grown children, a mother-in-law, and a grandmother. Her eyes reflected the goodness of the true Jewish mother, not the mothers mocked in books and plays, and whom American Jewish writers and some psychoanalysts consider the source of their children’s nervous afflictions.

  It may seem funny to you, but I fell in love with this woman. I realized that even from a romantic and sexual standpoint such a woman was more interesting than those old witches who dress like sixteen-year-olds, drink like sailors, curse like streetwalkers, and whose alleged love is in fact sheer hatred. It’s no wonder that so many modern men become impotent or homosexuals. You have to have queer inclinations in the first place to marry one of these.

  The man, Reb Haim, asked my reason for coming to Israel and I told him the truth: that I was disgusted by the kind of life I had been leading; that I wanted to become a Jew—a real Jew, not a nationalistic Jew or a socialist Jew, or however they call themselves.

  He said, “It’s a long time since I’ve heard such words. What do you propose to do?”

  “I’ve saved up some money. I want to pray, to study, to be a Jew.”

  “Why did you pick the Sandzer study house?”

  “I just happened to be passing by and I saw the study house. It was merely a coincidence.”

  “Coincidence? … Et …”

  Again I heard the same expression that I had heard in the old rabbi’s house in New York. These Jews didn’t believe in coincidences.

  After a while, he said, “Coincidence is chance. The Enlightened claim that the world is chance, but a Jew who has faith knows that everything is destined. Coincidence is not a kosher word …”

  13

  As you already know, I’m hardly an exponent of modern man and his literature, but Shakespeare’s contention that all the world’s a stage is a truth that is tied into faith, into the belief in Providence. Just as in a play, where the protagonist often appears in the very first scene, that’s how life is, too. You come to a foreign country, to a strange city, and you immediately meet the people who will play a vital role in your life, the chief heroes of your personal drama. That’s exactly what happened to me.

  I sat there and ate dinner at my host’s, Reb Haim’s, house, and I asked him if he had any children. He sighed and told me that he had had several children, but only one daughter was still living, and she provided him no satisfaction. It seemed that one son had volunteered for the 1948 war and had been killed by an Arab bullet. Two other children had died while still young. The one remaining daughter had married a yeshiva student but he had died six months after the wedding. She had been a widow for three years. I asked him what she did, and he said she was a seamstress who lived not far away.

  Just as we sat talking, the door opened and in came a young woman with a kerchief over her head. She looked no more than eighteen, but I later learned she was twenty-four. One look sufficed to tell me a lot about her: first of all, that hers was a rare beauty, not the kind fashioned in beauty parlors, but the beauty and charm that’s given by God.

  Secondly, I saw that she glowed with the grace of chastity. The concept that the eyes are the windows of the soul is not a mere figure of speech. You can see in a person’s eyes whether he is full of arrogance or modesty, honesty or cunning, pride or humility, fear of God or abandon. This young woman’s eyes reflected all that is good about the Jew. Her gaze revealed all the great qualities mentioned in The Path of the Righteous. When she saw me, a stranger, she took a step backwards. She seemed frightened by me.

  Thirdly, I knew practically at that second that she was my destiny; that I wouldn’t rest until she became my wife. Reb Haim was right—coincidence is not a kosher word. Everything that had happened had led me to this city, to this house. I had never before felt the hand of Providence so strongly.

  Apparently the young woman sensed it, too, for she grew strangely disturbed, blushed, and seemed dazed.

  I heard her mother ask, “Serele, why don’t you say good evening? Our guest is from America.”

  “Good evening,” Sarah said, and her voice was like an obedient child’s.

  “Good evening, good year,” I replied.

  “Serele, have you had your supper yet?” her mother asked.

  “No, I’ll eat later.”

  “Eat with us.”

  I was hoping that she would sit down at the table, but in this house females didn’t eat at the same table with men, particularly not with strangers. Only Reb Haim and I sat at the table while the women ate in the kitchen. Fate had tossed me from Celia, Liza, and Priscilla back to the true Jewishness, to the source from which we had all drunk, back onto the path that led to the Torah and to purity. In bygone years I had seen so much wantonness, licentiousness, and adultery that I had already forgotten there were other kinds of women. Celia and Liza had often accused me of lacking respect for women. But what was there to respect about them? Celia claimed that D. H. Lawrence, the author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was the greatest writer of all time. I had often found pornographic books at Liza’s. Both Celia and Liza liked gangster movies. When the gangsters shot or stabbed each other, they laughed. I myself used to suffer terribly during these scenes. Violence and bloodshed have always made me shudder. Celia and Liza both loved lobster. I knew that a lobster is cooked alive in boiling water. But these supposedly delicate ladies didn’t care that because of them a living creature was being murdered in a most horrible fashion. Celia and Liza both liked plays full of shocking horror and dissolution. And all this was done in the name of an art whose eternal theme is violence and fornication.

  Only now as I speak to you do I realize how much suffering this art has caused me. In order to enjoy it, you must have the heart of a murderer. It is completely sadistic, mean and cruel. I often saw Celia and Liza laughing at scenes that should have evoked tears. The hero went through torture and agony, and this was supposed to be amusing. There is an expression, “gallows humor,” and this is the humor of modern man. He laughs at another’s misfortune. When a healthy young woman deceives an old and sick husband, this is supposedly comic. All the heroes in worldly literature have been whoremongers and evildoers. Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, Raskolnikov, and Taras Bulba are the typical her
oes and heroines of literature. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Goethe’s Faust, right down to the trash aimed at pleasing the street louts and wenches, are full of cruelty and abandon. All worldly art is nothing but evil and degradation. Through the generations writers have glorified killing and debauchery and they have all kinds of names for it—romanticism, realism, naturalism, New Wave, and so on.

  Lately, I have come to understand why pious Jews never believed, and still don’t believe, in studying too much Scripture. The horror stories in the Scriptures somehow didn’t befit the spirit of the Diaspora Jew. Rabbi Isaac Luria and Baal Shem Tov are closer and more understandable to him than Joshua, the son of Nun, and King David. Joshua and King David had to be justified and defended, but Rabbi Isaac Luria and Baal Shem Tov needed no defense whatsoever. For the same reasons, the Enlightened also praised those parts of the Scripture that they called “worldly.” Reciting the Psalms was to them a waste of time, but to read about the Jewish wars—this was worldliness. Our fathers and grandfathers identified the Song of Songs with the Almighty, with the Divine Presence, with Israel, but the Enlightened went out of their way to prove that the Song of Songs was simply a love ballad. I’m not talking against the Scriptures, God forbid. The Scriptures are holy. But Jewishness has developed. All things start out raw, and ripen with time. When the apple is green, it doesn’t have the same sweet taste as when it is ripe. The basement of a house is not as elegant as a drawing room.