by Deen, Shulem
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.
I remember one of the first times I had questions that I could not ask. They were not questions of faith but of more mundane matters—about the girl proposed to me in marriage. What I wanted to ask was chiefly this: Is she pretty? Is she smart? Is she personable? And if she isn’t those things, can I say no?
The questions I would eventually ask—Does God exist? Does our faith really contain the universe’s essential truths? Is my faith truer than someone else’s?—would, on the surface, seem of greater consequence. But at the age of eighteen, I had no big questions, only relatively small ones. And those small questions seemed so trivial that I was embarrassed to voice them. Charm is deceptive and beauty is vain; a woman who fears God, it is she who is praised. I was told that the girl was very much a God-fearing one. Did I really need to know more?
I was in the middle of doing laundry when I was told of the girl I was to marry. I was a student at the Great Yeshiva of New Square, when the washing machine in the dormitory had stopped working and students scattered to the homes of friends and relatives to do their laundry. I dragged my laundry bag to the home of the Greenblatts, family friends who lived at the edge of the village. My father had died several years earlier, and my mother was still trying to rebuild her life after my father’s death. So the Greenblatts were standing in as family, providing meals, laundry services, and the kind of meddling ordinarily reserved for family members.
It was close to midnight, and Berish and the children had long gone to bed. The only sounds were of Chana Miri finishing chores in the kitchen, cabinets gently opening and closing, the careful clinking of dishes being placed in the sink, running water. Soon these sounds died down, and I heard the soft tap-tap-tap of Chana Miri’s slippers as she came toward the laundry room, near the stairway to the bedrooms upstairs. I imagined she was heading to bed. I would let myself out, as I often did.
Chana Miri appeared in the doorway to the laundry room, and I raised my head in her direction without meeting her gaze. She wasn’t family, and to look at her directly was forbidden. From the edges of my peripheral vision, I could see the cloudy image of a diminutive female form, a kerchiefed head, a shapeless floral-print housedress.
“Did Berish tell you about the shidduch?” she asked.
I shook my head, my eye fixed on the motion of the iron. Chana Miri fell silent.
“Well,” she said finally. “Berish can give you more details tomorrow, but I might as well tell you now.” She paused, and then said haltingly, “I know … this might not sound like a great proposal. But … give it some thought.”
I nodded as I moved the iron across the white polyester fabric, watching the soft creases disappear under the gentle hiss of steam. I was hoping to appear nonchalant, although I felt my heart
beat quicken with a tick of excitement.
“Chaim Goldstein’s daughter,” Chana Miri said finally.
I must have looked crestfallen because Chana Miri’s next words were, “I know what you’re thinking. But it’s not as bad as you think.”
I didn’t know the girl, but I knew her male family members. Chaim Goldstein was a portly man who prayed exuberantly and unself-consciously in the back row of the shul. During Friday night services, I would see him making his way through the synagogue aisles, silver snuff box in hand, while the cantor’s twirling voice filled the high-ceilinged sanctuary. Shuffling from table to table, he would offer worshipers a pinch of his peppermint-scented snuff, while behind him trailed three of his young sons, with unkempt sidelocks, mud-crusted shoes, snotty noses. He was not the kind of man I imagined as my father-in-law, and I turned away now, not wanting Chana Miri to see my disappointment.
I thought also of Nuchem Goldstein, Chaim Goldstein’s son. I remembered a day when, my study partner absent, I had asked Nuchem to be my partner for one study session. This was during my first year at the yeshiva, and I’d thought it kindly to reach out to the boy who sat day after day without a study partner, idling over his Talmud, drumming his fingers on the table for hours, never once letting his gaze fall to the open volume before him.
Nuchem seemed to have little aptitude for Talmud study. In fact, I had never before encountered a partner like him. “Why did the sages ask all these questions if they already knew the answers?” he asked, as if the entire form were unfamiliar, as if he hadn’t been studying Talmud since the age of six.
“It’s a process,” I said, scarcely believing I was having this conversation.
“Why does the process matter?” he asked, scowling and indignant, as if personally affronted by the sages’ lack of consideration, putting him through the grind and toil of rediscovering conclusions that surely ought to have been known by now. “Why don’t we just study the conclusions?” It was a startling question, and I felt bad for this boy, who was clearly not enjoying his time at the yeshiva. But what I felt mostly was contempt; he was asking that which we knew must not be asked. Was he so dense as not to know that?
“I know what you’re thinking,” Chana Miri said again now. “You know her father, you know her brothers. But I was told she is different.” She stood in the doorway, and the silence hung heavy between us.
“What’s her name?” I asked finally.
“Gitty,” she said, all too eager. “Gitty Goldstein.”
Gitty. From the Yiddish, git, good. It had a pleasant ring, suggesting femininity, innocence, devotion.
Still, all I could think of was her family—Chaim’s simpleminded mannerisms, the dim look on Nuchem’s face, the little boys following their father at the shul, shy and timid, as if aware, even at that young age, that some people were more worthy than others and that they, by virtue of some arbitrary social code, had been placed among a lower class.
“I need time to think about it,” I told Berish the next day. I said the same to my mother after Berish asked her to speak to me. Only Chana Miri seemed to understand. But still, she thought I shouldn’t dismiss it.
“She’s different from her brothers,” Chana Miri said. “I hear she’s very normal.” I couldn’t help thinking: Normal? Is that her best quality?
Several months earlier, my classmates and I were taken by surprise when the first of our friends got engaged.
“Hust gehert?” The news went from table to table and bookstand to bookstand, sweeping through the vast study hall within minutes. “Have you heard? Ari Goldhirsch is engaged!” The studious looked up from the tiny letters in the margins of their Talmuds, and the idlers halted their conversations. We were stunned, hardly expecting one this soon. Most of us were only seventeen, some even younger.
“Bei vemen?” was the question on everyone’s lips.
Bei vemen. Not with whom but in whose home?—into which family, and within which extended clan of aunts, uncles, cousins, grandparents.
“Mordche Shloime Klieger.”
The name of the bride didn’t matter, only the name of her father. It wasn’t just a girl that a boy married but an extended set of family relations, with all its respectability, if one was lucky—or its grim ordinariness, if one wasn’t.
It was April 1992, and I’d been hoping that the engagements wouldn’t start until the following year. It was said that the rebbe didn’t approve of these early engagements but that families sometimes rushed them when the match was too good to let pass. Sometimes, if the boy or the girl was not yet eighteen, the engagement was kept secret; but soon enough, word would get out. The first engagement brought with it the pressure to be among the first. Early engagement was a sign of desirability; extended bachelorhood, a mark of shame.
With Ari’s engagement, the race was on, and other classmates soon followed. Moishe Yossel Unger and Burich Silber were engaged within a week of each other to two sisters, granddaughters of the rebbe’s personal secretary. Of course, none of us knew what the girls were like, but the girls themselves were hardly the point.
Aron Duvid Spira was soon engaged to the daughter of Avigdor Blum, the wealthiest man in the village. Zevi Lowenthal followed soon after, to the daughter of a prominent scholar. My afternoon study partner, Chaim Lazer, was engaged to the daughter of his uncle Naftuli. As one friend after another was paired off, I, too, waited for the matchmaker’s call. I congratulated each of my friends at their weddings, accepted in return their gracious smiles—mertzeshem bei dir, your own engagement soon, if God wills it—yet my heart ached, anticipation seasoning into dread. On Friday nights, as I prepared to lift the glass of sweet wine to recite the kiddush, I prayed that soon I might be doing so with a wife at my side, rather than alongside hundreds of other hungry yeshiva students. King of kings, command Your ministering angels to commend me with mercy. Let it be soon. Let it be with a good girl from a respectable family.
At the tischen, the rebbe’s public Sabbath meals, we stood on six rows of tall bleachers to the rebbe’s right. Each year, the yeshiva students shifted one set of bleachers nearer to the rebbe himself, until the yeshiva seniors, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who would be married that year, stood nearest. All eyes were trained on the latest group of eligible students, appraising each one, wondering which daughter of which community member he might be paired with.
“What is wrong with Chaim Goldstein’s daughter?” Berish asked a few days later.
I said only that I needed more time to think, unable to formulate the torrent of thoughts into words.
“She has everything a wife should have,” Berish persisted. “What’s to think about?”
I didn’t know what there was to think about. If at first, I was not drawn to this match because I was not drawn to this girl’s father or brothers, I soon found myself wondering about the girl herself. But the questions I had in my mind could not be asked aloud. I wondered: Was she pretty? Was she intelligent? Was she thoughtful and charming with a pleasant smile and an endearing laugh? Or did she have none of those qualities, and maybe even decidedly unpleasant ones? I wondered if I might ask for a photo of the girl, but since none was offered, I thought it improper. I imagined that Berish and the matchmaker and the girl’s family would wonder: What kind of boy is this, who needs a photo of a girl before deciding to marry her?
“I hear she is very sweet,” my mother said, after making her own inquiries. “The fourth child of twelve, takes very good care of her younger siblings. That says a lot. She’d make a good wife and mother.”
“She’s very social, too,” my mother added brightly. “Attends weddings and other family celebrations very eagerly. Joins in the dancing. Has friends. She’s very well spoken of.”
When none of these bits of information had the desired effect, Berish suggested the obvious solution. “Why not ask the rebbe?”
Of course. The rebbe. The rebbe would have the answer.
Late one night, several days before Cha
nukah, Berish and I went to seek an audience with the rebbe. The gabbai, Reb Shia, the rebbe’s elderly secretary, sat in his office adjoining the rebbe’s chamber, while several dozen Hasidim waited in the large, brightly lit waiting room, pacing nervously, reciting Psalms, or brooding in silence. Reb Shia wrote my kvittel, a request note scribbled onto a small white square of paper, and ignored Berish’s query of how long the wait might be. Hour after hour passed as, one after the other, the men were summoned for their turn with the rebbe, soon emerging with smiles for the surly door attendant, slipping ten- or twenty-dollar bills into his palm, now pleased, with hearts and minds unburdened.
Finally, Berish and I were ushered in. I’d only been to see the rebbe for hurried blessings and rushed handshakes, never for advice on a personal matter. Now, for the first time, I was to make a decision based on the rebbe’s guidance. It was a comforting thought. This was the special privilege of the Hasid, having access to the divine inspiration channeled through the tzaddik, the perfectly righteous individual.
The rebbe sat at the head of a long table on an elaborately gilded chair upholstered in rich blue fabric. I could see him observing the door, fingering a gold pocket watch. His forehead was misty with sweat, his stout frame and graying beard appearing so close, so lifelike—unlike in shul, where he seemed only a blurry impression beheld from afar. Strewn across the table were piles of request notes from earlier visitors, mixed with the traditional money gifts—twenty-, fifty-, and hundred-dollar bills.
