All Who Go Do Not Return

by Deen, Shulem

  I thought of the difference between us and those who despised us. Those teenagers in the car, I had taken for granted, were common anti-Semites, Hitler’s spiritual progeny. They would’ve caused us bodily harm if they’d been able to, I was certain of it. And yet, what really differentiated us? What made us so quick to rally a mob and pursue a group of young people for what really were, in this incident, no more than harmless insults?

  And if we had caught up with the car, what would we have done to them?

  Several months later, I visited a body shop in Monsey, where a young mechanic named Matt worked on my car. As I stood near him, we found ourselves chatting.

  “You from New Square?” Matt asked, reading the address on the work order form.

  I nodded.

  “I was there last night,” he said. He was a volunteer firefighter, and there’d been a fire emergency that night. “Real interesting place.”

  “How so?”

  He looked up from fiddling with something under the hood. “Well. You know. I wouldn’t be allowed in New Square otherwise, so it was just interesting.”

  “What do you mean?” There were always people in New Square who didn’t live there: construction workers, janitors, taxi drivers, supermarket employees. I’d never heard of anyone being denied entry. By communal ordinance, it was forbidden to sell property to anyone outside the community, but New Square was a public village, a legal municipality. Anyone could enter its streets.

  Matt turned to look at me again, as if he were teaching me something elementary about the world. “You can’t go into New Square if you don’t live there. You’ll get beat up.”

  “That’s not true,” I said, a touch defensively.

  Matt straightened up and leaned a hand on the hood’s latch. In the other hand, he held a rag, black with grease, which he held out as he pointed to my chest. “You,” he said, waving the greasy rag up and down to indicate my Hasidic garb, “can go in there. But if I go in there without having any business there, I’ll get beat up.”

  I must’ve laughed, because I remember Matt saying, “You think it’s funny? They’ve got their own laws, their own rules. You go into New Square and you don’t belong there, you’re in trouble.”

  He turned back to his work, then looked up at me again. “Don’t get me wrong. I respect all people.” He took his rag and wiped something under the hood of the car. “But if you don’t belong in New Square, you just stay out. That’s just how it is.”

  PART II

  Chapter Ten

  Kol bo’eho lo yeshuvun.

  All who go to her do not return.

  So says the Bible regarding a woman of loose morals. So said the rabbis of the Talmud regarding heresy.

  Heretics, the rabbis said, can never repent. “We do not accept their return, ever,” wrote Maimonides, the twelfth-century sage known for his rationalist approach to faith. “We do not accept the repentance of heretics because we do not believe them. If they appear to have repented, we maintain they have done so fraudulently.”

  Others say that heretics cannot repent because heresy is a force so potent that an individual is powerless to combat it, an insidious trap from which there is no escape. One never knows where heresy lurks. It can lie in the seemingly innocent words of a stranger, in knowledge outside the Torah, or in the writings of anyone who has not been vetted by the sages of his generation. It can lie in a seemingly innocent tale, when told in the wrong language, by the wrong person, or through the wrong medium, its nefarious intent so subtle as to pass almost unnoticed.

  I was thirteen, during my year at the Dzibeau yeshiva in Montreal, when I learned a lesson about this danger. It was evening, after a full day of study, nearing bedtime. Yeedel Israel stood at one end of our dorm room polishing his shoes, and Sender Davidovitch sat on his bed clipping his toenails. Moshe Friedman, who occupied the bunk beneath mine, stepped out to the bathroom to brush his teeth. I, too, should’ve been preparing for bed; instead, I lay on my top bunk reading an English-language book, Akiba, a fictional reimagining of the life of the second-century sage Rabbi Akiva, by the German Jewish author Marcus Lehmann.

  The Talmud tells the story of Rabbi Akiva in brief. Until the age of forty, Akiva was unlearned, a poor and ignorant shepherd, who tended the flock of the Jerusalem aristocrat Kalba Savua. When Akiva fell in love with Rachel, Kalba Savua’s daughter, she insisted that she would not marry him unless he promised to devote his life to Torah study. Akiva promised, and the couple was married. Soon after, Akiva left home to study Torah with the sages Nachum Ish Gamzu, Eliezer ben Hyrcanus, and Joshua ben Hanania, the great masters at the academies of Lod and Yabneh.

  For twenty-four years, Akiva remained in the house of study while his wife was home alone. After twenty-four years, Akiva returned to his wife, accompanied now by twenty-four thousand students. Now he was Rabbi Akiva, the greatest rabbi in all of Israel, in all of Jewish history, perhaps. Rachel, living in poverty and solitude all these years, received word of her husband’s return, and set out to greet him. Upon seeing him, she fell to her knees and bent to kiss the hem of his cloak.

  “Get away!” Rabbi Akiva’s students shouted to the woman kneeling before the great master. But Rabbi Akiva recognized her. “Let her be,” he said to his students. “For all that is yours, and all that is mine, belongs to her.”

  “Why aren’t you undressed yet?” an angry voice bellowed.

  In the doorway stood Reb Hillel, his unkempt jet-black mustache growing over his lips into his sprawling black beard, ferocious-looking despite his slight frame. Reb Hillel was one of the most feared rabbis at the yeshivas. His slaps were legend—they always came twice in succession in one fluid motion, palm striking left cheek, then returning sharply for a backhanded strike to the right. Until that night, I had studiously avoided him.

  “And what do we have here?” Reb Hillel asked, pointing his beard at my book.

  Outside I could hear students rushing about, the bathroom door in the hallway being opened and banged shut as my dorm mates prepared for bed.

  “It’s—a biechel,” I said. A book. A little book. Not a book of Torah or its commentaries but of general knowledge. A storybook.

  “A BIECHEL!” Reb Hillel cried. “Don’t you know what the Chasam Sofer said about a biechel?”

  I didn’t know what the Chasam Sofer had said about a biechel, although I knew other things the Chasam Sofer had said, chiefly this: “All that is new is forbidden by the Torah.” All that is new covered many things, including modern dress, modern speech, modern names, modern ideas.

  “Biechel, the holy Chasam Sofer says, stands for ‘Kol bo’eha lo yeshuvun!’”

  Biechel. Beis, yud, kof, lamed. B-Y-K-L. Kol B’o’eho Lo Yeshuvun.

  All who go to her do not return.

  So said the Bible regarding a woman of loose morals. So said the rabbis of the Talmud regarding heretical ideas. So said the Chasam Sofer regarding little books—which I imagined meant little books of a certain kind, books of unknown provenance, written in strange languages by strange people. The book I now held, because it was in English, not Yiddish or Hebrew, looked suspicious to Reb Hillel.

  But the book I was reading was kosher.

  “It’s a ma’aseh biechel,” I said. “It’s about Rabbi Akiva.” The tale of a sage. Not Torah, but close enough.

  Reb Hillel stood very near my bed, his flared nostrils right up against my face as I lay with my head glued to my pillow. Reb Hillel raised his hand and I flinched, but he only reached to take the book. I watched as he studied the front cover, then the back, then flipped through the pages. I realized then that he could not read it.

  After a few moments, he tossed the book back onto my bed. He turned briefly to stare at Sender and Yeedel, who sat frozen on their beds, and turned back to me: “You couldn’t find a book about Rabbi Akiva in Yiddish?”

  If my little book contained no heresy, Reb Hillel’s point was well taken. Foreign reading brought foreign ideas and foreign influen
ces, and before you knew it, you were speaking ill of God and His anointed one.

  All that is new is forbidden by the Torah, said the Chasam Sofer, an Austrian rabbi far from Hasidism’s Polish and Ukrainian origins. His principles had no connection to Hasidic teachings and, in a sense, ran counter to them. Hasidism, when first formed in the mid-eighteenth century, had come to liberate the Jewish people from a worldview ossified under centuries of legalistic arcana. Hasidism came to eschew the artificial and the pretentious and the formulaic. To raise the spirit of the law over the letter of it and to find infinite layers of that spirit. To celebrate the mystical experience over scholarly wrangling. It declared matters of the heart and mind superior to pietistic excess.

  Yet the principles of the Chasam Sofer rather than the Baal Shem Tov came to characterize the modern Hasidic worldview. With the spread of the Haskalah, the Jewish Enlightenment movement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, new challenges created new priorities for observant Jews. The teachings of Hasidism, many realized, were quickly becoming irrelevant in the face of the devastation wrought by the Enlightenment movement, and so Hasidim rallied around the Chasam Sofer’s battle cry and rushed to carry his standard.

  All that is new is forbidden by the Torah.

  Years later, I would read the works of Martin Buber and Abraham Joshua Heschel and Elie Wiesel and wince at their romanticized portraits not only of Hasidism, the teachings, but also of Hasidim, the people, as if all those who bore the name surely lived by its principles. In fact, other than a small cadre of mystics and the remnants of early Hasidic practices—dedication to the rebbe and communal events with song and dance—Hasidim in the twentieth century seemed to know little of the mysticism, the ecstasy, the melancholy and the joy of the Baal Shem Tov and his disciples. Instead, it regressed to the heavy-handedness and the rigidity that Hasidism had come to eradicate.

  Because of the merit of three things, Israel was delivered from Egypt: they did not alter their names, their language, or their dress. This is the midrashic dictum that encapsulates the ethos of the modern Hasidic world, a world characterized by the simple values of cultural fidelity. The objective is self-imposed ghettoization. Distinct language and dress keep interactions with outsiders to a minimum and help maintain separation from the wider world. Restrictions on secular education and outside knowledge keep foreign ideas at bay. Bans on media and popular entertainment keep away temptation. And so the Hasidim are spared the calamities of modernity.

  “My father used to listen to the radio,” my friend Motty confided in me one day.

  Motty, a former classmate with whom I now had an evening study session, had recently bought a car, a used brown Dodge minivan. In his car, away from the meddling of his wife, he had begun to listen to the radio. He had been raised among Skverer Hasidim in Montreal, and had moved to New Square only for yeshiva studies and marriage, and now he was trying to explain to me that listening to the radio was not all that bad.

  “Was my father not pious enough?” Motty flashed me a look, as if to say, how preposterous. His father, who woke each day at dawn to study Talmud for several hours before going off to his office, had been a close confidant of the old rebbe. He gave generously to charity and raised a dozen offspring, the majority of them scholars or married to them. “It’s not the worst sin in the world,” Motty said.

  It was true. The prohibition against radio listening was not one of the 365 biblical prohibitions, for which the theoretical punishment ranged from lashes to the death penalty to extirpation. It was not even a truly rabbinic one, as it was not mentioned in the Talmud.

  Motty gave me a sidelong glance. “I think you’d enjoy it too, by the way.” He brought all five fingers together in front of his face, then sprang them apart theatrically. “Opens your mind.” He described how captivating it all was, news reports flowing into traffic reports, flowing into commercial breaks and then weather and sports, every moment of airtime perfectly calibrated. “Modern technology. I’m telling you, you’d be amazed.”

  In truth, we already had some of that modern technology in our home. In our kitchen, right above the refrigerator, sat a sleek, silver double-deck Panasonic stereo cassette player.

  When I had first brought it home, several weeks after our marriage, in the summer of 1993, Gitty had frowned.

  “It has a radio,” she said with an accusing glare.

  The device, fresh out of the box, lay on the chintzy oilcloth on our kitchen table, and Gitty stuck her index finger at a spot on top, near the volume control. Tape, AM, FM were printed in tiny white letters along the ridge of the circular switch. There was no denying it.

  “We’ll do what everyone does,” I had said then, annoyed at the suggestion of impiety. Many of my friends had cassette players, and when the device came with a built-in radio tuner, there was a standard procedure for it: Krazy Glue the switch into the tape-playing position, paste a strip of masking tape over the station indicators, and put the antenna out with the next day’s trash. As Talmud students, we were nothing if not resourceful; loopholes and workarounds were our forte.

  I assured Gitty that I would disable the radio, but she only shook her head and went back to her housework. The cassette player soon went on top of our refrigerator, where it would remain, through four different apartments and across the births of our five children, for the next decade or so.

  But I never disabled the radio. I either procrastinated or I forgot or perhaps I thought it useful to have in case of emergency. Still, we never switched it on, allowing it to serve only as a phantom decadent presence in our otherwise pure and pious home. The tape player would serve mostly to entertain our children, who would haul their Legos, Tonka trucks, and American Girl dolls out onto the kitchen floor, and the cassette decks would spin an endless spool of musical tales featuring Yanky, Chaneleh, and Rivky, good Jewish children who spoke no lies, loved the Sabbath, and always, without fail, honored their parents.

  Few radios were to be found when I was growing up, but I remember one incident when I was around ten. It was late on a Saturday night, and my father was being interviewed by a Jewish radio station about his work, teaching secular and unaffiliated Jews about our brand of Orthodoxy. My mother borrowed a radio from one of our non-Hasidic neighbors for the evening, and our family gathered around the table in our small kitchen while my father, in his study down the hall, gave his interview over the phone. I remember little of the interview itself, as I spent most of the thirty-minute segment marveling at the mystery of my father’s voice being transported from the other end of our apartment to a studio in some unknown place and back to us in the kitchen. I remember also that it felt oddly aberrant. Secular influences were such anathema to our lives that the presence of the radio on the kitchen table, right next to the silver Sabbath candlesticks my mother had just cleared off the dining-room table, was jarring.

  During my teenage years and the first few years after our marriage, there were no accessible radios nearby. Current events were learned about in old-fashioned ways. In the yeshiva dining room, news of the failed coup against Boris Yeltsin in Moscow and Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait were passed along with plates of farfel and slippery noodle kugel. When Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin shook the hand of Yasser Arafat on Bill Clinton’s White House lawn, we looked up briefly from our Talmuds to listen to the student who claimed he had the news on good authority—probably from the school’s non-Jewish janitor—and we promptly returned to our studies. Later we repeated the news at home to our wives, who carried it farther to their mothers, sisters, and neighbors.

  Over time, however, I came to look up to the radio on the refrigerator with longing. By then, I had already learned two rules of radio. The FM dial, I knew, carried music—secular, vulgar, abhorrent, especially female voices. The sin was so great that I couldn’t even be tempted. It was the AM dial that intrigued me. I learned from Motty that it carried news and opinions and all kinds of fascinating bits of information about the world. My c
uriosity grew nearly unbearable as I wondered about all that was available to me with only the flick of a switch.

  The more I thought about it, the more the temptation grew. Motty was right, I thought. It wouldn’t violate Jewish law but only the restrictions of our community. I would sit at our kitchen table eating the dinner that Gitty had prepared, and my eyes would wander to the red band on the station indicators on the device above the fridge. The dial seemed to hiss and beckon in a seductive whisper: I’ve got news for you. But I worried about Gitty. If she caught me, she would scold and sulk at the impurities I was allowing into my heart and, by extension, into hers and those of our children.

  Finally, I could no longer resist. Late one night, Gitty and the children asleep in the bedrooms at the end of the hallway, my eyes wandered up to the stereo system. At first, I shoved the temptation aside, as I had done so many times before, but the more I tried to suppress it, the greater the urge became.

  In one of our kitchen drawers, alongside utility bills and an assortment of multicolored rubber bands, I found an old pair of earphones. Careful not to make a sound, I moved one of the chairs near the refrigerator, stepped up onto it, and plugged the earphones into the tiny jack. I leaned my elbows on the dust-covered surface above the fridge and began twisting the dial slowly, listening with one ear to the cackle of static as the white indicator floated across the red band, while keeping my other ear tuned for noises from the bedrooms down the hallway.

  I switched the dial from one station to another, commercials for medical malpractice attorneys, car dealerships, and department-store blowout sales filling me with forbidden pleasure. The strange jingles, the smooth transitions from traffic to news to commercials, captivated me; the fact that the sale was for one week only, or that I was not currently on the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, which, I now heard, was backed up to the Brooklyn Bridge because of an accident in the right lane, mattered little. I was like a visitor from a different era encountering our modern one, captivated by its very mundaneness.