All Who Go Do Not Return (22 page)

Afterward, I rotated through a number of odd jobs. One job, ostensibly as a bookkeeper, lasted three days, until the boss fired me for calling him crazy. He ran a multimillion-dollar operation, buying and selling photocopier and fax-machine toners on the gray market but refused to buy a computer for the office, preferring an old-fashioned double-entry system in an enormous, ancient ledger. I could do bookkeeping as long as I had a computer with a working copy of QuickBooks. But manual, double-entry ledgers? I thought that was crazy.

For some time, I manned the phone lines for a company that provided a telephone-directory service for Hasidic businesses. Callers interacted with voice prompts, unaware that a human—me—was listening on a headset, pushing buttons to deliver the audio listings. I fielded calls from housewives looking for clothing sales, men looking for Judaica bookstores, teenage boys asking about “lindjerie” shops—probably calling from yeshiva dorms, where the most titillating thing was an automated voice listing of local stores selling women’s hosiery and Shabbos robes.

My passion for study, piety, and prayer was mostly forgotten. Now I wondered only how I was going to support my family. After rotating through a half-dozen jobs in as many months, I felt increasingly as if I were not a grown-up but a child. Somewhere, somehow, a decision had been made: Gitty and I were to playact as parents, she as homemaker, and I as provider. Except, while Gitty seemed a natural for her role, I was clearly a failure at mine. Gitty fed and clothed and bathed our little ones as if groomed for the task her entire life. I never saw her hold her head in despair over a burned pot of chulent. I, on the other hand, went from job to job, wondering about all those years I was taught the importance of Torah study and never a word about how to earn a paycheck.

In my spare time, I sat on the plastic-covered chairs at our faux-mahogany dining-room table, and studied computers—how to work with them but also how they worked on the inside. I was fascinated by their parts, how magnetic hard drives worked alongside RAM, connected via motherboard, input and output devices. But most of all, I was fascinated by software, the mind within all that metal and silicon.

“Why are you spending so much time on this?” Gitty would ask, as I brought home book after book from the library on the inner workings of hardware, writing computer code, setting up networks. Gitty thought that I should be doing more productive things, such as inquiring at the fish store about the “Cashiers Wanted” sign in the window. Or maybe selling life insurance. Or starting another business of some sort. “What’s the point of all this computer stuff?”

I would shrug in response. I’d say it was just really fascinating and fun and interesting, and Gitty would roll her eyes. What I really thought—a fantasy I didn’t dare voice out loud: I wonder if I might work as a computer programmer one day.

I didn’t know how one became a computer programmer, but I could not quiet my fascination. The books would pile up around the house, on the kitchen counter, on the bedside nightstand, on the little window ledge in the bathroom. When reading about the binary number system, I was struck by the beauty of mathematics, the symmetry of numbers, concepts I had never thought about before—we’d studied no mathematics past seventh grade, which had pleased me perfectly at the time. But what I was reading now was fresh and exciting: machine language, overlaid with assembly language, overlaid with “high-level” languages—C++, SQL, Perl—nested levels of abstraction built on reusable modules. I was fascinated by the use of a machine to imitate a human brain, to break down human thought processes to their smallest parts and to mimic them through concise lines of computer instruction. Like a mechanical lever, but for the mind, computer code could make a machine outperform humans to near-limitless degrees—and I was learning exactly how it was done.

I would behold a page of code like a work of art. In mapping algorithms and routines, I found a kind of exhilaration that was similar to the logical processes of Talmud study, except these processes were not stretched over ancient rules of textual exegesis but strictly logical premises. At the most basic level, they were staggeringly simple: If balance is greater than zero, funds can be withdrawn. If time is past 6:30, sound the alarm. If snoozed, repeat until unsnoozed. Yet the possibilities, built only on ones and zeros, on and off, true and false, were literally limitless, allowing the creation of complex routines of both beauty and utility. Endless possibilities from one essential binary. In the Talmud, too, there was beauty, but here was a true amalgamation of the human and the divine. If the Talmud was built on the purported word of God, that
word
struck you as suspiciously human, with ambiguities and layers of meaning and all the arbitrariness of human language. The very idea of faith suggested something man-made—the idea that we must submit to conviction, rather than simply behold the universe in its natural order. In the principles of logic, however, which formed the basis of computer software, the premises were fixed. True was true. False was not. There was no gray, no middle ground, no room for ambiguities or contradiction or layers of interpretation. Precision and predictability were key. Prayer was of little help when your executable was stuck in an infinite loop.

Yakov Mayer, I soon learned, wasn’t having much success selling life insurance. When he learned about my interest in computers, he, too, grew curious about them. Yakov Mayer, however, had never learned to read English well, and had a hard time studying on his own. The few books he acquired on the subject didn’t feel sufficient, so he went to look for another way.

An Orthodox organization, Yakov Mayer told me excitedly over the phone one day, was offering courses in computer programming at its offices in lower Manhattan. The organization, Agudath Israel of America, was an advocacy group for Orthodox Jews, and it had set up a division called COPE Institute, to train men in “kosher” professions: accounting, computer programming, networking.

“How about we go for the programming course?” Yakov Mayer asked.

He thought we could become real programmers, but I laughed at the idea. I imagined that one could not become an actual computer programmer without going to college any more than one could become an astronaut or a brain surgeon. At the very least, I imagined that one needed a high school diploma. And really, what good was a course? I had taught myself enough computer programming to write decent code for at least a thousand different business uses. Learning the stuff wasn’t the problem. Finding a way to get paid for it was.

“Well,” Yakov Mayer said. “They’ve got a job placement program.”

Several days later, Yakov Mayer and I sat in the very last row of the Monsey Trails commuter bus to Manhattan. It felt like a synagogue—the sights and sounds were the same: men in their prayer shawls and phylacteries, eyelids still heavy from sleep, mumbling prayers. The prayer leader stood in the center of the aisle, calling the ends and beginnings of chapters:
Halleluyah, halleluyah
, mumble mumble,
And David blessed the Lord
, mumble mumble,
On that day Moses sang with the children of Israel
, mumble mumble.

The men all sat on one side of the bus with a curtain drawn down the aisle, beneath which we got glimpses from the other side: gold-foil flats, fashionable heels, stockinged ankles.

For the Shmoneh Esreh, we rose and squeezed into the aisle, swaying along with the jerky motion of the bus as it cut between cars, tractor-trailers, and New Jersey Transit buses on their way to the Lincoln Tunnel. A man squeezed through the throng in the aisle, dangling a navy-blue velvet pouch between his thumb and forefinger:
Rabbi Mayer, Master of the Miracle
was embroidered on the pouch in gold thread. From within came the jingle of coins as men dropped nickels, dimes, quarters, to support the pious men of Jerusalem. For the Torah reading, a scroll was taken from a makeshift ark overhead. One man read aloud from it, his tinny voice losing strength as it traveled through the mass of bodies, sounding, to us in the rear, like an overseas phone call with a bad connection.

The men were Orthodox, and yet most of them were non-Hasidim, working professionals—attorneys, accountants, doctors, investment bankers. They wore starched button-down shirts and sharp suits and polished black shoes. A handful of Hasidic men, who worked mostly as diamond dealers in midtown or as salesmen for the Hasidic-owned B&H electronics store, huddled in the rear. Unlike the others, the Hasidic men looked shabby, in ill-fitting overcoats, beaver hats speckled with rain spots, unkempt beards. These were
my
people, and at first, the others filled me with disdain. Such vanity! Their shoes so polished, they sparkled. Their trousers so perfectly creased, it was as if they had pressed them just that morning. Who had time for such nonsense?

Yet they had something I wanted. I envied their sense of purpose, the vibes of success they emitted, electric charges of money and comfort zapping off their power ties and their shimmering gold metal cuff links. These men, I imagined, didn’t pawn their wives’ jewelry to make rent.

Could I be like them?

Only a few years earlier, the thought would’ve horrified me, but now, I wondered, why not? They, too, were Orthodox. They prayed, they kept kosher, they kept Shabbos, and yet they lived in the modern world, engaged with it, interacted with it, earned decent livings through hard work and honest professions, and then they came home to their families and lived fully religious lives. Couldn’t one have it all?

Later that morning, in an office building on a narrow street in Manhattan’s financial district, Yakov Mayer and I sat in a room filled with long tables as a nervous little man in a white shirt, his tangled tzitzis fringes hanging from his belt, handed us a pile of stapled sheets of paper. This was the course’s entrance exam, an “aptitude test,” and it had three sections: English, mathematics, and logic. We had thirty minutes for each, and I zipped through the questions with ease.

“Why would they give us such a difficult exam?” Yakov Mayer asked, as we headed to catch the bus back home. “What’s English grammar got to with programming?”

He’d guessed his way through most of the questions, he said.

Clearly, we experienced the exam differently, and I wasn’t surprised. All Hasidic boys’ schools were substandard in their general-studies curricula, but in New Square, things were particularly bad. Yakov Mayer’s “English” classes had consisted of little more than lessons in the English alphabet and basic arithmetic. His teachers were young men who had themselves been educated in New Square’s cheder, and they didn’t know much more than the students.
“Aynglish, foy!”
we had cried at the Krasna cheder in Borough Park, but now I felt thankful for those two hours we’d had in late afternoon. As disdainful as we were back then, it gave me a good enough foundation. Yakov Mayer hadn’t been so lucky. In preparation for the exam, he had asked his wife to tutor him in English and math, but even so, he found it all too challenging.

Two days later, we got our test results. I passed, but Yakov Mayer failed.

“I still don’t understand what English has to do with programming,” he said to me over the phone. Yet he was not discouraged. “I can take the test again,” he said. He’d already begun new tutoring sessions with his wife.

A couple of weeks later, he retook the test, and this time he passed—just barely. There was still a catch, though, for both of us. Neither of us had high school diplomas, and so we would have to take another exam that covered some of the basic high school subjects.

“You ready for the next exam?” I asked.

Yakov Mayer was silent for a moment. “I think not. I’ll just have to make a diploma.”

I was stunned. “Forge one?”

“What else can I do? There’s no way I’ll pass this exam.”

A few days later, I took the bus to the city, alone this time, and took the second exam. It was more challenging than the first, especially the math questions. I found myself staring at problems involving
x
’s and
y
’s, and was stumped.

Simplify
:
9x + 3y
^*
6
=
24x − 2

How did
letters
get into a math problem? Baffled, I stared for a long time at the sheet in front of me. Was it A equals 1, B equals 2, and so on? I tried to remember back to my math lessons as a child. The last lessons we had were on fractions, and I vaguely recalled converting mixed numbers and finding common denominators, but nothing about the value of letters.

This time, it was my turn to guess my way through my responses. I answered the questions as best I could, and handed in my exam. I wondered if I should’ve just followed Yakov Mayer’s lead and forged a high school diploma. But now it was too late. Perhaps my first instincts had been right. Maybe this course wasn’t for people like me. Maybe it was meant only for non-Hasidim, those raised in less sheltered environments, who’d taken high school math and all kinds of other subjects that our Hasidic yeshivas did not bother with.

To my surprise, I passed this exam, too. Not with a perfect score, but good enough. Yakov Mayer, for his part, submitted his forged high school diploma, and on a scorching day in July 1999, we took the bus to downtown Manhattan for our first day of class.

Two months in, Yakov Mayer sat down next to me in the classroom.

“I’ve decided to drop out,” he said. “I struggle to get through every page.” He pointed to our textbook,
The C Programming Language
, which lay on the table in front of us. His tone was almost apologetic. The course had turned out to be more stimulating than I’d expected, and as much as I’d taught myself on my own, I quickly learned a lot more. Yakov Mayer was a bright fellow and was quick to grasp the concepts when they were explained to him. He had been a good student in yeshiva. He was disciplined and determined and conscientious about the reading and the lab assignments. But his English skills were too weak. Even with his wife’s help, he had trouble reading and understanding the material.