All Who Go Do Not Return (30 page)

I knew I could be one of them. I could tell stories. I had opinions. All I needed was a theme. And readers.

Ever since I was young, I had secretly dreamed of being a writer. As a child, I filled notebooks with fragments of stories, disjointed scenes involving an ordinary Hasidic boy who wanted to be extraordinary. One day, I hoped, I would stitch it all together into a great work of literature, and it would be sold in all Hasidic bookstores across Brooklyn.

At fourteen, I tried to set down the outlines of my autobiography—I imagined I’d fill it in over the years. Throughout my years in yeshiva, instead of Talmud commentaries, the traditional obsession of an aspiring young rabbinical student, I wrote pages and pages of philosophical musings in florid rabbinic Hebrew. I would scribble them on loose-leaf sheets, then stick them between the pages of whatever Talmud volume I was studying. I would fill so many of them that, years later, they would come slipping from between the pages each time I took one of those volumes off the shelf, scattering across the gleaming hardwood parquet of our living-room floor.

In the early years of my marriage, I wrote Yiddish essays. They were on religious themes, mostly, and for a long time, I showed them to no one, until one day I sent an essay, in longhand on several loose-leaf sheets, to a local Yiddish publication,
Maalos.
I was proud of the piece. I had woven together several disparate elements—a tale of an old Hasidic master, several Bible verses, a teaching from a favorite work on Hasidism—and framed them with a personal situation: I was having trouble with my toddler daughter. In particular, I was frustrated that my daughter preferred her playthings to bouncing on my lap.
God, too
, I wrote,
wishes we’d come to Him. But we humans prefer our silly playthings.

When at first I heard nothing from the publication, I figured they didn’t much care for it. Three months later, paging through the latest issue of
Maalos
, I discovered a small notice at the bottom of one of the pages.
To so-and-so who sent the essay about his daughter: We’ve misplaced your essay along with your contact info. Please call us.

When I called, a woman asked if I could resend the piece. “It was so beautiful!” she said, and offered fifty dollars for it. “Is that acceptable?”

I had not expected to be paid. I could scarcely believe it was accepted. Payment arrived several weeks later: two third-party checks, along with seven dollars in cash. The essay was published a month later with one minor revision: they switched the gender of my child. I felt chastised. I should’ve known that to write so expressively about loving my female child violated some unspoken matter of propriety.

Within a year after purchasing my first computer, I became consumed with computer technology, and I soon forgot the pleasures of writing. I thought myself a computer expert, and placed an ad in a local bulletin announcing that I was available to teach private computer lessons. A Hasidic man in Monsey hired me to teach him how to use Microsoft Windows and Word and Excel. We sat in his basement office for several hours, and I demonstrated how to use dropdown menus, how to copy and paste, how to use print and save commands. His eyes were glazed over most of the time, but he paid me handsomely, and insisted that I come back for more. After three days with him, the man’s wife, a matronly Hasidic woman, came down to the basement.

“You are Shulem Deen?” she asked.

I said that I was. She stood at the edge of the room, maintaining a proper distance. I could hear the ruckus of a large family upstairs. It was dinnertime, and the man had told me earlier that he had a dozen children.

“I’m the publisher of
Maalos
,” the woman said. “That piece you wrote several years ago—it was so beautiful! Could you write more for us?”

But I could no longer write for
Maalos.
I was no longer sure about the things I believed, could no longer write with conviction about loving God, about Torah study and prayer. I could no longer quote Hasidic texts with any real reverence. Doubtful of all that I’d been taught, I would have nothing to say to readers who expected morality fables and homilies on biblical and rabbinic texts.

A blog would allow me to get back to writing, but I wasn’t sure what I could write about. Clearly, I would not be offering religious messages. For a moment, I thought I might write about politics, or maybe the Mideast conflict. I could rant, like dozens of other American Jewish and Israeli bloggers, about the world’s unfair attitude toward the Jewish state. But now I felt conflicted about that, too. When I had first encountered the Internet, I had been a staunch supporter of the State of Israel. I still loved the land and its people, and yet, I had begun to feel uneasy. Decades of Palestinian suffering and the occupation of their lands could no longer be ignored, justified in the name of security. I couldn’t possibly offer my opinions, if they were always changing, still unformed.

Yet blogs were clearly an opportunity. Blogger was handing them out for free. The least I could do was take one.

I created a Blogger account, and named my blog “My Blog.” In the sidebar, I wrote: “Shulem Deen’s Blog.” I placed my personal e-mail address next to it. And then promptly forgot all about it.

One Sunday in April, the news spread through New Square about disturbances in Williamsburg. Tension had been mounting for weeks. An
eruv
, the practice of stringing wires from one pole to another to create an enclosed space, utilizing a loophole in the Sabbath laws to turn a public domain into a private one, had been erected around the neighborhood by some of Williamsburg’s Hasidim. In Jewish communities all over the world, from Jerusalem to Montreal to New Square, eruvs were common practice. This allowed people to carry items out of their homes on the Sabbath, on which it would otherwise be forbidden. Young couples could bring food home from their parents, mothers could take their babies out in their strollers. The wheelchair-bound could be transported to the synagogue.

The Satmar Hasidim objected. Their rebbe had ruled that an eruv in New York City was forbidden. That week, around noon on Saturday, hundreds of Satmar men, cloaked in their white-and-black striped prayer shawls, marched through Williamsburg crying, “Shabbos! Shabbos!” Bedford and Lee Avenues were lined with thousands of New York police, but that didn’t stop some of the Satmar men from spitting and hurling insults at those who violated their rebbe’s ruling. Fisticuffs broke out here and there, and, according to the
New York Times
, five men were arrested.

This incident came after several months of sporadic violence toward those who relied on the eruv, and now I could no longer contain myself. Outraged, I turned to my blog. I had no readers, as far as I knew, but my intestines felt like a cauldron of rage, and I needed an outlet.

Someone needs to show the Satmars that their terrorism won’t work in the land of the free and the home of the brave.
America was for Hasidim, too; and so the eruv proponents, too, had a right to practice their religion as they chose, without fear of harassment by the Satmars.

A few hours later, I forgot about the Satmars. Now I was thinking about how else I might make use of the blog. I checked my visitor logs to see if anyone had read my rant, but other than my own visits, the logs remained empty.

Trying to think of something insightful to share
, I wrote in my next post.
Nothing so far.

Later that day, I wrote about a book I was reading. Soon after, I had a disappointing meeting with a prospective employer. I was supposed to be hired for a new job, with a significant salary increase. I had been all but assured of it, but the prospect fell through. They were not hiring, they decided at the last minute, and I went to sleep that night terribly upset. The next morning, I blogged about how disappointed I was over not getting that job. So disappointed, that I was staying home from work to recover.

Called in sick to work today
, I announced to the world. I hoped that my boss wasn’t reading. I checked my visitor logs—still empty. My boss clearly wasn’t reading, and neither was anyone else.

That afternoon, I thought back to the eruv disturbance. I thought about the ways our Hasidic society kept people in line. We could control not only the masses but even the leaders. The eruv was not a rebellious project by a fringe group; it was supported by prominent Hasidic rabbis. As far as anyone knew, they were God-fearing men. Except, in that narrow grid, between Lee and Bedford, from Broadway to Heyward, there was only one way to fear God. The Satmar way. And the Satmars were willing to use violence to ensure that everyone knew it.

But these attitudes were not limited to Satmar. The same rabbis who were in favor of the eruv were themselves part of the structure that demanded conformity on everything else. In Skver, violence was used to enforce communal norms. In Vizhnitz and in Ger and in Belz and among so many other sects, there were always rumors of similar incidents. It was how our world worked. We kept people in line by whatever means possible.

What kind of world was this? And who could possibly save us?

George W. Bush, that’s who. That was the thought I had on that Monday afternoon in April 2003. George W. Bush, I wrote, should’ve sent troops to New York’s Hasidic neighborhoods. If Americans were so insistent on spreading freedom, there were places closer to home that needed it. Before we went off to bring democracy to Afghans and Iraqis, maybe Williamsburg and New Square could be liberated first.

As military campaigns go, mine was perhaps weakly conceived. A battalion of U.S. Marines marching through Williamsburg or New Square wasn’t likely to impress the rabbis. There were no statues to topple, no insurgents with IEDs or RPGs, and no nation-building to embark on. But I was fed up, and I wanted the world to know that in our dark corner of the world, right in the middle of New York, there was in fact very little freedom. I wanted to shout it to the world, and I didn’t care who heard me.

Actually, on second thought, I did care. A moment after I clicked “Publish,” I reread my post. It was four paragraphs long and very clearly expressed criticism of my own community, my own people. My name and e-mail address were right there in the open.

This isn’t good
, I thought.
Someone isn’t going to like this, and I’m going to get in trouble. I should take my name off, maybe.
Anonymity! That was it. And why not? This was the Internet. I drummed my fingers on my desk and tried to think quickly. I needed a name, any name. “Hasidic Rebel.” That’s it! I can always change it later.

Then the readers came. First in the dozens, then hundreds, and soon thousands. My visitor logs grew and grew, the numbers rising, doubling and tripling by the day. Across the Internet, I found other bloggers who linked to me, excitedly, with a discovery they seemed to think astonishing: “Look at this! A Hasid writing in secret about his insular world.” Apparently, people wanted to read about my world, and it appeared that I had a compelling enough voice to bring them back for more.

It was magical. Every day, another link would pop up somewhere. The Yada Yada Yada Blog and the Head Heeb and Allison in An Unsealed Room and the elders over at Protocols, all of them were linking to the “Hasidic Rebel.”

“Fascinating stuff.” “A unique perspective.” “A rebel with a cause.”

It gave me the encouragement to keep writing, about the parts of my life that I loved and the parts that frustrated me to no end. I wrote about my wife and about my kids. I wrote about the rebbe. I wrote about what it meant to live as a Hasid, within and around New York City, both as part of a broader culture and also, tenaciously, grittily, distinct from it.

The anonymity allowed me to be critical, but I tried to write honestly. There were things about my world that I still loved, and I wrote about them along with our extremist practices and the narrowness of our worldview, the frustrations with which I was now consumed day and night. I wrote about the stresses of trying to embrace modernity and aspects of outside culture while living in a world so steeped in tradition. I wrote about hiding videotapes after secret runs to Blockbuster, about sneaking my daughters into the library, about the wonders of a rebbe’s tisch, and about Hasidic hitchhikers who didn’t approve of the music I played in my car.

Readers could not get enough. And yet, I could not tell my readers everything.

I could not express outright heresy. My persona was still one of a believer, despite my critical views. Questions of faith, I believed, required a more solitary struggle, a search within, not one aired for public entertainment and submitted to the rapid-fire bursts of Internet comments.
I believe in God and the Torah
, I wrote in one post, even as I knew it was not true, not really. Even under anonymity, I could not yet say otherwise. To declare myself a heretic was a step so terrifying and so bold that I could not say it out loud, even to myself.
Apikorus.
Heretic. It was such an awful, awful word. Shameful and wicked. And I still desperately hoped, deep inside me, that I was not one.

At first, I told Gitty nothing about the blog. I wanted to tell her, and I knew that I would eventually, but the right moment felt elusive. We had just barely recovered from a difficult episode: only several weeks earlier, I had purchased a television set.

It was a shock to Gitty, the day she discovered it. It was a Sunday, and I had gone to Costco, where I’d noticed the tall pile of cartons on four pallets, 32-inch models, $39.99. I had wanted to get one for a long time but had feared Gitty’s reaction. Now I couldn’t resist. I placed a carton in my cart, and picked up a package of rabbit-ear antennas a few aisles down. I covered it all in a large black trash bag in the back of my car and brought it home. I laid the television set on the dining-room floor, still wrapped in the bag, and shut the door.

An hour later, Gitty walked into the dining room. Ten seconds later she emerged, her face frozen. For three days, she kept silent. She cooked meals, fed the kids, did laundry, but she would not say a word to me.