All Who Go Do Not Return

Yiddish words are rendered phonetically as they are commonly spoken among contemporary American Hasidim. This is generally known as the Southern (or “Polish”) dialect of Eastern Yiddish, although there are occasional exceptions.

Hebrew words are rendered using popular conventions for Hebrew-English transliterations, which often differ markedly from typical Hasidic pronunciations; for example,
Torah
rather than
Toyreh; Rosh Hashanah
rather than
Rosh Hashuneh.

The word
rebbe
might cause some readers some confusion, as the term can mean either a dynastic leader of a Hasidic sect or a male teacher of elementary school boys. Generally, however, the term can be properly understood from its context.

I wasn’t the first to be expelled from our village, though I’d never known any of the others. I’d only heard talk of them, hushed reminiscences of ancient episodes in the history of our half-century-old village, tales of various subversives who sought to destroy our fragile unity. The group of Belzers who tried to form their own prayer group, the young man rumored to have studied the books of the Breslovers, even the rebbe’s own brother-in-law, accused of fomenting sedition against the rebbe.

But I was the first to be expelled for heresy.

The call came on a Sunday evening, while Gitty and I were having dinner with our children.

“Shulem, this is Yechiel Spitzer,” a deep male voice said, and then paused. “Can you be at the
dayan’s
office for a meeting at ten?”

Yechiel was a member of both the Education Committee and the Modesty Committee, which were, together, tasked with looking after the behavior of individuals in our village, ensuring that they wore the right clothes and attended the right synagogues and thought the right thoughts.

“What kind of meeting?” I asked.

“The
bezdin
would like to speak with you,” Yechiel said.

The bezdin was our village’s rabbinical court, a three-member body that issued regular edicts on urgent religious matters—banning Internet use, or condemning unauthorized prayer groups, or regulating proper head-coverings for women—at the head of which sat the dayan, our village’s chief rabbinical judge.

Yechiel waited for my response, and when I said nothing, he said, “You might want to bring someone along. You may not want to be alone.”

His tone was oddly flat, which sounded like a deliberate affect, as if to underscore the gravity of his call. I didn’t know Yechiel well, but we were friendly enough when we passed on the street, or if we happened to be sitting next to each other at a shiva or a bar mitzvah. Clearly, though, this was not a friendly call.

When I returned to our dinner table, Gitty raised an eyebrow, and I shook my head.
Nothing important.
She pursed her lips and held my gaze for a moment, and I turned back to my plate of leftover chulent from yesterday’s Sabbath lunch. The children seemed happily oblivious. Tziri, our eldest, had her eyes in a book. Hershy and Freidy were giggling into each other’s ears. Chaya Suri and Akiva were squabbling because Chaya Suri had looked at Akiva’s dinner plate and Akiva said he couldn’t eat food that Chaya Suri had looked at.

Gitty continued giving me silent glances, until I looked up at her and sighed. “I’ll tell you later.”

She rolled her eyes, and then stood up to clear the plates off the table.

I looked at my watch. It was just after six.

I wasn’t entirely surprised by the call. I had heard from friends that word was getting around the village:
Shulem Deen has become a heretic.

If heresy was a sin in our all-Hasidic village in Rockland County, New York, it was not an ordinary one. Unlike the yeshiva student who ordered a taxicab each night to get away for an hour of karate lessons, or the girl spotted wearing a skirt that didn’t fully cover her knees, or the schoolteacher who complained of the rebbe’s lengthy Sabbath noon prayers, heresy was a sin our people were unaccustomed to. Heresy was a sin that baffled them. In fact, real heresy, the people in our village believed, did not happen in our time, and certainly not in our village, and so when they heard there was a heretic in their midst, they were not sure what to make of it.

“Doesn’t he know that the Rambam already answered all questions?” the rebbe had asked.

The Rambam, also known as Moses Maimonides, was a twelfth-century Jewish scholar and philosopher, perhaps the greatest of all time. His gravestone in the city of Tiberias, Israel, declares: “From Moses to Moses, there has risen no one like Moses.” In our study halls, we pored over his legal codes and his famous Commentary on the Mishna. We told tales of his righteousness and his scholarship. We named our children after him.

But we did not study his philosophy.

It was said that the Rambam’s most notable philosophical work, the
Guide for the Perplexed
, was so great and so brilliant that it was meant only for the most learned. For everyone else, to study it was unnecessary. The important thing was to know that it contained all the answers, and so all further questions were pointless.

“Doesn’t he know that the Rambam already answered all questions?”

I don’t know if the rebbe in fact said that. I had heard it from friends, who heard it from other friends, and rumors in our village weren’t always reliable. What I did know was that the rebbe was the village’s supreme leader, and nothing of consequence happened without his direct involvement. And so when I was told to appear before the bezdin, I knew that the order had come all the way from the rebbe.

At exactly 10:00 PM, I walked up the dirt path to the side entrance of the dayan’s home. The dayan’s authority came from his extensive knowledge of Torah, but his office was an extension of the rebbe’s. If the rebbe was our chief executive, the dayan and his bezdin were our judiciary and law enforcement.

The gravity of his office notwithstanding, the dayan was a kind and gentle scholar. Back when I was a yeshiva student, more than a decade earlier, I had spent hours with him in talmudic discussion. During the years following, I had walked this very path hundreds of times for various personal and familial matters, bringing palm fronds to be inspected before the Sukkos holiday, undergarments to be inspected for menstrual blood, chickens with discolored flesh to be inspected for signs of injury.