Despite losing God, his family and briefly his mind, in his first book former hassid Shulem Deen blames himself for not foreseeing the events that would befall him.
By ELAINE MARGOLINShulem Deen(photo credit: PEARL GABEL)
Shulem Deen left the Skverer Hassidic community of New Square, New York, after 15 years of marriage and five children because he was suffocating inside a cloistered world that no longer felt real to him. His eventual departure probably began when he was only a teen and “wondered how we really knew the things we knew, whether heaven and hell really existed, whether the rebbe was truly saintly, whether Moses really split the Red Sea for the Israelites fleeing the Egyptians, and whether those Israelites and Egyptians and Moses ever existed at all.”But his religious fervor would always return, and he learned to push away creeping doubts by repeating to himself: “To have faith is to believe blindly, to demand no proofs, no evidence, no logic.To have faith is to believe without reason whatsoever,” he writes in his memoir All Who Go Do Not Return.But Deen by temperament was a pretty rational guy, bothered by all kinds of uncertainties. Even about his beloved rebbe he noticed things others didn’t.He felt there was an overly rehearsed and artificial quality to the rebbe’s speeches and predictable tears. His gestures never changed and he seemed to be operating on auto-pilot.Even worse, Deen felt the rebbe was distant from his followers and surrounded by handlers that made it impossible to get too close to him. Meeting with the rebbe after his shidduch (marital match) was announced to express his hesitation about his upcoming nuptials, the rebbe dismissed him quickly and blessed the union. Deen felt silenced. At 18, he married Gitty, and began a troubled marriage that was strained by his challenging nature and her blind obedience. He was drawn to the outside world; she feared it and resented his rebelliousness. There was really little hope for them.But it was losing God that was most poignant for Deen, an experience he writes about with an eloquent bewilderment recalling the moment he realized he was a nonbeliever. Deen writes “I don’t remember the day, or the month, or even the exact year, but only where I was and what I was doing... I no longer found prayer meaningful, but still kept up the routine, partly out of habit but also out of fear of displeasing Gitty... 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...” He suddenly realized, “I no longer believe any of this.”The desolation of this new reality stood in contrast to the exhilaration he had often felt in celebrations with his fellow Hassidim “dancing in place, hand in hand, shoulder to shoulder, children and their fathers, yeshiva boys and the elderly, lifting their feet and stomping them on the floorboards.” Now there was only silence and alienation.Deen’s parents embraced hassidism after secular Jewish upbringings. His father had been a hippie and experimented with psychedelic drugs. His mother had been a Beatles fan. They both fell in love with the ascetic lifestyle and religious intensity the community offered.But Deen feels they missed much of what he endured growing up with schoolteachers who routinely beat students “for not knowing the meaning of an Aramaic word in their Talmud, or for removing their fingers from the tiny text of Rashi’s script in the margins.” Deen’s father died when he was only a teenager and he remembers him as a gentle man who would frequently become so lost in prayer that he would be oblivious to all that surrounded him.But Deen was different and felt constrained, eager for any news about the outside world. It began with a radio, and then television, and then movies and then the explosive power of the Internet where he started blogging anonymously as the “Hassidic Rebel.”At the same time, he was struggling to find a way to feed his growing family without a high-school diploma or any real work experience. He writes about the enforced infantilism of the hassidic male who is kept dependent on those around him just to make ends meet.He tried teaching but it paid practically nothing. He went into business with another hassid but the business floundered.He finally found work as a computer programmer in Manhattan and was able to pay his bills. He loved and nurtured all of his children with the same tenderness his parents had shown him, and when he began to consider leaving for another life, he never believed his children would desert him. But he was wrong.When his marriage collapsed, he initially remained part of his children’s lives but they quickly stonewalled him.During arranged visits, they would not speak to him or eat the food he prepared.Deen kept trying, but the forces against him were overwhelming. Judges would often rule against him during custody negotiations. Worse, his children’s hearts were hardening right in front of him and he could do nothing to stop it.He wound up spending time in a psychiatric unit and left after a week, with a fistful of anti-depressants and a shattered heart. His three oldest girls do not see him; the youngest two boys see him six times a year for a couple of hours, and the eldest son often doesn’t show up. His ex-wife refuses to talk with him. He is truly on his own and often lonely.Deen is an achingly expressive writer and an honest and caring man. He has written a wonderful first book that really explores what it feels like to lose God and then your family, and then for a brief time, feel like you are losing your mind.He has every right to be bitter and angry at the forces in his old community that have conspired to wear him down emotionally and financially and erase him from their collective memory.But Deen doesn’t succumb to meanness of any kind toward anyone. Instead, he clings to his sadness with pained restraint, and mostly blames himself for not foreseeing the events that would befall him after he lost his faith in God. He feels bad about the hurt and disappointment he caused his ex-wife, and guilty that the children feel ashamed of him.But they show little empathy for him.They remain silent, and this strikes the reader as nothing less than some form of ancient madness.
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