I wandered through the narrow streets of Jerusalem. This was long before the Six-Day War. Old Jerusalem was still in the hands of the Arabs and it seemed that we would never get it back. But Meah Shearim was ours and that is where I went. And as I walked along, the Evil One harangued me: “Joseph Shapiro, where are you going? Those Jews believe every word in the Shulhan Arukh, while your head is filled with what the Bible critics wrote and the materialists preached. You can no more become one of the pious than you can become a Turk.” But I kept on going. I came to a building and saw a house of prayer. It was a study house of the Sandzer Hasidim.
Before I go on, I must tell you that during my week and a half in Tel Aviv I had encountered quite a bit of snobbism toward me and my kind. Those born in Israel, the so-called Sabras, consider us Diaspora Jews aliens, especially if we don’t speak Hebrew with their pronunciation and with all the new words they’ve invented. The leftist Jews disdain the rightest Jews. Among the leftists themselves there are many distinctions. A member of Mapam considers a member of Mapai a reactionary. They both consider a General Zionist a bourgeois. To a Communist, they are all a bunch of fascists whom it would be a good deed to exterminate. I often heard the leftists make vicious slurs against America and American Jews. They claimed that American Jews were a bunch of moneybags and worshippers of the Golden Calf. When I reminded them that American Jews supported all the institutions in Israel, and that without them the State of Israel wouldn’t exist, they replied that the American Jews gave the money to avoid taxes and were actually indifferent about Israel.
I heard many jeering attacks against the Hadassah women, against American rabbis, against everybody in general. I often thought: We are a small people, half of which has been annihilated, yet the remnant is consumed with such divisiveness, such antipathy. It struck me that if the Israeli Jews were no longer obliged to come to the American Jews for aid, they would spit in their faces.
I went inside the Sandzer study house thinking that I would feel more of a stranger here than anywhere else. I was dressed in modern fashion, I had no beard, I wore no earlocks. To these Jews, I was nothing more than a blight against Jewishness. But what happened was the very opposite. I came in and felt myself transported back to my youth. Jews like my grandfather—with gray beards, earlocks, skullcaps on their heads, and wide ritual garments with long fringes—came up and greeted me. Their eyes seemed to say: “It’s true that you are alienated from us, but still you are our brother.” I saw in their eyes something that I had never seen among modern Jews: love for Jewishness, love for a fellow Jew, even if he was a sinner. It wasn’t a feigned love, it was real. Everyone can tell real love from fake.
Several men and youths sat at tables studying the Gemara. Some studied silently, others aloud. Some sat bent over and others swayed and their earlocks swayed along rhythmically. I saw children no more than twelve or thirteen already studying the Gemara on their own. An odd kind of nobility exuded from their faces. They didn’t have to pass any tests; they didn’t need the Torah for their careers. They studied because this was the reason for which the Jew had been created. They would never receive any honors for it, and chances were they would remain paupers all their lives.
I took out the tractate of Betzah and tried to study. I knew how little relevance it had, dealing with an egg that a hen laid on a holiday. Could the egg be eaten or not? The School of Shamai said yes, the House of Hillel said no. I need not tell you that all the Enlightened, all the enemies of Talmud, use this tractate as an example of how removed the Talmud is from the world, how little it has to do with logic, with the times, with social problems, and so forth and so on.
“But,” I asked myself, “how is it that I feel like a stranger among modern Jews and like an intimate here?”
When the Sandzer Hasidim saw that I had taken out a book, they grew closer to me. Men came over and greeted me and asked me where I was from. When I told them from America, they began to inquire about the Jews in America as one would ask about brothers, not about “moneybags,” “reactionaries,” and “worshippers of the Golden Calf.”
The modern Jews only wanted to favor me with their “ideals,” but these Jews sought to attend to my body. They asked me where I was staying, and when I told them I hadn’t yet checked into a hotel, they recommended a place where I could spend the night. Unbelievable as it may sound, several of the men invited me to their homes for dinner. I could spend the night in their homes as well, they told me. They didn’t feel that one shouldn’t inquire into another’s private affairs. On the contrary, they asked me what I did for a living, if I was married, if I had children, and how long I planned to stay in Israel. They spoke to me as if they were my relatives. To the one who asked me if I had a wife, I lied by saying I was divorced, and he promptly proposed a match for me. Naturally, I assumed that he might be trying to earn a matchmaker’s fee. A young man came up and asked me for a donation. But all this was done without superciliousness and with courtesy. Since I was a Jew who looked into a Gemara, I was one of them.
I studied a good number of pages that day. I prayed at the evening services with the men. Between one service and the next, a circle of elderly men and youths formed around me. In America, young people look upon the older person as someone to be thrown to the dogs. There is no worse insult there than to say about someone that he has aged. When parents invite a guest, their children are rarely present. Young people in America ignore their parents. I must say that I saw the same thing among the modern people in Israel. To be young for them is considered the greatest achievement.
I didn’t detect a trace of this among the Sandzer Hasidim. On the contrary, the youths showed genuine rather than put-on respect toward the elderly. Modern man is a thorough believer in the material world. The elderly person has already used up a great share of this world and has little left to eat, or to fornicate. But the young man still has a large reserve, and for this alone he is entitled to respect and recognition. Besides, the young person is identified with the latest fads. He is the newness, the vogue, the progress that is the idolatry of modern man.
I spent that evening at the house of a head of a yeshiva who had invited me for dinner. I was afraid that his wife, when she saw he had brought home a guest without letting her know first, would be upset. But she was apparently used to this. I was given a skullcap and shown where to wash my hands for dinner. There was no bathroom in the apartment and the towel was not the cleanest. The mistress of the house had a wrinkled face. I gathered from her talk that she was barely past fifty. In America and even in Israel, I had seen women her age having illicit affairs, drawing alimony from husbands they had deceived, wallowing in luxury, and indulging themselves in adultery and in other wickedness. But this pious woman had long since accepted the onset of age as part of the honor of being a mother of grown children, a mother-in-law, and a grandmother. Her eyes reflected the goodness of the true Jewish mother, not the mothers mocked in books and plays, and whom American Jewish writers and some psychoanalysts consider the source of their children’s nervous afflictions.
It may seem funny to you, but I fell in love with this woman. I realized that even from a romantic and sexual standpoint such a woman was more interesting than those old witches who dress like sixteen-year-olds, drink like sailors, curse like streetwalkers, and whose alleged love is in fact sheer hatred. It’s no wonder that so many modern men become impotent or homosexuals. You have to have queer inclinations in the first place to marry one of these.
The man, Reb Haim, asked my reason for coming to Israel and I told him the truth: that I was disgusted by the kind of life I had been leading; that I wanted to become a Jew—a real Jew, not a nationalistic Jew or a socialist Jew, or however they call themselves.
He said, “It’s a long time since I’ve heard such words. What do you propose to do?”
“I’ve saved up some money. I want to pray, to study, to be a Jew.”
“Why did you pick the Sandzer study house?”
“I just happened to be passing by and I saw the study house. It was merely a coincidence.”
“Coincidence? … Et …”
Again I heard the same expression that I had heard in the old rabbi’s house in New York. These Jews didn’t believe in coincidences.
After a while, he said, “Coincidence is chance. The Enlightened claim that the world is chance, but a Jew who has faith knows that everything is destined. Coincidence is not a kosher word …”