ATUB @לעיקוואד ATUB 'ס רעוויו:
Shulem Deen might be the star of OTD writers, but what struck me in this book was how little of it can actually be said to be the telling of an OTD narrative. It read so much more like a Chasidic coming of age story, the story of almost every boy or girl growing up in such community. There’s not one element of the story that any average Chasidic man over thirty can’t identify with. Every single part of it. And can perhaps be applied even more universally, although I have little knowledge or experience of that.
Let me briefly sketch out this reading for you. Growing up Chasidic is growing up in an all-encompassing system of education/indoctrination/socialization. You are told that everything is figured out, we got the truth about everything you could possibly need, and all that is left for you to do is to be good, conform to plan, and all will be alright.
For a small minority, perhaps this works out. They are good students, get good Shiduchim, have kids, somehow make a living, and all proceeds according to plan. For the most, there is a lot of shock and awakening involved. This story starts the day after your wedding. From a boy expected to be entirely in the dark about marriage, and about everything else needed in the real world, you are suddenly expected to be able to handle a relationship perfectly, to take care of a wife. You are suddenly confronted with half the world you have been entirely in the dark about.
Then you need to provide for your family. As Shulem says, he would have thought whoever created the Kolel system figured out the budget for you, turns out, as every single man finds out, this is not the case. There is no way to make it with kids on a kolell stipend, and all your training in ancient law and lore doesn’t even prepare you to get a job teaching that. Again, a small minority does get jobs in education, dropping right back into the system they have just graduated, with no added knowledge of the real world, thus perpetuating the cycle of naiveté. But for must, you suddenly realize all the adults you have been relying on all your life, really have no idea what they are doing, and it is for you to figure out how to make it in the real world.
Even growing out of the naiveté of total simple faith isn’t much of an exception. Every average smart Hasidic man I know, has at some point realized it isn’t so. For many, as for Sulem, this happens after chancing on those kiruv books that purport to give that absolute proof of the truth of Judaism. For others, it’s just being in the world, meeting people, finding out not all Goyim are miniature Hitlers prostitutes and gangsters, some even have alternative faiths they take as seriously as we take ours. For yet others it is getting into some Haredi Gossip forum and finding out the Rebbe isn’t the saint he was made out to be, that the leaders are themselves not those perfectly edited portraits of them you see in school.
It would be too painful for me to elaborate on the divorce aspect of the story. But in a word, while the kind of total estrangement Shulem experienced is rarer, divorce in the community is excruciatingly awkward, painful, and leaves parents with little recourse to maintain normal relationships with children, you don’t need to be a Kofar to have this happen to you.
So, yes all who go do not return, growing up is one directional, and what is learnt can’t be unlearnt, but that doesn’t mean everyone who listens to radio will become a goy, or that everyone who reads permission to believe will end up an atheist. This book did a great job of telling, in its context, the all too human story of growing up, of being faced with an answerless universe, of becoming an adult yourself and suddenly realizing that adults don’t know much either.