Dear Editors,
My cousin is a liar. He is also a heretic who is tragically confused about the world. And, hashem yerachem, what happened to his morals? But his life is his life, as is his afterlife; it’s not for me to get involved. I am not his mother (who grieves, believe me, every day she wakes up broken by what he’s become). But to lie about me, about what happened, and to do it so publicly? (I looked up the circulation of this magazine—it’s not nothing!) I won’t pretend to understand the values of the readers of a magazine like yours—I don’t want to know what “socially conscious” and “radically intimate” mean—but hopefully at least the truth still matters to them.
My cousin wants you to think it was me who dragged him into this. He wants to make himself a naive victim and me the villain, or at least the catalyst. Because how does his story start? Out of the blue his zealot cousin invites him to a silly-seeming meeting about anti-Semitism, because—why else!—his crazy cousin wants to save him. Such narishkeit. As if I have nothing better to do but sit around and think about my cousin’s spiritual well-being and scheme his salvation.
If my cousin could be saved by a scheme, we’d have done it already.
The truth is that he called me. He wanted help with an old memory: Once, when we were kids, we were accosted on the bus by a nut. This was more than thirty years ago, but as we talked, it came back to us and we pieced it together. I was fifteen and my cousin was nine. We were sitting on the bus—my cousin’s memory was that I was taking him to the magic shop, which made sense—and this guy who looked all smashed up and smelled awful was suddenly looming over us, his face pinched in fury, and he spit on us, he accused us of murdering his sons and raping his daughters, he spit on us again, and then he got off the bus.
I hadn’t thought about this incident in years. It is an ugly memory but hardly a painful one—my entire life I’ve worn my kippah proudly in public; you are going to get strange and nasty comments—and it was nice to reminisce with my cousin. It’s rare these days for us to just schmooze. But soon enough he started asking such stupid questions, like how could I know for sure that the guy was actually anti-Semitic and not just crazy, and how could I know for sure that he targeted us because of what we were wearing? Usually questions like this would get me worked up, but I remembered what Rabbi Shmuley taught me: I closed my eyes and breathed deeply and told myself what it means to be a true ohev yisrael: “Love is an active verb.” I exhaled, opened my eyes, and asked my cousin, innocently, solicitously, why he was thinking about this incident at all; was this for something he was writing?
My cousin made a show of hesitation—as if he would ever not take the opportunity to say something he thinks makes him seem important—and said that an editor at some magazine had asked him to write an essay about what it was like being Jewish in America right now. He said the name of your magazine, even though he knew I wouldn’t recognize it and even though he knew I wouldn’t care. It sounded extremely goyish. (I have since learned your founder was Jewish. Changes nothing. Many very goyish things—Broadway, Communism, Christianity—were founded by Jews.) My cousin said the editor had told him the essay was meant to provide balance, a diversity of viewpoints. What were these viewpoints that the Jewish viewpoint needed to balance against, needed to diversify from? I didn’t want to know. My cousin wants to paint me as some farfetched frum nut, as if I only care about what G-d cares about. But in this moment, honestly, I was feeling protective. Max is still my little cousin. So I told him he should not write this essay. There were two reasons why. One reason I said aloud, and the other I kept to myself; I wasn’t trying to pick a fight—like I said, I was trying to protect. The reason I didn’t say aloud was that he was unqualified: He had no idea what it was like being Jewish in America right now. He’s been numbing his Yiddishe sensitivities for years, his whole adult life he’s been fleeing from that sort of understanding. The reason I did say aloud was that he would upset everyone. Certainly his family and probably also all his new friends, who are notoriously hard to please. “This is a needle you cannot thread,” I said.
My cousin sighed and, surprisingly, didn’t disagree. He admitted he was having a lot of trouble with the assignment. He said he’d tried to write a political essay (G-d help us), and explained what it was about, or what it was supposed to be about, but I could not tell you what he said, because it made no sense. My cousin is a decent-enough writer, but his range is limited. He wrote a book about our grandfather, which was not my style (much too much inquiry, nowhere near enough resolution), but it’s fine, people liked it. But politics? My cousin is incapable of writing about politics, because he is fundamentally not certain of anything. He grew up inside the richest, most glorious, most rewarding certainty in the history of mankind—and he threw it away, and with it went his ability to properly embrace any principle. (Aside, of course, from skepticism.) Anyway, my cousin then explained why what he wanted to write wouldn’t work (thank G-d), and I didn’t understand that either, but what I did understand was that in his own fumfedik way he’d come to realize that he didn’t understand what he had been trying to write about.
“And so I thought,” my cousin said in an unusually quiet voice, “maybe I could write about anti-Semitism, about what happened that day on the bus.”
Over the next few days I thought a lot about my cousin. Did he really have nothing more to say about anti-Semitism in America than an incident that had happened to him when he was nine years old? I wondered if that means he’s been lucky, but then I realized no, he’s impoverished. He no longer understands his people’s suffering. He has no idea what people are going through.
So I called my cousin (and here is where his story starts, because why start your story at the beginning?) and invited him to come with me to one of Rabbi Shmuley’s meetings. I knew he’d be intrigued, because it was an irresistible premise: Once a month members of the shul gathered to talk about anti-Semitism.
“What does that mean?” my cousin asked. “What do they talk about?”
“What’s happening in their lives,” I said, “what’s happening in the world. These days people are afraid, and people are confused, so we sit and talk and listen. There’s no agenda. There’s no politics.”
My cousin asked how it could be that there’s no politics. I said because Rabbi Shmuley doesn’t allow politics, so it becomes only about expression.
My cousin said he’d come and promised it would be with an open heart.
A few days later, a few minutes before nine o’clock, we met in front of the shul. He was fatter than the last time I’d seen him, and he wore a baseball cap, which covered his head, yes, but was not the sign of respect he seemed to think it was. In his story he writes that in this moment he felt a “sharp pang” of nostalgia, a “tickle of longing.” But this is a lie. In truth he felt nothing, which I know because he said, “I have not been here in years, and you know what? I feel nothing.”
“Open heart,” I said.
“I’m being open,” he said.
Downstairs, in the sisterhood hall, about thirty people had already arranged their chairs in a circle. I recognized maybe half from previous meetings, and there were lots of hushed but warm greetings. It feels good to be part of a group; it’s beyond me how some people want to deny themselves this. My cousin wrote how “un-diverse” we were, but that’s ridiculous. There were men and women (mostly women), college students and seniors (though mostly middle-aged women). There was one child, ten or eleven years old. There were women who covered their hair, and there were women who did not. Some of these people were very rich. There were even people in the room who I suspect voted for Obama.
“Let’s get started,” Rabbi Shmuley said, and everyone’s attention snapped to; he had a way with a crowd. We all loved Rabbi Shmuley. So young, so vibrant, so warm. He welcomed everyone, the regulars and the first-timers, and made meaningful eye contact, it seemed, with everyone—including my cousin, whose face was so hard, he was doing his best to show everyone how unsold he was. So his heart was not so open. I closed my eyes and breathed in deep and breathed out slow. I thought if anyone could get through to him, it would be Rabbi Shmuley.
Rabbi Shmuley gave his spiel. I’d heard it before, but its power hadn’t faded. It was about how what the Jewish people were going through in these times was both unprecedented and a repetition. For us, he said, time is a spiral. We are always being reminded that we have always been a persecuted people. Remembering is a collective experience, he said; it transcends the individual, and yet—another paradox—it is at times like these that it is more important than ever to know yourself, to not lose your sense of self in the chaos. Everyone was moved, and a few of the women teared up, as they did every meeting. My cousin’s expression admitted nothing. (“The baby-faced rabbi talked a while about anti-Semitism being both new and old” is what he writes.)
Rabbi Shmuley went over the ground rules: “We are here to learn from each other, not to argue. Certainly not to compete. Don’t deny anyone’s experience. Don’t deny anyone’s subjectivity. And, of course, no politics.” Everyone (except my cousin) nodded. Then Rabbi Shmuley brought out a cloth sack and asked everyone to put their phone in it. This was new; people were confused. Rabbi Shmuley said there’d been concerns that the meetings were being surreptitiously recorded. Everyone looked around, even more puzzled. My cousin looked at me, intrigued. “It gets intense,” I whispered. The sack was passed around, and everyone put their phones in it. Rabbi Shmuley put the sack under his chair and asked who wanted to go first.
A woman I didn’t know said how bad it was out there, and only getting worse. This prompted a chorus of enthusiastic agreement. Rabbi Shmuley nodded. “Sure,” he said to the group, “but what does it mean for you?”
Mrs. Itzkowitz raised her hand and said something awful had happened to her last week: She was in the middle of making dinner for her family and realized she needed some ingredients, so she went to the supermarket and was doing her regular loops, walking the aisles, this section, that section. (I was nervous this story was going to be about watermelons; it would not be the first time Mrs. Itzkowitz wanted to talk about watermelons.) She found herself confused, and then found herself agitated but had no idea why, so what could she do except keep walking the aisles, doing her loops? But she kept forgetting what it was she was looking for. So she’s doing the loops, walking the aisles for who knows how long, and all the while she’s getting more confused, more agitated, until she stops in her tracks, as if paralyzed, and is hit with a “flashback” (her term): a suicide bomber detonating himself in the middle of the supermarket. And it was so visceral, she said, she could hear the screams, she could see the carnage, the bits of flesh and bits of food hurtling through the air. “Terrifying,” Mrs. Itzkowitz said. “I couldn’t stop shaking.”
It was a harrowing story, but the regulars were perplexed, because nothing of the sort had ever happened to Mrs. Itzkowitz. (If it had, we certainly would have known.) Someone asked the question as gently as they could, and Mrs. Itzkowitz clarified that it was her cousin’s husband who’d survived the suicide bomber, she thought we’d known that, she was sorry for the confusion.
Mrs. Itzkowitz is a kind soul, but this was not a good opening anecdote. This has happened at other meetings: It becomes a cascade of secondhand stories that just don’t hit the same, and that’s not what I wanted my cousin to hear. But I should have had more faith in Rabbi Shmuley—before anyone else could talk, he thanked Mrs. Itzkowitz and said that of course we feel for one another, it’s who we are, “but tonight in this space we want to know what has happened to you.”
A man said that while he was walking home from shul, a burrito was thrown at him from a moving car. It missed, but not by much. “It’s so dangerous,” someone said. People murmured their assent. Rabbi Shmuley nodded encouragingly. One of the college students said he felt uncomfortable walking around campus, and a woman who didn’t cover her hair said that, even though she was not so conspicuously Jewish, she was afraid to walk in public—she felt marked somehow.
“There’s something in the air,” the man sitting next to her said. “It’s like it’s atmospheric.”
“That’s an interesting word,” Rabbi Shmuley said. “Do others agree?”
They did. They had many examples: slogans, marches, swastikas, headlines, podcasts, celebrities, captions, tweets, bumper stickers, Sharia law, conspiracy theories, torn-down posters. They shared incidents, run-ins, confrontations, near-confrontations, and things they’d read on the internet. I kept looking at my cousin—obviously I understood that some of it was silly, but how do you deny their experiences?—but I could not tell what he was thinking. (He writes: “Collective kvetch.”)
Rabbi Shmuley was a skilled moderator. He knew when to step in and when to step back and when to pull others in. He let people talk about what they wanted to talk about, but at the same time he was subtly pushing, probing, for fear. He was after stories where people were afraid, and he pushed them to articulate precisely their fears. But most people aren’t poets; they said they were afraid—of being on a plane, of protesters—and what else were they supposed to say beyond that? But then a woman said that at her grandson’s school—this was the kid sitting beside her—they’d found bullet holes. This seemed to be the anecdote Rabbi Shmuley was looking for, and he asked the child what that was like. “It was really scary,” the boy replied, his hands under his thighs.
Rabbi Shmuley made eye contact with everyone, letting the silence linger. “What is fear?” Rabbi Shmuley finally asked.
It was a deep question, and no one answered right away, so Rabbi Shmuley let the silence linger again; he’s so good at that.
A warning, someone said.
A mistake, someone else said.
“Yes,” a third said, “exactly—we cannot afford to be afraid, we cannot let them win.”
“A message to make aliyah,” another said. “Birth pangs of moshiach. A reminder of who’s in charge.”
It was around this point that my cousin apparently could no longer even pretend to have an open heart. He needed everyone to know how above all this he was, and so he groaned—not subtly either—and rolled his eyes and shook his head. At least half the room noticed. My cousin wants you to think he then boldly asked his bold questions, but that’s not what happened. What happened is that Rabbi Shmuley turned to my cousin and calmly remarked that we hadn’t yet heard from him; maybe he would like to share? My cousin, with none of the dignity nor eloquence he pretends he had, mumbled something about victimhood, about chauvinism, about safety and privilege, about our morally bankrupt institutions and our tax dollars, and even something about genocide. It was not very articulate, but everyone understood enough.
One of the women responded, and she just destroyed him, as they say on the YouTube clips this woman likes to share, explaining the real history he was attempting to pervert. (How did my cousin describe this exchange? She “screeched” at him “incoherently.”) Others piled on before Rabbi Shmuley cut in, raising his voice just enough to quiet everyone else down. “We are not here to argue,” he said, “and certainly not about politics.” He turned back to my cousin. “Though it’s also true that we haven’t heard an opinion like yours in this room, I don’t think ever. I want to know more about you.”
“What do you want to know?” my cousin said. He said it with such insolence—I think his arms were crossed.
“I want to know if you personally have had any experience with anti-Semitism,” Rabbi Shmuley said.
“No,” my cousin said.
“Our grandparents were in the Holocaust!” I sputtered.
My cousin shrugged. “He asked me about my life,” he said, “and I was born in 1985.”
I was speechless.
“That’s true,” Rabbi Shmuley said, “that is what I asked. So in your entire life, since 1985, you’ve never experienced anti-Semitism?”
“Once, maybe,” my cousin said, softening somewhat. “I was nine years old and sitting on the bus,” he began—but he got no further because at that point two masked men burst into the room waving pistols and shouting.
My cousin is a coward. Not because he was afraid—who wouldn’t have been afraid?—but because he won’t even admit he was afraid. He wants you to believe he didn’t feel fear at all, when everyone in the room thought they were going to die. Armed men storm a room full of Jews, and my cousin—who seems to think that the kind of men who would storm a room full of Jews would care what sort of Jew he thinks he is—what does he say happened inside his head? He says he was “confused.” That he was “overwhelmed by the sudden chaos.” It’s this lie in particular I can’t get over. Though maybe I should be impressed that he’s at least admitting he was confused, that he’s not pretending he saw right away that it was staged.
Look, as pretend attacks go, was it the most persuasive? No. This is a shul, not a theater, and Rabbi Shmuley was trying to make a point, not give us all a heart attack. These men weren’t actors; they were Mrs. Kahan’s nephews wearing hoodies. At being menacing and tough they weren’t naturals, and they didn’t seem well rehearsed; I don’t think they’d even planned what they’d shout. One of them forgot to tuck in his tzitzis. The guns were plastic and had red caps on the barrels. But they appeared out of nowhere, and out of nowhere is, in real life, blazingly fast. They burst in, they shouted (I think it was something like Nobody move! and Hands where I can see them!), and obviously all of us—except for Rabbi Shmuley—were terrified. What did we do? What do you think we did? We gasped, we yelled, we were struck dumb. Some of us fell to the floor, some of us stood up, some of us could not move at all. The woman who’d brought her grandson enveloped him with her body. (That was inspiring.) In those few moments, everyone—everyone—talked to G-d, I’m sure of it. Some reached for their phones to call the police, to call their loved ones—but the phones were in a sack underneath Rabbi Shmuley’s chair. My cousin—and here’s how I know for sure he was afraid—took my hand. (He lies and says I took his.) We did not look at each other; we did not have to. It only lasted five, maybe ten seconds—not long but also an eternity.
So why is my cousin denying he was afraid? Why can’t he admit to five seconds of fear? Why is my cousin, who, remember, is a writer (one apparently desperate for something to write about), why is he refusing to acknowledge what must have been the most dramatic five to ten seconds of his life? (Keep in mind that he’s a liar; he could have stretched it out.)
He didn’t even give it a section break!
It’s because my cousin has an argument to make. For him, nothing will stand in the way of an argument. Not drama, suspense, shame, and certainly not the truth. And what’s his argument? Honestly I’m embarrassed for him, and for you, too, if in the end you decide the truth doesn’t matter and you publish his essay. My cousin wants you to believe that everyone else in the room was afraid while he was merely confused. Because everyone else in the room was primed to be afraid, they already saw fear everywhere, while he, not primed to be afraid, did not see fear everywhere, so what he experienced in those ten seconds was merely confusion. And by the time he might have realized that maybe he should have been afraid, it had become clear that the men were Mrs. Kahan’s nephews and that the guns were plastic and that Rabbi Shmuley was perfectly calm.
Soon enough everyone understood they were safe and we were back in our seats and looking at Rabbi Shmuley. He smiled and let the silence linger, then explained he’d asked Mrs. Kahan’s nephews to don hoodies and find fake guns and storm the room shouting. “I wanted you to feel what you all just felt,” he said. “That was real fear. You should know what real fear is.”
And as Rabbi Shmuley continued to talk very intelligently and very movingly about the nature of fear and what it means vis-à-vis Jewish identity, my cousin, who I thought would at least find this interesting—or, at any rate, provocative—stood up and left the room. He writes that he could not take it anymore; he wants to give you the impression his exit made a dramatic statement. Ridiculous. No one cared. I think everyone thought he was shaken up. And, actually, the more I think about it, the more I think that’s the truth: He’d been afraid that he was about to be murdered because he was a Jew, and that had really shaken him up, had really messed with his impoverished sense of Jewish identity, his “safety” and “privilege.” In any case, I didn’t go after him. My cousin says he went to the sanctuary and sat down in a pew, alone in the grand, dark room. I can’t say for sure he’s lying, but this whole scene sounds exactly like something he’d make up. (He once admitted to me that the dream he describes in his book about our grandfather was totally made up.) So, according to him, he sits and has big, profound thoughts about what it was like to daven as a child, what it was like to believe as a child, what it felt like to belong as a child. It’s the least offensive part of his essay, but of course he doesn’t take it anywhere—like I said, always much too much inquiry, never enough resolution. (My question is: At that point, why not just daven?)
Anyway, whether or not my cousin actually sat and had all those big unresolved thoughts, he was in the parking lot by the time the rest of us exited the building. He claims he was “gathering his confidence,” but I think he just needed his phone back. I didn’t see him right away; I was talking with one of the college students about the climate on campus. Suddenly there was some sort of tumult, and I looked over and saw my cousin on the ground with his face all bloody, one of Mrs. Kahan’s nephews standing over him, and Rabbi Shmuley kneeling down, characteristically concerned.
What happened? There are two versions. My cousin writes that he accosted Rabbi Shmuley, that he said to him—with real anger but zero threat of violence—that what he had done was irresponsible (though why would my cousin be so mad if, as he insists, he hadn’t been afraid?), and apparently one of Mrs. Kahan’s nephews took umbrage at my cousin’s chutzpah and laid him out. The kid who’d pretended to be a brute was in fact a brute, my cousin writes. Mrs. Kahan’s nephew, on the other hand, says my cousin demanded his phone, and when Rabbi Shmuley, wanting to talk, didn’t immediately comply, my cousin tried to grab the sack, and it escalated from there.
And here is where my cousin’s story ends, because why wait until your story’s over to end it? He’s on the ground, bloodied, the Jewish kid who hit him standing over him. I ask you, now that you know the real story—does this image feel true to you? He thinks it’s so poignant, getting punched by a Jewish kid at a meeting about anti-Semitism that his zealot cousin dragged him to. He doesn’t even mention how concerned Rabbi Shmuley was. I don’t not feel bad—no one wants to see anyone get hurt. But there’s no big lesson here. My cousin got punched in the face. Maybe it was his fault, maybe it wasn’t; what else is there to say?
My cousin didn’t seem all that hurt, but people were worried he’d hit his head—Rabbi Shmuley most of all, who insisted I take my cousin to urgent care. So I helped my cousin up and into my car. And maybe he had hit his head, because he was acting a little strange, almost like he was drunk. I don’t think he remembers any of this. “What was I saying,” he asked in this funny dreamy voice, “when those kids with toy guns interrupted me?”
“You were telling the story of the time we were on the bus,” I said.
“Oh right,” my cousin said. “You want to know the truth? You want to know why I called you in the first place?”
I said I did, even though I didn’t actually care; I just wanted him to be quiet. I’d had enough of my cousin for one night, but someone had said it was important he stay awake.
“The truth,” my cousin said, “is that I don’t even remember what that man looked like, or what he did, or what he said. You know what I remember? I remember you. I remember your face. Because the entire time that man was standing over us, saying whatever he was saying, I was not looking at him, I was not listening to him. I was looking only at you. I did not know whether we were supposed to be afraid, and so I was looking at you, and your face told me: No.”
What did that mean? What did that have to do with anything?
I asked, as we were pulling up to the urgent care, if he was going to write about tonight, and he said: “How could I not? What a night! There was a staged attack, and also I got punched in the face.” I exhaled and inhaled and asked if I could at least see a draft before he sent it in. “Of course,” he said. “You’re my brave cousin, you’re the reason it all happened.” In the moment, that calmed me down, but in retrospect it really shouldn’t have; he was already cooking up his distortions. A couple of weeks later he sent me the essay he sent you. He did it only to upset me, I know—he couldn’t even wait until it was published. He wouldn’t answer the phone or respond to my messages; he thought he could silence me.
So I won’t stand idly by. I write to you, editor, to ask you to do the right thing and reject my cousin’s lies.
