Brother’s Keeper

Photo: flickr/music5one

It was a Friday morning on a scorching day in July when my older brother Yekusiel called me in a panic.

“Dovid is stuck at the Greyhound station in Philly,” he said. “And I can’t pick him up because I have a flat. Could you possibly give him a ride?”

Dovid was our youngest brother, who had bussed in from summer camp on his way to Lakewood for a family simcha—a Bris or a Kiddush or a Bar Mitzvah, I didn’t know for certain, I hadn’t been invited even though I lived only two towns over. Yekusiel must be in a real bind, I thought. We hadn’t been in touch for some time, not since my secular girlfriend and I decided to get married one year earlier. For Yekusiel to call now for a favor was so unusual and unexpected that it intrigued me in a strange way, and so I agreed.

Driving down I-95, I turned on the radio. Friday programming on NPR had long been my favorite, but I found it hard to focus. My mind wandered into the past. Growing up, we had been five brothers. Yekusial was the oldest, and we’d idolized him. Then came Asher and me, 16 months apart and, as children, inseparable. Heshy was the wild one, always getting into trouble, and Dovid was the youngest, whom we had all adored.

All that, though, was in the past. After I left Orthodoxy in my late teens, my family faded from my life in a jumble of misunderstandings and clashing values. Nothing but strained relationships remained where once had been a boisterous band of brothers.

As I drove into downtown Philly, I found myself on edge. The last time I had seen Dovid was two years earlier, at a Bar Mitzvah that ended badly, when my girlfriend and I were asked to leave because our dress was deemed inappropriate. I wondered how Dovid now looked, what I would say to him, this youngest brother who was almost a stranger.

I didn’t recognize him immediately, but I knew it had to be him, a young man in a black suit, broad-brimmed hat tipped to a rakish tilt. He waved, and I pulled over and stepped out to help with his luggage. We shared a stiff hug and then threw the suitcases in the trunk. The conversation during the ride to Lakewood was stilted. Dovid seemed reserved, a bit nervous, I suspected, around his apostate brother. I asked about his life and his plans for the upcoming year, and gradually he grew more at ease and began to share.

He’d finished high-school, he said, and was now moving on to a more serious yeshiva. “In September I’m moving to Denver,” he said. “I’m going to Rabbi Gorb.”

The mention of Rabbi Gorb horrified me.  I had visited Rabbi Gorb’s yeshiva as a teenager for a few days, just long enough to realize later how narrowly I had avoided the trap. My brother Asher, however, the one who’d been practically my twin, spent six months there and underwent a total transformation. He’d been sent for a rehabilitation of sorts, after he began to deviate from frumkeit when he turned 18, flirting with the boundaries of our restrictive lifestyle. The rabbis had noticed him slacking off during study sessions. Once, the dean of students caught him in the basement with a portable radio. He’d taken to frequenting the public library every Friday afternoon, which the yeshiva frowned upon. Some nights he’d disappear from the dormitory and take a bus to Manhattan to visit a club or watch a movie. When the rabbis and our parents caught wind of his exploits, they took swift action. He was removed from his relatively liberal yeshiva in Brooklyn and sent to Rabbi Gorb in Denver.

Rabbi Gorb—massively obese, with fiercely intelligent eyes set in a leonine head above a prominent nose and jutting bearded chin—exuded every characteristic of an archetypal cult leader. He held court in a large house on an isolated campus in a Denver suburb, where his students buzzed around him with servile obsequiousness. He was amazingly charismatic, with a magnetic personality. When he spoke his eternal truths, of the world and our place in it, with his booming, hypnotizing voice, he captivated his listeners, seducing them with his vision until they wanted nothing but to spend the rest of their lives nestled in the folds of his long black frock coat.

Those who were sent to join Rabbi Gorb’s circle were provided with a clearly defined life path, a guru to turn to for all of life’s important decisions, and the peace of mind that came with total submission to a single man and his ideas. In the mind of my devout parents, this was exactly what Asher needed. It worked. Asher sojourned out to Denver and abandoned everything for a life of devotion as defined by Rabbi Gorb.

Six months later, Asher was no longer a troubled adolescent but a Torah scholar, his back bent and his eyes glowing with piety, the exploits of his past only a fading memory. Soon afterwards, he married a teenage girl from a prominent rabbinic family, who became pregnant shortly after.

Now, several years later, Asher, who had once been my closest brother and friend, still lived in Denver, now with his wife and three children under Rabbi Gorb’s all-encompassing tutelage. Asher—with whom I had shared so many cigarettes and hushed conversations, swapped exaggerated accounts of sexual escapades and tales of adolescent bravado—no longer spoke to me, no longer kept in touch at all, he the rabbinic scholar and I the heretic.

And now Dovid, our youngest brother, sat beside me in the car, bursting with quiet energy, at the cusp of his adult life. I didn’t know him well, had been out of touch for some time now, but if he was being sent to Gorb, I realized he must be having yeshiva troubles. The rabbis must have judged his devotion to his studies inadequate, and he was now being sent to be worked over and to be prepared for marriage.

The sad part, the gut-wrenching reality, was that Dovid appeared to be looking forward to it. Like any young person searching for meaning and identity, Dovid was eager to attend a yeshiva where, it was claimed, those answers would be provided. He had been taught that all deviance from The Path, all exploration and experimentation, all base urges, were the work of Satan. All questions and doubts were the work of demons seeking only to lead him astray.

Rabbi Gorb, I knew, would provide the deceptive remedy for all that adolescent angst, and it now pained me to watch helplessly. I wanted to shout across the chasm that lay between us: Dovid, Don’t do it! Welcome your “problems,” explore your world, embrace your questions and doubts. Know what it is to be human. I wanted to scream: Your current self is good! Don’t let them tell you otherwise. Don’t abandon your future, your limitless potential, your entire being, for a life lived as an appendage to an egomaniacal rabbi!

But I remained silent. I knew that confronting him directly about his path wasn’t likely to have the desired effect.

As we neared Lakewood—where I would drop Dovid off and, most likely, see little of him again—our already-stilted conversation lagged, and I switched on the radio. “Science Friday,” a program I’d always found fascinating, was on, and the host was exploring breakthroughs in robotics.

If I won’t speak my mind, I thought, let him at least know about the world he’s losing out on. Silly, probably futile, but worth it still. Let him hear what a wealth of knowledge and opportunity lies outside the stifling walls of his narrow, fundamentalist world. Perhaps, I thought, I might plant just enough doubt in his mind before he went off to Denver.

I glanced over at him, observing his youthful demeanor, his expression unchanged. I wasn’t expecting a sudden transformation, to see the seeds of curiosity taking hold in that moment. No. But still I was startled when, in front of my eyes, I saw a transformation of a different sort. Dovid’s deepset eyes, the wisp of stubble on his chin, the aquiline nose were suddenly familiar in a way that they hadn’t been earlier. In front of me I saw not Dovid’s face but Asher’s, now with the prematurely wrinkled forehead, the somber expression, eyes always absorbed in a sefer, oblivious to the world around him. And then I saw the laughing visage of Rabbi Gorb himself, fat lips spread as he cackled at my helplessness. I felt a wave of despair rush over me as I watched Dovid swing open the door at his destination.

I hoisted his suitcase out of the trunk and it hit the sidewalk with a thud. The zipper popped open slightly and through it I saw the oblong edge of a gleaming white object. Only after Dovid stuffed the object back into a jumbled pile of undershirts and re-zipped the suitcase did I realize what I’d seen: The sleek edge of a white Macbook.

If Dovid had a Macbook, it was likely he went online. And if so, he had access to more than just NPR’s Friday programming. Perhaps there was more to Dovid than I knew. Perhaps he stood a chance, after all. Rabbi Gorb, at the very least, would have his work cut out for him. And this time, perhaps he would fail.