The Streimel: A Reflection on Teshuvah

The Streimel: A Reflection on Teshuvah-Repentance
Rabbi Dov Gartenberg
Yizkor, Temple Beth Shalom, Long Beach 5758

Twenty one years ago, at my former congregation in Venice, California, I delivered a Kol Nidre sermon about my brother, Philip. I had just visited him and his family in Jerusalem that summer to reestablish a strained connection. Over a number of years, my brother had become strongly attracted to the ultra-Orthodox community of Bratzlaver Hasidim. In the sermon I described an encounter with my brother which had deeply troubled me. At the time I was struggling to understand my brother’s emerging ultra-Orthodox practice and beliefs. But I did not ever have the opportunity to reflect on it further, because my zayde, Max Grouf, died of a heart attack on that Motzei Yom Kippur. A year later my brother died from complications due to a serious illness.

In September I observed the twentieth Yarhzeit of my brother, Philip. I thought about my two decade-old encounter with him. He was a passionately idealistic person who gave his all in everything he did. He was extremely bright, successful in his field of mathematics and computer science. He married an Israeli woman who came to the US to be with him as he finished his doctorate. My sister-in-law, like my brother, discovered traditional Judaism in adulthood and with him gradually embraced the ultra-Orthodox way of life. In the mid-80s my brother and his young family moved to Israel where he took a position as a professor of computer science at Tel Aviv University. The family chose to live in Jerusalem, however, because they wished to be close to the strong Orthodox communities that thrive in the Holy City.

When I saw my brother during the summer of 1986 it was so apparent that he had changed. I came to his house on a Friday afternoon to spend the Shabbat with his family. As I walked into their Jerusalem apartment I was greeted by the poster "Mitzvah Gedolah Lihiyot Sameach Tamid" - IT IS A GREAT PRECEPT TO BE JOYOUS ALWAYS. The house was a-bustle with Shabbat preparations. My sister-in-law was busily preparing the Sabbath meals and my brother involved himself with the household tasks, singing niggunim as he worked feverishly. As the time came to leave for Kabbalat Shabbat I saw my brother emerge from his room robed in a long brown Bratzlaver capote, his head covered by an impressive wide brown fur streimel.

I knew from letters that my brother had changed, but I was not prepared emotionally to see him in the clothing of his transformation. As I took in his altered appearance, we gathered up the children and began our walk to the Bratzlaver synagogue in the Jerusalem neighborhood of Old Katamon. I could not stop looking at my brother, a tall strapping man, as he walked joyfully in his capote and his streimel. He towered over the other Shabbat strollers making their way to the synagogues.

At the Bratzlaver Shtebel, there were about 100 people, mostly modern orthodox young men with twelve or so Bratzlavers in their capotes scattered throughout the room. My brother stood up front while I retreated to the rear. We began the Kabbalat Shabbat with blissful singing and swaying. By the time we reached Lcha Dodi, the whole room had become one body. The intensity of the prayer was astonishing; each stanza had a different melody, which was chanted with the utmost fervor. My brother was swaying wildly from end to end; his hands lifted upward, singing at the top of his lungs. He continued like this for almost the entire service, his eyes closed, his head bobbing and turning.
The service ended, and everyone streamed out wishing good Shabbas to one another. My brother’s wife and the children, who had been in the Ezrat Nashim, the women’s section, joined us for the walk back to the flat for Shabbat dinner. My brother, euphoric from his davening, took off his streimel with the intent of hoisting his five year old son up onto his shoulders. As he did so, he gently waved his streimel toward me and asked, "Dooby, can you put this on your head while I carry my son?"

I remember the moment vividly as he held out his streimel, and awaited my response. The years of our struggle to differentiate ourselves from each other passed before me while I figured what to do. The streimel was like a white hot object which I dared not touch without getting burned. After a long moment’s hesitation I told my brother, "No, Philip, I can't wear your streimel."

A year later my brother was gone. My sister-in-law has devotedly raised their four children. Although she moved away from the Bratzlaver community, she has brought up the children in the Jerusalem Lithuanian Haredi community. My nephews now married and with growing families, live in their own apartments and study in Yeshivot. Our relations with my brother’s family are loving, but greatly strained. As Haredi Jews they keep our way of life at arm’s length. Our contacts with each other can only be on their terms. As the children get older and start their families within the 4 cubits of the Haredi community there is less and less that we have in common except that we are family. While our children can enter their world, we know that they will never enter ours. My nephews and niece have grown up to view our world as foreign and forbidden. The abyss between the Ultra-Orthodox and the non-Orthodox in Israel is something that is very personal to me. Although I know my nephews would not throw rocks or hurl insults, they have been raised in a world that cannot fathom other ways to live religious Jewish lives.

I remember the offer and my refusal clearly that night. Twenty one years later I think of that moment and remember my brother. I was overcome then with anger over how much my brother had changed, how much he had grown distant from our family. But now with the benefit of time I realize that he was reaching out. For as I see it now, my brother, carried away by the joy of his prayer, simply wanted me to share that joy with him. He was no longer thinking about the difficulties in our relationship, and he was not trying to influence me. He was totally focused on the transporting joy of Shabbat prayer , and the sense of God’s presence. He was completely un-self-conscious in that moment. I imagine that the moment I refused him he did become self-conscious, aware of my discomfort and judgment. I really don’t know, because we never talked about this moment over the Shabbat we spent together or during that last year of his life.

As I reflect on that moment so many years later I find myself focusing on my brother’s passionate spirituality. Although he chose a very uncompromising spiritual path for himself, I realize that we both shared strong spiritual yearnings. Over the years, so many people have shared with me their spiritual yearnings and struggles. I see so many more people today that are spiritually hungry, seeking a path of meaning for their lives. I have seen people shocked by life’s sudden events and tragedies into an awareness of the spiritual void in their lives. I have seen people change directions as a result, moving through profound spiritual discoveries before my eyes. I have also seen people suffer great spiritual disappointments.

What is spirituality? Arthur Green writes that, “Spirituality is a view of religion that sees its primary task as cultivating and nourishing the human soul or spirit. Each person, according to this view, has an inner life that he or she may choose to develop; this ‘inwardness’ goes deeper than the usual object of psychological investigation and cannot fairly be explained in Freudian or other psychological terms. Ultimately, spirituality is ‘transpersonal,’ reaching deeply into the self but then extending through an inward reach beyond the individual and linking him to all other selves and to the single Spirit of the universe we call God.”

Like my brother I see the challenge of religious life as the cultivation and nourishing of our souls. I am not prepared to reduce his strivings to pure psychological need as I have been more willing to do in years past. I am no longer prepared to dismiss his experience as being too radical or extreme for me to respect. I am much more convinced now that his extending of his streimel was his sincere way of connecting to me in the moment of the uplift of his soul.

Green writes further that, “God is experientially accessible through the cultivation of this inner life, and awareness (da’at) of that access is a primary value of religion. External forms, important as they are, serve as instruments for development, disciplining, and fine tuning the awareness. Hasidic spirituality may present them as divinely ordained forms, but they are still recognized as a means (indeed, a gift of God to help us in our struggle), not as an end in themselves.”

My brother, who would not compromise his spiritual life and therefore chose the intense path of Bratzlav, had that evening sensed the presence of God. On that same evening I had experienced the burdensome presence of what Greene calls ‘the external forms.’ I was hung up on the streimel and could not see through it to the joy welling up within my brother.

I consider myself, like my brother, a spiritual seeker. In my youth I was not satisfied with the sterile, vapid presentation of Judaism I absorbed in my liberal synagogue. I seriously explored Buddhism during my college years. While in Israel in the mid 70s, I essentially lived in Orthodox environments and considered moving into that spiritual orbit. To this day I remain fascinated by different spiritual disciplines and approaches both within and outside Judaism. Like my brother I was not interested in the fashionable spiritualities that promised easy highs with little effort, or the solipsism that marks so much of what is call spirituality in American culture. We both recognized that real spirituality required discipline and regularity of practice, of training the mind to be aware and responsive to God.

We both found in Hasidism an authentic Jewish spirituality, but we parted ways on the degree to which we embraced that spiritual path. My brother became convinced that he needed to situate himself in the totality of a living Hasidic community. In this community he could live a life devoted to what Green beautifully summarizes as the essence of Hasidic spirituality: Avoides Hashem, the service of God, marked by an inward intensity (kavane) leading to attachment to God (devekus) and ultimately to the negation (bitel) of all else. The life of Torah and mitzvot, along with a zealous commitment to strict Orthodox interpretations of Halachah, constituted the Avoidas Hashem.

I knew and loved very deeply the world he chose to live in. By the time I was in my twenties the language of that world was no longer foreign to me. But the entry visa into that community includes embracing the belief that there is an exclusive relationship between God and the Jewish people. For as spiritually committed as I was to Torah and to its way of life I could not cross that threshold. I could not bring myself to deny the legitimacy of other faiths and paths in order to justify my own. I was not absolutely sure if my brother had begun to close off the rest of the world, but there were signs. I certainly was fearful that his journey was leading him in that direction. The truth is that I will never know because of his untimely death. However, my sister-in-law ultimately embraced the belief system of her Haredi community and my nephews and niece are safely ensconced within the high and well defended ramparts of its spiritual fortress.

As I reflect back to that moment in the summer of 1986 I regret that I didn’t take hold of his streimel and walked awkwardly a few hundred feet with it atop my head. I am sure I would have looked somewhat funny with my white shirt, beige slacks and sandals crowned by a black furry hat that was designed to compliment darker garb. No one in Jerusalem would have mistaken me for a real Bratzlaver, probably they would have thought me to be one of those crass tourists angling for a picture among the natives to take home to the Mishpache in America. But there really was a compelling reason to have received the streimel from his hand -- it would have been good to celebrate what we shared rather than to dwell on what separated us.

There are so many different paths in this world. We live at a time when we have so many choices about which paths we can take. Even in our own families, siblings and children and even parents take divergent paths and grow apart. But sometimes we are hasty to judge how far we have gone from each other and we enlarge the distance between us by our rejections. Sometimes Teshuvah involves a turning away. Sometimes Teshuvah involves a turning toward. Teshuvah is never formulaic, predictable, or automatic. Sometimes Teshuvah has to take place when the person you want to turn toward is no longer before you. Then you must direct your Teshuvah to those who remain before you and before God who stands before all of us.