Shulem Deen > Quotes

“Family hug,” I would announce as the children prepared to leave, after they were bundled into their coats and hats and mittens, and the six of us would gather near the door and squeeze together in a tight circle. “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss,” we would all go, puckering lips against cheeks and foreheads.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Zeal compensates for fear. A soldier is whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before battle—because how else does one withstand the fear of death? The religious zealot who shouts, beats, and kills is perhaps not the one who is secure with his faith but the one who is so fearful of the challenges, so aware of the fickleness of conviction, that he has no choice but to strengthen it with the drumbeat of mindless fanaticism.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“When caught in a world where your very essence feels shameful, life turns into a feverish obsession with suppressing your true identity in favor of a socially accepted one.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Logic will get you nowhere if it’s faith you’re after.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“You can’t invent a historically memorable event, unless it really happened.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“OK. Your father says faith is beyond reason.” “And so?” “I disagree,” Chezky said. “Faith is fully within reason.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I was like a visitor from a different era encountering our modern one, captivated by its very mundaneness.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I had been grateful for her willingness to keep in touch. If I was not there to see my children each night when they came home from school, to have dinners with them and do homework and take them shopping and work on school assignments, I could at least get regular updates from her. How would I be a parent to them now?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“But what did it mean to have faith in the righteous? Was it to have faith in their very righteousness? There was something maddeningly circular about that—how did one know if they were righteous enough to have faith in? By faith?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“They found its teachings profound. So much love. So much joy. Such inner peace. In their idealism, they overlooked its harsher realities.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Skills?” Zundel asked finally. “Don’t you need to go to college for that?” Gavriel shook his head noncommittally. “Not necessarily. You can write if you’ve ever worked with computers. Or if you’re good at math. Things like that.” He looked around the room as the men looked timidly at the forms in front of them. “Don’t be modest,” Gavriel said. “This is the place to brag.” And so we sat and wondered what we might brag about. We knew a lot about commerce in first-century Palestine. We could write contracts on property sales that would be legally binding in fifth-century Babylonia. A handful of us knew exactly how to slaughter an ox in Jerusalem’s ancient temple, skin it, clean it, and separate the priestly portions. But this was the first we’d heard of rezemays. Slowly, we began to fill in our names, our addresses, and phone numbers and then tried to think of what we might consider a skill. Excellent English reading and writing skills, I wrote down.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“For the children’s sake, we said, we’ll make this the most amicable split in the history of amicable splits.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“was said that the Rambam’s most notable philosophical work, the Guide for the Perplexed, was so great and so brilliant that it was meant only for the most learned. For everyone else, to study it was unnecessary. The important thing was to know that it contained all the answers, and so all further questions were pointless.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Hasidism, when first formed in the mid-eighteenth century, had come to liberate the Jewish people from a worldview ossified under centuries of legalistic arcana. Hasidism came to eschew the artificial and the pretentious and the formulaic. To raise the spirit of the law over the letter of it and to find infinite layers of that spirit. To celebrate the mystical experience over scholarly wrangling. It declared matters of the heart and mind superior to pietistic excess.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“When a child is taught that a parent is wicked, the child’s love for the parent does not subside immediately. What the child feels instead is shame. Shame over her own feelings of affection for someone she has been told is a bad person. Shame over her biological association with that bad person.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“A parent for fourteen years, I was accustomed to my children’s pendulous moods, but this—complete and determined withdrawal from one day to the next—was something else.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“This was unlike the Gemara, the elaboration on the Mishna, which could go on for pages about why a certain law was the way it was and how it was known. The Mishna was both easy and dull, a straightforward compendium of laws.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“The realization that I had lost my role as a father, not by the courts but because my children’s minds had been turned against me, sent me tumbling into an emotional sinkhole. I yearned for some way to shut down my mind and was gripped with the increasing conviction that death was the only way to do so.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“At first, I wasn’t very concerned. A family court judge could not rule on the basis of religion, I imagined. But when the judge ordered overnight and weekend visitation rescinded and reduced visits from twice weekly to once a week, I grew alarmed. “It’s only temporary,” my attorney explained. Until it went to trial and a permanent arrangement was decided. “How long until the trial?” I asked my attorney. “Hopefully, within the year.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“would never have known. In her entire life, she hadn’t”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“The objective is self-imposed ghettoization. Distinct language and dress keep interactions with outsiders to a minimum and help maintain separation from the wider world. Restrictions on secular education and outside knowledge keep foreign ideas at bay. Bans on media and popular entertainment keep away temptation. And so the Hasidim are spared the calamities of modernity.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“It was an odd accusation, not only because it was so far from reality but also because it betrayed what I had long suspected: a glimmer of envy. As if underneath it all, those who begrudge the godless their godlessness do so not because the godless are sinners but because sinners have more fun—and how dare they?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I wanted the freedom to simply be who I was, without fear or shame. When caught in a world where your very essence feels shameful, life turns into a feverish obsession with suppressing your true identity in favor of a socially accepted one.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“enlightened ones do not seek God. They seek only to destroy the faith of those who do.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Both good and bad behavior were guided not from within but by the books and authority figures who declared one thing forbidden and another thing virtuous. Self-determination was an unrecognized concept.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“When adults misbehave, I reasoned, they forfeit the right to tell children what to do.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“As if underneath it all, those who begrudge the godless their godlessness do so not because the godless are sinners but because sinners have more fun—and how dare they?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I lost my children’s hearts, and with them, very nearly, my sanity.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Chakirah, they called it. Rational inquiry. And it led, they warned, to bad things.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Only those afflicted with a psychological ailment would choose to abandon the loving embrace of the Hasidim. And sometimes I wondered: Could they be right?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return