The Sichuan Broadcasts

  I know what I am talking about. I have been in the teshuva business myself.

  It was in July 1994. The Dean of the Brooklyn Yeshiva where I studied then had dispatched me along two other class-mates to reach out to the estranged Jewish masses of Portland, Oregon. Yes, at that time, I was learning in a noted Yeshiva on Coney Island Avenue, Brooklyn, NY. I spent a year and a half there. I have some difficulties myself in tracking down my itinerary for that period. I actually have to check the stamps on my old passports to ascertain what was when.  From Paris, I'd gone to Strasbourg. I learned a lot there. I didn't foster my skills though. I had already a good grasp of Biblical Hebrew. I could study the Book by myself. But I still didn't comprehend rabbinical Hebrew, which is very abstruse, nor the Aramaic of the Talmud, which is very allusive. They didn't teach that in Strasbourg. From the discourses of the Rav, from the discussions with the disciples, I gained priceless insights and some knowledge. I didn't get the tools to become independent in my learning. And, well, Strasbourg was like Paris in some ways. In Paris, if you didn't pass some examination, you would never be really allowed to speak. In Strasbourg, if you hadn't been in one of the famous Lithuanian Yeshivot of the Holy Land, you would never be really listened to. I wanted to know more. And I was ambitious. I left for Israel. I went to Bne Brak.
  There, I enrolled in a small Yeshiva for French speakers. The Dean had had a hard time in his youth to enter the prestigious world of the great Yeshivot. He had devoted his life to spare the boys who came after him that hardship. He had built a kind of transition or preparatory Yeshiva. There you were taught, in a very school-like fashion, what was necessary to get in the real show. I had some difficulties with the other guys there. They were a bit too reborn to my taste. Any question was considered an objection, and objection was heresy. Not much wisdom, but good skill-building. After two months of that intensive program, I had picked up enough of the rabbinical jargon and of the vernacular to follow a talmudic class in modern Hebrew. I was sent to another Yeshiva, a real one though a last-tier one, in the middle of the desert, in the last town before the Red Sea, Yeruham. It was a first step. I spent six months there. I got bored to death.
  The ultra-orthodox neighbourhood was on the frindge of the city: one street lined by the decaying concrete of three storied apartments blocks built twenty years earlier for new immigrants who had never shown up. Off the street stood the Yeshiva, right on the edge of the desert. It was a new building, the smartest of the city. Through the windows of the study hall, we saw the desert. I spent a lot of time in there, contemplating that emptiness and daydreaming about future triumphs, because it was the only place with air-con. The dorms were in appartments down the street, two or three students in a room. From mine, I could watch people in the neighbourhood next to ours. That was the only distraction. It was quite entertaining actually; it was an Indian neighbourhood. On friday afternoons, dark skinned women wraped in colorful sarees busied themselves to get everything cooked before Shabbat. They were amongst the poorest people in the country. They had been dumped there, in a development city where nothing had ever been developed, and left to rotten. I had never heard until then that there existed Indian Jews. I never got a chance to meet them. Like everywhere else in our wonderful Jewish State, each community kept to itself. In half a year, exactly one thing happened. A week before the city elections, the representatives remembered that the men in black go the poll, and so do their wives. On our way to the morning prayer, we found teams of workers busy digging large holes along our street. As soon as the afternoon break was struck, we all rushed out to check which one of the speculations that had agitated the house of study all that morning would prove right. None did. We were in shock: our dusty lane had been transformed into an elegant boulevard lined by palm trees. A month later, they were all dead. The municipal embellishment program did not include any watering follow-up.
  I took any excuse to ride the bus back to Bne Brak. A festival, a wedding or a circumsision, and I was on the Egged liner, off to visit friends. I loved those long rides. It was the only time I had a chance to listen to the radio, to begin with. I didn't understand half the news, but at least I was reassured that things were still going on in the wider world. And I got to see different people. Young soldiers who fell asleep as soon as they hit their seat. Russian immigrants who quite didn't understand how you could read and appreciate Lermontov and still be on a bus going from nowhere in the desert to some other nowhere in the suburb of Tel Aviv. If I was lucky, I would be treated to a hot political discussion. A traveller would get so bored that, instead of listening to the news, he would start to comment on them. Israelis are very strongly opinionated. Such unsollicited comments are bound to provoke an argument of some sort. For me, it was the only opportunity to have a glimpse into the contradictory points of view that pull apart that fragmented society. Each one of them did make some sense. Which didn't help me very much in understanding the whole Israeli conundrum. The strange thing was that as tough as the argument would get, you could always feel some underlying complicity. As though rudness and calling people names was to be expected in a family row. I spent a lot of time on that bus. Toward the end of the semester, every other Shabbat was a good enough pretext to leave.