The Wise One nonfiction
by MOSHE SCHULMAN
When I was eight days old, I was carried into a synagogue on a fluffy white pillow while the congregation yelled, “Baruch Habah!” or, “Blessed Is the One Arriving,” and the mohel, a rabbi who performs the ritual circumcision, removed my diaper and cut off the foreskin of my penis. At least Isaac got Mount Moriah and nature. I got a stranger’s lap and a stuffy room full of people staring at me. Some of them clapped and sang. Some cried. Some fainted. I was officially one of them. I had made the cut. The fourth of eight children (four boys, four girls), I was raised in the Orthodox Jewish community of Monsey, New York. There was a saying in Monsey about large families: “Every time a Jewish baby is born, we stick it to Hitler.” My father had high hopes that at least one of his four sons would stick it to Hitler better than anybody; become “The Wise One,” the next great rabbi of his generation; and spend his days studying Torah. In the early days of my parents’ marriage, my father, who dreamt of becoming a scholar himself, studied Torah in Kollel in Monsey, a school where adults learned the sacred texts and received a small paycheck. But the small paychecks weren’t paying the bills, especially once my mother got pregnant for the second time. After ten interviews, my father found work at a computer software company in Manhattan. He shaved his Kollel beard and began taking the Monsey Trails Bus to the city every morning, his dream of becoming a great Jewish scholar destroyed by the births of his children. He tried grooming my older brother, Yisroel Meir, named after the Chafetz Chaim (one of the revolutionaries in the writing of Jewish law), to become a scholar. When Yisroel Meir was just a few months old, my father taped pictures of rabbis to the bars of his crib. But my brother was born a rebel and tore the pictures down. I imagine he became nauseated by the bearded men who stared at him while he fell asleep and were still there when he woke up. And so four years later when I was born, my father turned to me, his second son. “Moshe, do you know who you’re named after?” he asked throughout my childhood, smiling at me across the Shabbos table. “Rabbi Moshe Feinstein.”
“That’s right. Rabbi Feinstein, one of the Godol Hadors, Greats of Our Generation. At your bris, you were given a blessing to become greater than him.” “I know,” I replied, focusing on my chicken and potato kugel. “You see these seforim?” my father continued, pointing to the hundreds of books on the bookshelf behind him. “They’re my books from Kollel. Rabbi Feinstein was so great, he studied all of these books hundreds and hundreds of times. And so will you.” Whenever I walked by the portrait of Rabbi Moshe Feinstein that hung on our dining room wall, I believed he was watching me. He was making sure I was studying and doing all the mitzvahs and not sinning. I don’t want to be you, I thought. I don’t want to have a gray beard one day. I don’t want to wear suits and ties. I don’t want to sit all day studying Torah. I don’t want to answer questions and bless people who believe that my special connection with God will grant them children, happiness, and good health. I wanted to play sports, read magazines like National Geographic, and chase the beautiful shiksas. But I rarely had access to TV, radio, or secular books, so there wasn’t much to do besides study and memorize. The only books I was allowed to read were The Hardy Boys. My mother bought them in bulk from Costco on Friday afternoons before Shabbos. Unlike the hundreds of Hebrew books sitting on the bookshelves in the dining room, The Hardy Boys contained girls, mysteries, kissing, guns, and suspense. The Hardy Boys traveled to places I’d never heard of, like Boston and Washington, and they spent their time having adventures, not arguing over some ideology from the Talmud, like, if my ox gores your ox, what do we do? I didn’t want an ox. I wanted to be like Frank and Joe Hardy. At five years old, I was already trying to read through the Talmud, ancient Aramaic teachings that dissect Jewish law. I would sit at the dining room table in my blue legging pajamas and hunch over the open book like an actor studying lines for an audition—an audition for the greatest part, in the greatest show, for the greatest director ever. I didn’t understand anything I was reading, but I read the words over and over. Sometimes my father taught me pronunciations and definitions. Sometimes he didn’t. Sometimes I didn’t care at all about the words. I
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