The Hasidim ‘n me

Last night at Footsteps, I had an epiphany.

O.K. I had several.

Footsteps is a non-profit organization that offers support to people who want to reach beyond their Orthodox religious communities. They occasionally have authors come to talk about their own experiences leaving their faiths, and when a nice woman named Jamie called me this summer to ask if I’d be one of those authors, I hesitated only a little bit.

If you’ve ever seen the Hasidim, they’re the women with wigs and scarves and ultra-conservative clothes. The men wear long side curls (peyos) and white shirts and black pants and dark coats and hats. They look like they’ve wandered out of an eastern European shtetl — which most of their ancestors did.

I only know that word — how to spell it, not how to say it — because I spent a long-ago summer reading everything Isaac Bashevis Singer ever wrote. In fact, there were several moments in the evening when someone would say something in Yiddish and I would think, “So that’s how you say it.”

I have met Hasidic Jews and knew enough not to reach to touch any one — even to shake a hand, as for men that’s tantamount to sin, touching someone other than their wives. But the first guy through the door — side-curls and all — stuck his hand out and said, “Call me Loser,” only it’s spelled Luzer, and that’s his last name. He looked like a shorter version of the actor, Aidan Quinn, and I was immediately entranced. (In fact, Luzer wants to follow his look-alike into acting. In fact, unless he ends up on the cutting room floor, Luzer should appear in “The Good Wife” tonight at 10 p.m. I’m going to watch for him.)

The women were dressed more like me — pants and sweaters, and there was a big spread off to the side (I told Jamie I want to come back as a Jew because they have better food) and then we all settled in for a talk.

Beforehand, she’d told me because of the insulated nature of their earlier lives, the people in the room might not get some of my social references (I’d asked about that, because few things are uglier than a joke that falls flat) but I didn’t find that at all. We all laughed together, discussed a bit (not all of them are transitioning to a more progressive faith; some have left the idea of God behind altogether), and there were several moments when I wanted to sit down and weep — though I didn’t.

(I told them I promised I would not try to convert them, and if they’d fallen on the notion that there is no God, well, they wouldn’t hear from me.)

I found myself talking about the more conservative parts of my faith and someone in the crowd would say, “Yeah, we have that, too,” and they would explain a point of their faith that sounded every bit as picayune as some of my own.

I’d say “I say that with love,” but the attention to detail that fills some people’s interpretation of religion is harmful to the extreme. And I saw that in the room last night, there in lower Manhattan in this group of people. On Sunday, I would have said we share very little, me and these Jews. Walking to the subway last night — part of the way with Luzer, who was heading for Crown Heights, I believe he said — I knew differently. Luzer is in the process, though he still very much looks the part. He’s lost his job. He’s lost his home. He lived in a tent for a while, in his car — all because he wants to find a freer path through the world, and to the Holy.

These men and women are leaving behind families and jobs and a culture that hurts, even while it is achingly familiar. It is what they know, what on some level they believe they should love, this parent who slaps. Hard.

And yeah. I have that, too.