All Who Go Do Not Return Read Online Free PDF

the hallways and repaint the lecture rooms. We were instructed to scrub our dorm rooms clean. Even the bathroom stalls were cleared of graffiti: Reb Moshe Lazer is a chazzer. Touching your bris is worse than smoking.
    I had enrolled at the yeshiva not as a follower of the rebbe, like most students, but because the Skverers didn’t ask too many questions, and I needed a yeshiva in which few questions were asked. While most of my elementary school friends had sought Talmud academies with reputations for producing impressive young scholars, my own goals were less lofty. I had heard of the entrance exams at the more prestigious institutions, hour-long oral exams covering many pages of Talmud along with their major commentaries, and the tales inspired dread in me. The summer after my bar mitzvah, after my friend Chaim Elya told me that the Skverers were in need of students for their modest-size Williamsburg yeshiva and that they weren’t very selective and administered no entrance exam, I told my parents that I wanted to study with the Skverers. My father looked doubtful, curious about my uncharacteristic initiative; but ultimately, he was pleased. “They’re ehrlich people, the Skverers,” he said. Ehrlich. Pious. Good Jews.
    But the Skverers and their ways were strange to me. I had spent my childhood mostly among the Satmars. The Satmars, too, had a rebbe, but I’d seen and heard little of him. My Satmar schoolteachers rarely spoke of him. My father embraced the teachings of the previous Satmar rebbe, the firebrand Reb Yoel, who died in 1979, but never visited his successor.
    “Ah! The rebbes of old!” my teachers would exclaim, and from them I learned that modern-day rebbes were only quaint relics of a once-glorious era. There was a time back in the old country, in the towns and villages that speckled Russia’s Pale of Settlement and the mountains of Carpathia, when a rebbe could make an anti-Semitic landowner perish in a freak accident, make a childless couple bear children well into old age, gaze into the eyes of his followers and see every one of their deeds, good or bad, past and future. But times had changed, it was understood.
    There were rumored exceptions. Reb Yankele from Antwerp, people said, performed miracles so great and so frequent, they were near daily occurrences. There was talk of the Tosher, near Montreal, who was good for marriage blessings—it was his specialty, they said. But these rebbes and their Hasidim were not in Brooklyn, and so they didn’t seem quite real to me.
    Now, observing the Skverers as they prepared for the rebbe’s visit, it was clear that they thought their present-day rebbe to be of equal stature to the great rebbes of old, and all I could do was scoff inwardly.
    “Did you see your name on the lottery list?” Chaim Elya asked one day. Anticipation was mounting as the rebbe’s visit drew near.
    “What lottery list?”
    “The lottery for the rebbe’s visit,” he said. “The lottery for who gets to do what. You won Psalms.”
    As I was to learn, a lottery had been held in which all students were entered for the privilege of serving one of the rebbe’s needs: opening the doors to the rebbe’s shiny black Cadillac on his arrival, holding his sterling-silver pitcher and washbasin, pulling out his chair when he stood or sat. It seemed as if the rebbe did not move an inch or raise a finger without a predetermined set of assisting maneuvers. I won the privilege of handing the rebbe my book of Psalms, from which he would recite five chapters at the end of morning prayers.
    At first, I was indifferent. Sure, I thought, the rebbe could use my Psalms if he wanted to, although it was just the same to me if he didn’t.
    “Can I see your Psalms?” a classmate asked the next day.
    Several students gathered around as I withdrew the modest faux leather-bound volume—a bar mitzvah gift from a family friend—from my navy-blue velvet tefillin pouch. My friends leaned in to examine it,