All Who Go Do Not Return Read Online Free PDF Page B

but with one quick glance at its puny ordinariness, they shook their heads. It was not the right kind, they said.
    “What’s the right kind?”
    “The rebbe uses only a Shloh prayer book.”
    The Shloh prayer book was a special prayer book for the mystics and the ultra-pious, filled with kabbalistic commentary in the margins. Because the rebbe used one, most self-respecting Skverer Hasidim used one, too. I, of course, did not.
    One of my classmates pulled me aside. “I’d be happy to exchange privileges.”
    “What’d you get?”
    He bit his lip. “Holding the towel after tefillin—but the rebbe can’t use your Psalms anyway.”
    Chaim Elya, my source for all things Skver, explained it to me: “When you hold the towel,” he said, “the rebbe wipes his hands, and that’s it. The towel is still the rebbe’s. But with Psalms, it’s your Psalms. You make a note inside that the rebbe used it. You get to keep it for life.”
    Other students, too, offered to exchange privileges, always making sure to emphasize that the rebbe couldn’t use my Psalms anyway, and so I’d best take what they offered or I would end up with nothing.
    Suddenly, my indifference was gone. I had won the privilege fairly. I approached the dean, Reb Chezkel, to ask if my Psalms was good enough for the rebbe, and he waved his hand to dismiss the critics. “Your Psalms is fine. The rebbe won’t care.”
    Still, some of the students would not let the matter rest. “You’re not even a Skverer Hasid,” one argued, “What does it matter to you?”
    One student offered me ten dollars in exchange for the privilege, and for a moment I wondered whether I might capitalize on the affair, sell it to the highest bidder. I thought of the chocolate Danishes at the corner grocery store, the shelves of Yiddish books at the Judaica shop on Bedford Avenue, the hot dogs turning in the window of Landau’s delicatessen on Lee Avenue. But selling the Psalms privilege would be unseemly, an insult to the rebbe. Besides, now it all seemed like a pretty big deal. I was keeping my privilege.
    I stood with the rest of the student body, lined up in the study hall waiting for the rebbe to appear. The door opened slowly from the outside.
    “Shh, shh,” the crowd hushed.
    An elderly man with a salt-and-pepper beard and bulbous nose, looking both morose and self-important, appeared, and it took me a moment to realize that he was not the rebbe but his attendant. He began brushing away imaginary specks of dirt on the floor with the tip of his shoe and shoving aside students whose elbows stuck too far into the cleared path. Several paces behind him came a stout man with a reddish beard gone slightly gray, his brow wrinkled, his wide-brimmed hat pulled low over his forehead, his eyebrows narrowed into an insistent scowl. This, evidently, was the great man himself: His Honorable Holiness, Our Master, Our Teacher, Our Rabbi, the Righteous Foundation of the World, the Rebbe of Skvyra, May He Live Many Good and Long Days.
    He did not look like a rebbe. He did not look regal, he did not look scholarly, he did not look rebbish. His beard was not white, and not nearly long enough—fist-length, at most. He did not sport long flowing white sidelocks but small reddish ones, and he kept them tied in a small knot in front of his ears. I had always thought rebbes were supposed to have a languid air, eyes downward or lightly closed or rolled upward, otherworldy. But this rebbe’s eyes looked shrewd and present. When he walked, his head pointed forward, but his dark eyes, under thick, slanted eyebrows, shifted with alertness. He said not a word and made no unexpected gestures, and yet, his presence in the room was thick; I felt it in the utter silence, in the unblinking, staring eyes and the bated breath of all around me. The rebbe approached the special lectern prepared for him, then whipped his densely woven prayer shawl out of its cowhide pouch and flung it in one sweeping motion