Tuvia returns to his roots
What’s it like to live in Mea Shearim? Tuvia Tenenbom tells us
You know how when you walk into a room and there’s someone in it, most of the time it’s just someone in the room? It can be someone you’re very glad to see, it can be someone you love, but it’s someone in a room.
But you know how some people just fill a room? It’s not that they’re necessarily so big, but their personality — their being — just fills all of it?
That’s what it’s like to walk into a room that contains Tuvia Tenenbom.
Tuvia — Mr. Tenenbom sounds far too stilted — is a journalist, playwright, the founding artistic director of the Jewish Theater of New York. He lives in New York and Germany, when he’s not working at his own, highly specific form of immersive journalism.
He writes works of nonfiction — his latest, “Careful, Beauties Ahead! — My Year With the Ultra-Orthodox,” is his sixth — that involve him entering into the world he plans to describe. In “Catch the Jew,” for example, he tours Israel, often as Tobi the German; in “The Lies They Tell” he does the same in America. “Hello, Refugees” looks at the plight of migrants in Germany — except that to use the term “plight,” while undeniably accurate, somehow makes pedantic a style that can be both grim and light, but rarely preaches and never plods.
So, Tuvia.
He is physically unmistakable — he’s big, and he’s brightly colored, red hair and pink skin and colored glasses and suspenders. So it seems surprising that he researches his books by going undercover.
But Tuvia disguises himself in the most straightforward way — entirely openly. Instead of trying to look like someone else, he plays himself — but himself as a naif, something that he most definitely is not. Because he is so unusual, because he is visible and so visibly open to experiences, to other people’s stories, people find themselves telling him those stories. The reader finds herself trying to navigate his prose — is this irony? Is it cheap faux naïveté? Or is it just reporting? — until she gives up and gives in to it. Its very real charm, once you are open to it, hides genuine insight.
“Careful, Beauties Ahead!” is a chronicle of the year he spent living mostly in Mea Shearim, Jerusalem’s most charedi neighborhood, along with visits to other charedi towns, including B’nai Brak, where he was born.
It is in some ways the most personal of his books, because Tuvia grew up in B’nai Brak. He’s got genuine cred there; he’s a descendant of the Radzyner rebbe on his father’s side, and of another, less prominent Romanian rabbi on the other. He was a sweet chasidic boy, as he puts it, and, unsurprisingly, a top student, until his ideas — most particularly about women, who intrigued him in ways that he was not supposed to allow — chased him out. (Note that nobody else chased him out. It was all him, doing it to himself.)
Tuvia’s always retained a love for the chasidic world, although he could not live in it as himself. He’s drawn back to the world not only to understand it, but to relocate some of the joy that he knows is in it, and that will comfort his soul.
But he’s still himself.
When we meet, he makes clear that he’s not mocking the people he writes about. “In Mea Shearim, they love this book,” he said. “Usually my books are best-sellers in Israel, but usually it takes two or three weeks. This one sold out in the first week. Charedim went to the stories and bought boxes of them like hot potatoes. Like fresh Danish!”
He quoted a rebbe whom he talked to after the book was published in Israel — a rebbe he said should remain nameless — and, reader, please note that most of interviewees have their names attached, and Tuvia does not hold back in making clear which of them he likes – that’s most of them — and which few of them he detests.
“One Shabbat, I went to daven in one of the shtieblach, and when it’s over, and everyone leaves, I go to say good Shabbes to the rebbe, and the rebbe looks at me and says, ‘Many journalists come, but they usually stay only a short time. When they’re here, they say they really like us, but when the article or the book comes out, it turns out that they really hate us. You came here and stayed for a long time, and you said you liked us, and when you wrote the book, it turns out that not only do you like us, you love us.’”
“So,” Tuvia said, “they don’t see this as mockery.
“And even when I do criticize them in the book” — and to be clear, he does, because he is writing about a complex society, where, by definition, some things will work better than other things, and some people will be happier than other people — “I say that they are not the only people who do things without understanding them.”
Tuvia sees the charedi world as a healthy refuge from the one where he lives most of the time, a world where political correctness is valued over blunt truth. A world, he said, where people follow “a little girl, Greta Thunberg, who has no degree in climate. No degree in physics. No degree in chemistry. She is a little bit meshugge. But hundreds of thousands of people listen to her.”
So in that case, why not listen to a rebbe?
Still, Tuvia said, “I did not think for a second that I would write a book that would be so approving of the ultra-Orthodox. I remember thinking that I wanted to write a book that would condemn them. To make fun of them. But because I allowed myself to get rid of my preconceptions and start from zero, I fell in love with them.
“It’s because I was able to learn new things. And that’s why at the end the book is so supportive of them. So very pro-charedi. I am not charedi, but I love the community. I found so many beautiful things in them.”
Those beautiful things included stylishly dressed women, lovely homes, and delicious food, Tuvia said, but most of all it included “a sense of humor. That means that every day I was in Mea Shearim, I was laughing from the time I opened my eyes.”
And possibly because he did grow up in that world, “I have that same sense of humor,” he said. “By the end, I realized that I might not be religious, but in my heart and in my soul and in my mind I am charedi.
“It’s like I discovered my family again. They are part of me. They are my brothers and sisters.”
The question of how Tuvia manages to fit into a culture that’s visually black and white and stone-colored, when he’s so bright, intrudes. That’s easy, he answers. In Israel, people absolutely know who he is. He’s a best-selling author and a respected explicator of his surroundings. By this point in his career, and particularly in Israel, he’s welcome as himself. That’s how he can get himself into the situations and surrounded by the people he describes.
“I didn’t know what to call myself, so I went to the kasbah. Five people approached me there, and they said, ‘Reb Tuvia!’ ‘How are you, Reb Tuvia?’ ‘Reb Tuvia, I will never forget page 135, line 7 of Kill the Jew!’ It’s amazing! They all read books!
“So I was Tuvia, and that was that.”
Also, he adds, he speaks Yiddish.
Part of Tuvia’s affect, as he takes you with him to explore the surroundings in which he has planted himself, comes from his use of the present tense. Whatever he’s writing about is going on now, right now, as we speak, even though of course it isn’t.
That approach works. (And it’s catching!)
Another way to consider Tuvia’s approach to writing is to look at the name he uses for God as he explores the charedi world.
He calls God “The Name.”
That is a direct translation of HaShem, one of the most common names given to God. It comes from the rabbinic prohibition against using God’s name, lest the name be taken lightly, somehow in vain, as the Torah forbids us from doing. Although God has many names, and God’s true name is unknown to us and always will be, we’re told, prudence dictates that we not use a name that’s too close to the real one. The farther away, the better.
The Name, as a name, is far enough away from the actual name to use.
Most of the Jews, whether or not they are in Israel, whether or not they are native Hebrew speakers, who call God The Name, say HaShem. Hebrew, after all, is the holy language.
But Tuvia, in his quest of wide-eyed transparency, chooses to translate HaShem. The Name, he calls God; when he’s writing, modeling his word on the Hebrew, he capitalizes HaShem’s The. It’s not haShem.
To have someone talk about The Name is at first not to take him seriously. But this is Tuvia Tenenbom.
“It is very important for American Jews, for ba’alei teshuva, who say HaShem and think it’s the name of God,” he said. “It’s not. I just translate it the way that it is.
“We don’t ever know God’s real name. In the Bible, Moses asks, at the burning bush, and God says I Am Who I Am. God refuses to say. Kabbalah invested 72 names for God, but nobody knows what the real name is.
“There are people who will not say HaShem. They think it’s too holy. So I decided that from the beginning I will be honest in this book. I will say it in English. In English, HaShem is The Name.”
If there is anything about which Tuvia is not entirely transparent all the time, it’s that he doesn’t travel alone. He’s accompanied by his wife, Isi, a woman of great warmth, charm, and tact. He thanks her, with love, in the dedication to this book, but otherwise her help, while essential, is quiet.
When you meet Tuvia, though, you meet Isi as well, and you understand a bit more about the scale of their efforts to prepare the book.
There are some issues that seem to us, here in America, to be roiling in Israel. Tuvia does not mention them. Although the question of whether charedim should serve in the Israeli army, particularly now, with Israel so horrifyingly at war, Tuvia does not discuss it in his book. In fact, he dismisses it when he’s asked about it. “It is an issue only in Israel, for the people who serve in the army,” he said. “If you are a Jew in New York, it is hypocritical.”
Then he explained his own theory.
“The reason they don’t serve in the army is very complex, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with charedim,” he said. “It’s because for 75 years, the two majority parties, on the right and on the left, always refuse to join to create a government. They always recruit the charedim and promise them that they would get a million dollars or a billion shekels and that they won’t have to join the army.
“If you give me a million bucks for not serving in the army, I will take it, and I don’t know many people who wouldn’t,” he said. “Everybody except the tzaddik in Sdom will take it. So we have been teaching them since forever that you don’t have to serve in the army. Just join the coalition, take the money, and we’ll be okay with that.
“So how can anyone not in Israel complain about it?
“And even the Israelis can’t complain. It is a democratic country. Vote for a party that says we are not going to do it.” But, he added, the only party ever to have said that it would do that — Avigdor Lieberman’s Yisrael Beiteinu — did not gain power.
“Now the right wing is in power,” he said. “Next it will be the left — and the left will offer the charedim the same thing.”
Tuvia is equally impatient with the pressure being put on Bibi Netanyahu — whom he does not like, he said — to do whatever possible to gain the hostages’ release.
“I interviewed a professor of Jewish history, David Sorkin, years ago. I met him again at the beginning of this war. I know that he is a very smart guy. And he said something brilliant to me. He said, ‘What I am afraid of is that the families of the hostages and the parties on the left will join and go on the street and demonstrate.”
He’s not a supporter of Bibi. But he said, “It will turn into a political thing.
“And that’s what happened. He analyzed it, and it turned out to be the truth. The hostage thing became political, and it split the nation in two. I think that there are two nations today.
“In any other country in the world, if another country sent hundreds of rockets a day into it, that country will be flattened. If Cuba did that to Florida, or if Austria did it to Germany, they’d be flattened.
“I am thinking that the Jews should be able to flatten Gaza. That’s what America did to the Islamic state in Mosul.
“Imagine that you had British hostages in World War II, and we stopped the war to get them back. If we did that, everyone in the world now would be speaking German and Russian. Thankfully, we didn’t do that.
“This is very hard to say, but it is a fact that you cannot stop the war. We cannot give Sinwar and Hamas whatever they want. If you withdraw all your forces to save a few hundred, you are going to have thousands killed. This is not logical thinking.
“This will only encourage the Palestinians to kidnap more people. Look at what happened with Gilad Shalit. They got thousands of prisoners freed for him.
“Thousands of people are dying now because Israel was merciful. It couldn’t stand the thought of an Israeli soldier suffering in captivity. But this is stupid, because so many people died.
“Please remember that I am not pro-Bibi, but here he happens to be right.”
In full contrarian swing by now, Tuvia talks about how most of Israeli society hates the charedim. “They say they’re all pedophiles,” he said. “They say they stink. Ha’aretz basically claimed that almost all of them have been sexually abused. Give me a break! They just hate the way they look, they hate the way they talk, and they hate what they stand for.”
In reality, Tuvia said, life for most of the charedim he’s met is good. “They have on average 10 children, and there is so much fun in the house,” he said; Tuvia does not have children. “In our modern times, if a couple gets married, they have one or two children, and those children are tyrants. The parents basically are those children’s slaves. But when parents have 10 children, the 6-year-old takes the 3-year-old for a walk, and the 5-year-old goes by himself to buy something at the store. They play in the street. They are free. I have never seen children so beautiful and so happy.”
As their husbands learn, “80 percent of the women go to work, at things like banking and real estate. You see them in offices, dressed like queens. They are happy, not like neurotic American Jews.”
And, he said, in what is for him the highest possible praise, “They don’t mind if you smoke next to them!”
He compared the way charedim eat to the eating habits of their more progressive counterparts in the United States. “Here, most Americans, may God save me, eat leaves and grass like horses.” (Tuvia is not a big fan of unnecessary vegetables.) “They go to restaurants where they have big plates, and everything on it is basically a leaf. And then they drink water.”
Charedim, on the other hand, he said, are major fans of Diet Coke.
More seriously, he yearns for the community that the charedim have but he does not, except when he’s there, living with them. “I have lived in New York City for many years, and I don’t know one of my neighbors,” he said. “Not one. In Mea Shearim, I knew them immediately. When I get there, right away my neighbor, a chasidic man, comes in and says, ‘Tuvia, I just made a good gefilte fish. Do you want some?’ I say yes, and he gives me some gefilte fish and a little babka.” And it was good, he said.
As he and Isi planned their year in black-hat Israel, “We were warned not to live in Mea Shearim,” Tuvia said. “They said people would throw stones at us. They’d say I’m an infidel.”
Instead, they were embraced, and he asked why. “They said that when you come for Shabbes, and speak to us in Yiddish, it is not you talking to us. It is your grandparents.
“And that gave me chills. Goosebumps. All of a sudden, I am not just a writer. I’m my grandfather, and you are my brother. No matter who you are, you are my brother.”
Still, Tuvia said, “At the end of the day, if you don’t have a sense of humor, you can’t read this book.”
That sounds like a dare to me.
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