Making a Murderer

The ceremony of innocence is drowned...

I wrote this essay a few years ago with, I came to realize, no clear objective. The story abruptly announced itself in my mind, clamoring to be born. Who was I to deny it the light of day? Words flowed as I rode a current of bittersweet nostalgia.  When I tried to end the piece, though, the lack of purpose reared its head. Was the punchline mockery? Catharsis? I was at loose ends, so was the essay. I attached a milquetoast “don’t do this to other kids” denouement. It felt insincere, like pulling a punch. Like pretending I was too removed in time and of mind, too above the fray, to be exercised. So now these years later I’ve dropped the ending. I don’t have a point. I don’t need one. It’s art, it’s a Rorschach blot, it’s an exorcism. It’s my story.

It is a late summer day in 1990, the inaugural day of high school for twenty-five fourteen-year-old boys. We call high school mesivta, as the right-wing orthodox do. The classroom, bathed in the burnt orange of late afternoon, is drab and featureless. Our teacher sits at a large desk at the front of the room. We deferentially call him Rebbe, even in direct address (“Would the Rebbe like a coffee?'). He wears horn-rimmed glasses, a black cloth yarmulke, and an insubordinate salt and pepper beard. Tall, with a strutting gait and speech to match, we'd come to learn he was unflinching, thriving on provocation and controversy, quite distinct from the school’s other colorless rebbeim who subordinate personality to the yoke of torah. Today, however, he clutched a small, fraying book and shifted uncomfortably in his seat. He cleared his throat.

We freshmen came from the major centers of American orthodoxy: Brooklyn, Lakewood, Far Rockaway, Baltimore, Detroit and Los Angeles.  Our names came from major centers of the Hebrew Bible, Avrahams and Yitzchaks, Moshes and Aharons, Dovid and Shlomo. We bore the trappings of male adolescence: wispy facial hair, voices skittering across octaves, the mingled scents of body odor and Right Guard.  We wore what might charitably be called business casual attire: button-down shirts, dark slacks, and styleless shoes. Some accessorized with tzizit, letting the corner strings of the religious undershirts we all wore dangle flamboyantly down the sides of their pants.

The onset of mesivta coincided with becoming a bar mitzvah. Ours were not lighthearted bar mitzvahs of DJs, photo booths, and shimmying girls in sequined dresses. Nor were they mere Hebrew school graduation ceremonies, marked by struggling through a Torah reading wearing a scarf-like tallit and a puffy satin kippah. For us bar mitzvah was a metaphysical status change. We became religious adults enjoined in meticulous performance of many (many) positive commandments, and equally careful avoidance of countless sins. We were acutely aware that we were now "legally responsible for our own transgressions," a concept even graver in the original Hebrew. The legislator, prosecutor, and judge in this theological framework was God Himself. It was deadly serious business.

So, on that first day, stacked on the standard anxieties of transitioning from middle school kings to high school runts, was the burden of religious metamorphosis. The temporal mirrored the metaphysical.  Gone were the halcyon days of elementary school where, despite the gender-segregated and unmistakably religious environment, we looked and acted kind of like regular American kids. We had hours of religious instruction, but hours of secular education too. We wore kippas and tzizit, but our polo shirts and khakis didn’t mark us as that different than typical elementary school kids. Our school had baseball diamonds and a basketball gym, we avidly followed sports and avidly played them. We memorized the staccato lyrics to Billy Joel’s We Didn't Start the Fire.

Mesivta was a different animal. Here, we could literally see the trajectory of our future religiosity in the monotonically increasing piety of the upperclassmen[1]. We ninth graders wore striped button-down shirts; a few tenth graders did too, but none of the upperclassmen did. All white shirts, only white shirts—yeshivish white shirts. Basketball followed a similar progression. Freshmen played daily on the yeshiva’s narrow court, with its undulating, cracked concrete floor and netless rims. We had not yet fully relinquished our very American childhood fantasies that we, too, could be like Mike. But court time dwindled with each year spent in yeshiva; the seniors played once or twice a month, at most.

So many aspects of our lives followed this sharp, upward curve in the totalizing project of becoming a yeshiva bochur. Attention to secular studies, always meager, waned to nothing by the middle of 12th grade. The transition to yeshivish vernacular—English flecked with Yiddish, Hebrew, and Aramaic—was, its ba’vust, kim’aht complete by the end of high school. In 9th grade we wore our metonymic black hats only during thrice daily prayers. The upperclassmen wore them every time they left the yeshiva building. It was their uniform, a statement of identity to the outside world, and to themselves. We were expected to make these changes, and then for these changes to remake us.

The situation was even more dramatic than that. In addition to a high school, the yeshiva incorporated a post high school “bais medrash'' program. The program centered on the eponymous study hall wherein, unshackled from even pretense of compliance with a government mandated secular studies curriculum, 75 students, aged 18-22, spent all day studying Torah. So, we freshmen didn't just peer 4 years into our futures, we could look further still, seeing the full sweep of our late teenage and early adult years embodied in the bais medrash guys. In their course of study, 14 hours a day of prayer, Talmud, Hebrew Bible, and Jewish law and ethics. In the growth of their black velvet yarmulkes, conquering ever more hairline or incipient bald spots. In their billowing payes, worn so thickly behind the ears that they spilled over the sides. In the numinous intensity of their baroque in-prayer swaying. In all the ways that every dimension of their personhood transubstantiated into yeshiva bochur ideal.

The rebbe, fingering the page edgings of his book, gaze riveted to something imperceptible on the ceiling, directs us to open a kitzur shulchan orach, a Jewish law compendium authored by Rabbi Shlomo Ganzfried. It is a summary of a classic earlier law code, and popular for its accessibility and cogent Hebrew.

One more thing to know is a bit about the Yeshiva’s campus, physically and metaphysically. The main building is squat, white, and ramshackle and has seen better days (but, very likely, never any really great days).  It is nestled in, but stubbornly apart from, a middle-class suburban neighborhood. The yeshiva stands less than a thousand feet from the Atlantic Ocean, yet it feels a million miles away from the adjacent beach, with its sinful co-ed swimming, bars, and frivolous volleyball games.   

The yeshiva is a boarding school. The students live on campus, returning home only one weekend a month and for select holidays. There are three dormitory buildings catty corner to each other a few blocks from the main yeshiva building. A student was murdered in one of them three years earlier. That dorm stands hauntingly vacant. The murder is well known to the students, but never spoken of by the hanhala. The dorms' architecture is, if not Brutalist, then brutal: boxy, stolid brick fortresses, with no grounds to speak of.  The interiors mirror the exteriors in their spartan, barracks-like austerity. If 'boarding school' conjures Andover or Choate, magisterial buildings on sprawling, bucolic grounds, picture the exact opposite. Yet, nobody minds. We’re excited to be independent proto-adults, and there is a kind of freedom in squalor.

This was the era before cell phones and the internet. We were isolated from our families and the world. The yeshiva became a surrogate family, the hanhalah acting in loco parentis. The patriarch of this makeshift family, the Rosh Yeshiva, never spoke to the high school students, reserving communication to the bais medrash guys. An unhappy dynamic, to be sure, but as Dostoyevsky reminds us, unhappy families are families too. I used to think his reticence was a bid for self-aggrandizement. I’m now pretty sure he was just shy.

The father figure role fell to the mashgiach. A mashgiach’s role in a yeshiva is ethical guidance, imparted through periodic sermons called shmuezzin. Our mashgiach also had the thankless job of dorm counselor, nightly remonstrating with us about curfew and cleanliness, and rewarded for his efforts with our sneering disregard. This sharply undermines his aspiration to be taken seriously as a spiritual mentor in the mold of the legendary mashgichim of pre-war European yeshivas.

So, this is our status as the rebbe announces the chapter we are to turn to in the Kitzur Shulchan Aruch. We are impressionable adolescents, anxiously embarking on the path to becoming yeshiva bochurim, aware that foundational changes are expected of us—changes mirrored in the dutiful upperclassmen. All of this is unfolding in the dislocating context of a new yeshiva, isolated from our families, in the care of our rebbes, freshly minted as “responsible for our own sins.”

“Chapter 151”, he instructed. The pages of 25 books rustle in unison. I’ll reproduce the entire, short chapter below in English. He went on to read it aloud in the Hebrew original. 

It is forbidden to discharge semen in vain. This is a graver sin than any other in the Torah. Those who masturbate and thus discharge semen in vain, not only do they commit a grave sin, but also one who does this is placed under a ban. Concerning such people it is said, "Your hands are full of blood," and it is likened to killing a person. See what Rashi wrote in the Vayeishev Torah portion concerning Er and Onan, who died because of committing this sin. Occasionally, as a punishment for this sin, God forbid, one's children die when young, or grow up to be wicked, while the sinner is reduced to poverty.

His words hung in the stunned silence. God was not ineffable in Yeshiva. Sex, as sex, was. When sex arose in Bible or Talmud study, once we passed the stage of skipping those sections altogether, it was always valenced as arid legalism or antique story, never real-world human activity.  Euphemisms like “he knew her” or “martial relations” were used, or the Hebrew was left untranslated. And now this rebbe, this very religious looking, religious guide on our new religious journey, in this most religious yeshiva, was going on unsparingly about touching our genitals, and ejaculation?

More distressingly still, we were now all murderers. Linger on that—it isn't a joke. It sounds like a joke. It’s likely the punchline to a thousand jokes. Humor may be the best way of dealing with it now. It wasn’t a joke then, nor was it intended to be. Faster than the bang of a gavel or a Soviet show trial verdict, our rebbe and Shlomo Ganzfried rendered us serial killers with, I immediately intuited, very high odds of recidivism. We were sinners without equal, worthy of excommunication. Our young children might die on account of our priapic killing spree. The just desserts of murder—more death. I took every word of this very seriously.

In my memory, those five minutes exist in a timeless vacuum. None of my classmates said a word, asked a question, or ever discussed it. It happened and then it was both ineradicable and forever disappeared. A yeshiva superposition. I did think about it, though, for a few years thereafter, attempting to white-knuckle my way to first-person abstinence. To steer clear of besetting sin. To avoid the killing fields. Occasionally I even succeeded.

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[1] I wrote piety, but more than piety, the long arc of mesivta bent towards "yeshivish," which describes the ethos and, importantly, the affectations of right-wing yeshiva culture. Yeshiva piety and yeshivish correlate, but not precisely. Various things, and various people, are one but not the other. In most measures, both were expected of us

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Glossary:

Mesivta: A Jewish high school for boys, typically with a strong focus on religious studies

Rebbe: A Jewish spiritual leader or teacher

Yarmulke: A skullcap worn by Jewish men (also known as kippah)

Tzizit: Ritual fringes worn by observant Jews, typically attached to a special undershirt

Bar Mitzvah: A coming-of-age ritual for Jewish boys at age 13

Tallit: A prayer shawl worn during Jewish religious services

Kippah: Another term for yarmulke

Yeshiva: A Jewish educational institution focusing on the study of religious texts

Bochur (plural: bochurim): A young man, typically a yeshiva student

Ba’vust: Well known

Kim’aht: Almost completely

Bais Medrash: A study hall or house of study in a yeshiva

Payes: Sidelocks or sidecurls worn by some Orthodox Jewish men and boys   Kitzur Shulchan Oruch: A summary of Jewish laws and customs (https://www.sefaria.org/Kitzur_Shulchan_Arukh?tab=contents)

Hanhala: The administration or leadership of a yeshiva

Rosh Yeshiva: The head of a yeshiva

Mashgiach (plural, mashgichim): A spiritual supervisor in a yeshiva

Shmuezz (plural, shmuezzin): Ethical sermons given in a yeshiva

Vayeishev: A portion of the Torah (the first five books of the Hebrew Bible)

Rashi: The foremost commentator on both the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud