This wasn’t yet a reconversion, only a crucial dalliance. But on Tinder, he met the woman who would become his wife, a French Jew who had recently moved to Israel and wished to become more observant. “In slow motion,” he said, she helped to lure him toward his past.
Another force, perhaps much more essential than the role played by his mother or his wife, also drew him back. This force was, for him, both difficult to capture in words and inescapably palpable. It was a longing, he said, for “the shtetl,” the impoverished Eastern European settlements where great numbers of the ultra-Orthodox once dwelled. There, into the first decades of the 20th century, they were segregated and preyed upon in pogroms. Indursky’s yearning for a place of such darkness might sound baffling, but during our conversations, he spoke about Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he considers a literary soul mate. (He doesn’t compare their talents, though it wouldn’t be far-fetched to call him a Singer for our age.) For Singer, who spent part of his youth in a shtetl and part in a shtetl-like pocket of Warsaw, a persistent theme was the paradoxical flourishing of religious belief precisely where and when God seemed to be scarcely in evidence. For Indursky, the Haredi of today are a reminder of history and of an appealing religious ardor, a counterintuitive and powerful faith in God, amid the cruelties of shtetl existence.
Indursky spoke, too, about something infinitely darker than the shtetl: a longing, which he tried to explain several times during our week together, for Auschwitz.
“I ask myself, how was I not there?” Indursky said about the concentration camp. “I have something inside me that wants to be there,. I feel I was there, because it was such a huge thing in our history, in my identity, as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors” and as a relative of the dead. “When I have been to Eastern Europe, I feel them, I hear them, I smell them, I walk with them.”
This was bound up with his re-embrace of faith, he said, because it tugged him to a place and point in history when God was, at once, most absent and most present. He tried to illuminate this idea with an abstruse lecture on the tenets of Hasidism, the branch of Haredi belief he now subscribes to. But he also offered an example, a rare scene. “On the way to the gas chamber, naked, people were singing” praises to the truth of the Torah. “They were walking into death with singing, with words of believing. Saying the more God hides himself, the more I can feel him. Saying it is my choice, I bring him to be.”
Content Source: www.nytimes.com