Life of Yeshiva Guy

“It’s too hard”, he complains plaintively. “He, G-d, will understand. My son, he is a Rabbi. In Brooklyn. He is Lubavitch. (Here, he serenades me with the first few bars of Yechi to prove it. Great. A chiloni taxi cab driver Meshichist. Just what my night needed). For him, it is easy. For me, not so easy”. “Ah”, I nod my head, wisely. Like I know the score. Except I don’t. As long as he thinks I do, I guess. I am, however, interested in understanding this cabbie a little better. So I continue the conversation.

I rip into him. “So explain to me again why you think He will understand your chillul Shabbos, your blatant violation of His laws, and worse, your denial of Him. You do realize that this- I indicate his bare head- isn’t what He wants.” A bit harsh? Perhaps… I’ve had enough of being gentle with politically hawkish but religiously dovish cab drivers who think they’re good people. Maybe they are. But to claim they are doing His will at the same time… It gets my goat, it does.

“Well, I am good, I do what he wants. I give tzedakah. Also, I learn Torah, sometimes. Look.” He holds up a laminated pamphlet version of some Chabad sefer that he supposedly studies in his off time. More likely he glances at it every now and then and uses it for show and tell purposes in order to extract a larger tip from his Chareidi clientele.

I tell him that’s wonderful. And ask him again, for the third time, why he believes the G-d he believes in is going to give him a free pass. Nothing is free. The cab ride certainly isn’t free- in fact, it took three minutes of hostage-rescue-style negotiation to secure a rate that would have matched the meter, had we used that. (Why didn’t we use the meter in the first place? Because it’s “broken”. Much like this fellow’s logic abilities, and my grammar.) But I digress. He, like so many others in this broken world we inhabit, has mastered Orwellian doublethought. Somehow, he believes in Torah, in it’s validity, it’s legitimacy. In its, in our, heritage. But not all of it. Only the easy parts. Doublethought.

Finally, he answers my question, or attempts to. “I simply can’t keep the Torah. It’s too difficult. Shabbos, Kashrut, all that. And I think that if I’m a good person, He’ll understand. He knows how hard it (Torah) is, how impossible. I just can’t do it. So why should I? For you, for people like my son, it’s easy”.

Right. Like I don’t have my own nisyonos, my own failings. I’m all too cognizant of the many nisyonos I fail, and the too few that I pass. Like I don’t rise and fall, every day, like the sun. Like I don’t sometimes feel that it’s only a matter of time until the yetzer hora gets me on a biggie, and then it will be too late. Oh, I know it’s hard. I need him to tell me this? And just to be clear, he initiated the conversation. He started the schmuess. Not I. I was just stuck next to him in the passenger seat. A hostage.

I truly don’t know what to tell him. How do you explain to someone the fallacy of such an obviously inherent contradiction in logic, in belief, in weltanschauung? What is the therapy for a patient experiencing hallucinations? The brain can instantly workaround any logical argument with a fresh creation by the brain.

“Oh, so you’re seeing purple dragons on the table in front of you? Try putting your hand through the dragon!” An effective strategy, right? Wrong. The brain will explain that this dragon is a substance-less dragon. Either that, or the brain fools the sense of touch much the same way it fools the sense of sight. Maybe not. I’m no psychiatrist, that’s for sure. I don’t know the precise mechanics of how people fool themselves. I just know that it works, and works well. Whatever you want to believe, as long as you aren’t constricted by absolute intellectual honesty, go ahead and believe it. Don’t worry about the logic issues. Your brain will create the necessary constructs to let you sleep at night. Be sure of that, if not the lie.

So I leave him with a pithy, cliched answer. Sadly, cliched is the best I can muster in my depressed state. (These types of people occasionally get me down, get me depressed.) I tell him that the Creator knows the catch-22 he’s created for himself, and that he’s already supplied an exit strategy. That the truth is there if he’s looking for it. That truth seekers will always find what they’re seeking. Perhaps if I’d been in a more comfortable state of mind…oh well. Spilt milk.

Stepping out of the cab, I tip five shekels more than necessary (I know, a sucker is born every minute, but still, that doesn’t mean we throw manners out the window).

I thoroughly enjoy the rest of my evening. Exiting the venue, however, my phone manages to sneak out of my pocket and worms it’s way onto the counter, unbeknown to me. The attendant, a kindly Russian chiloni fellow with a wonderful walrus mustache, spots it just before I leave. Calling me over, he presses it into my hand and bids me a good evening. But not before delivering a show stopper of a line, neatly packaged into two words. “Yetzer Hora” he tells me, in his brutal Russian accent, gesturing to my phone. Numbed, I stop and stare. I hadn’t even been sure that he was Jewish. “What is it?”, he asks silently with a lift of his eyebrows. He has no clue what his innocuous comment meant to me.

“Nothing”, I answer, turning and leaving.

He’s pointed out something I knew already, but preferred not to think about. Or thought about, but created enough constructs that it became a non-issue.

I, too, am a hostage to doublethought.

Maybe we all are.