Collateral Damage

The joke in yeshiva about Reuven Izorsky was that he took so long saying asher yatzar, the prayer after relieving oneself, that by the time he finished he would have to go again. I can see him standing outside the bathroom in the downstairs vestibule that led directly into the main auditorium, the bais hamedrish. He is shuckling back and forth, his face all scrunched up as he focuses rapturously on the prayer of gratitude to God for “creating humanity wisely,” for wisely disseminating within us various orifices and, I will add, wisely restraining Himself from giving us more than we have.

Even back then, when I was devout, or claimed to myself to be, I could not nearly compete with the ferocious intensity of Reuven’s prayers. I will assume that Reuven was absorbed in asher yatzar on that occasion when Hannah Blatt accosted him in the vestibule and called off their wedding, shouting for all to hear, “You are an apikoros^[1],” that is to say, a heretic, a deserter, a turncoat, before she ran weeping out of the building.

In fact, I had set up Reuven with Hannah, who was a close friend of my sister’s, and even a friend of mine, if you could call it that. And it was I who informed the rosh yeshiva, the head man, about Reuven’s contact with the Arabs. Beyond that I was merely an observer of the events that ensued. Though not entirely, perhaps.

Reuven was my best friend and roommate in the dormitory. He was also my chavrusah, my Talmud partner in the bais hamedrish where about a hundred of us sat daily, each paired off with a partner, studying the Talmud and commentators, and arguing loudly and boisterously about the various traps and twists and turns and mind-bending puzzles in the text. Each pair of students had their small desk, but there were also lecterns around the room where people could stand. Often one pair of students would walk over to another pair to ask a question, and sometimes a group formed to tackle a difficult issue. There was always a distinctive buzz in the bais hamedrish, a noise not heard elsewhere, which an outsider might momentarily mistake for prayer because we chanted the texts we read, but it was mainly the noise from our discussions and disputations.

One morning before we began to delve into the passage we were up to, Reuven grabbed my arm and stammered, “It is never permitted to kill innocent people, Morty. In Halacha …”—that is, Talmudic law—“… there can be no such thing as ‘collateral damage.’ It does not matter if they are Jewish, even if they are goyim.” That’s how it all started. This was around the time of the Six-Day War in 1967. Collateral damage was not a topic widely discussed in those days, but it was for Reuven a Talmudic problem that had to be addressed. “I’ll give you an example,” he said, his speech always punctuated by stammering pauses. “If a vicious criminal comes to kill you and your child and he holds in front of him a baby as a shield, can you defend your life and the life of your child at the expense of the baby’s life? No! That is not allowed!”

He was a stammerer. Sometimes he would open his mouth to speak and, for what seemed an interminable time, nothing came out. It was painful to watch. It looked like he was choking to death, his mouth wide open, his tongue and his eyes moving seemingly in panicky tandem from side to side. But not always. Often the words issued forth with ease. Especially when he prayed it was as if a stream of water broke through a dam and gushed forth unimpeded. He said to me, “Yes, Mordechai, it is just like that! It is because the Torah says to us, Shifchu lephunuv l’veychem,” quoting from the line in Psalms: “Pour out your heart before Him: God is a refuge for us.”

He was a stammerer like Moses in the Bible. Isn’t that a peculiar little tidbit to have gotten included in the biblical story? You will notice that this character detail was conspicuously absent from Charlton Heston’s portrayal of Moses in the movie. In my current apostatic guise as a professional philosopher I claim to believe that almost everything said of Moses in the Bible is mythical. But I’m struck by the fact that apart from his stammering, virtually the only other personal description of Moses in the Bible is that he was the most humble man in the world. A humble stammerer reluctantly thrust into heroism. So it also was for Reuven, but he had no magic staff that he could transform into a snake. He had only Talmudic arguments to lean on.

If you know little about the yeshiva world, you may have trouble understanding Reuven’s motivation in all that was about to transpire. You have to understand the mad passion with which we in the yeshiva loved the Torah, which was understood to include all of the canonical Talmudic commentary coming down through the ages. God was for us a mystery, an abstraction of smoke and mirrors, a blank something-we-know-not-what that was somehow responsible for the Torah. If we claimed to love God, this love was only a shadow of what we truly loved, the Torah, God’s stupendous gift to us. In the yeshiva the Torah was the bottom line, the first and last word, and there was therefore no plainer manifestation of intellectual and spiritual ineptitude than to try to reason from mere philosophy about right and wrong. That was not Reuven’s conscious intention.“ The Torah says that collateral damage is not permitted,” was his claim.

He went to speak to the rosh yeshiva, who was an internationally renowned Talmudic genius. The rosh yeshiva’s name was Avraham Shick. He was youthfully animated in his 50s, with a short gray beard and pale blue eyes, and a strangely perpetual flush on his face that seemed to us, his students, to radiate from the prodigious Torah engine burning inside him. He lectured to us on the Talmud with a signature beat and rhythm of his own, a kind of staccato of brief paragraphs, separate bursts and breaths of insight. The rosh yeshiva had been a close friend of Reuven’s father, as they had both belonged to a yeshiva cohort that escaped from Hungary just before the Nazis invaded. Reuven’s father had since died. The rosh yeshiva told Reuven to speak to Yoseph Koslow. It soon became known in the yeshiva that there was to be a Talmudic duel between Yoseph Koslow and Reuven Izorsky on the matter of collateral damage.

Let me try to explain a few things to you about Talmudic arguments. In “learning,” which is yeshiva parlance for Talmudic study, there are two basic virtues: A baki has breadth of knowledge, an amkin has depth of understanding. Reuven was a bigger baki than me, but I was at least as much of an amkin. This meant that in our day-to-day learning together I could hold my own, because going deeply into an issue was the central enterprise. But he knew many areas of the Talmud that I had no idea about. Laws of war and self-defense were discussed in tractates that I hadn’t gotten to yet, but he apparently had some knowledge of them. And he had somehow dug up an argument in the Chazon Ish, one of the stellar Talmudists of the 20th century. Many of the Talmudic luminaries from medieval times onward had a nom de guerre that was for some reason preceded by the definite article “the.” The Chazon Ish^[2] was in fact writing a commentary on the Rambam, better known as Maimonides.

According to Reuven, the Chazon Ish had concluded that collateral damage was never permissible. I had no idea whether that was so, and had little inclination to try to penetrate the issue. But Yoseph Koslow knew it inside and out. Koslow was formidable as both a baki and an amkin. He was viewed as the best student in the yeshiva. That was why the rosh yeshiva assigned him this task.

Reuven was hardly a pushover, though. In time he would become even an better student than Koslow, but he was at a disadvantage. Every student in this yeshiva was out of high school and advanced in learning, but some students were much older than others. Reuven and I were 19; Koslow was about five years older. Let’s figure it out. On a typical weekday a good student in this kind of advanced yeshiva spends about 10 hours learning. Allowing for less time spent on Sabbath and holidays, and occasional disruptions for weddings and the like, we can estimate very cautiously that the student learns on the average at last 50 hours a week, therefore more than 12,000 hours in five years. That’s how many hours of learning Koslow had over Reuven.

Koslow kept saying that the rules were different in the case of a milkhama, a war. Reuven wouldn’t accept that. He said, “What do you mean by a milkhama? I’ll give you an example. Ten lunatic thieves enter a bank intent on killing everyone there. There are a hundred people there, including a number of children. The thieves grab 10 children as shields. Are you permitted to kill those 10 children in an attempt to save the remaining 90 people.” No, said Koslow, that is not permitted, but that case doesn’t have the shem^[3] of a milkhama. The shem means the name, the category, the halachic legal status.

“Why not?” said Reuven, “How many people do you need? Suppose there are a thousand people in the bank.”

It’s not a matter of numbers, replied Koslow. In random cases of murder, you can’t kill innocent people to save other innocent people. But the case of a milkhama is different. Collateral damage in war is permitted, he said, of course within reasonable limits.

“And what are reasonable limits?” asked Reuven. There is no definite answer to that question, said Koslow. The gedolim, the Talmudic giants, must determine this on a case-by-case basis. But according to one Talmudic position, even in the case of combatants it is not permitted to kill more than one-sixth. For noncombatants, said Koslow, one must of course be very, very cautious.

Though it seemed clear to all of us that Reuven had lost that Talmudic battle, he remained adamant. Maybe what happened next was my fault. He told me he wanted to speak to some Arabs to find out how they felt about killing noncombatant Jews. I thought he was nuts. But I knew there were Arabs living on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn, and I mentioned this to him. Could I have anticipated that he would actually go there? It’s true that I always thought of him as being physically fearless. He was unnaturally tall for a yeshiva boy, probably over 6 feet 2, and he had the physique of a wrestler, but to actually go at night from New Jersey, where we were, to Brooklyn to seek out Arabs …

When he returned from Brooklyn he seemed frantic and barely coherent. He kept saying, “A muddena zach”—a strange thing. “A muddena zach, Mordechai, a muddena zach. Good people, good, good people. A muddena zach.”

I said, “Who? The Arabs? What happened? Did you actually talk to anyone?”

“I met people. I spoke for a long time to one person. A good, good man.”

“An Arab?”’

“A man who cares, Mordechai. An Arab. A muddena zach.”

“What’s his name?”

“Dave.”

“Dave? The Arab is named Dave?”

“A good, good man.”

“The Arab.”

“A good, good man, Mordechai. He cares. A muddena zach.”

As utterly crazy as it sounded I had no doubt that it actually happened just as Reuven reported, including his encounter with this Arab named Dave. At one point in that conversation with Reuven, I shouted at him, “The Arabs have hurt us! They are a danger to us!”

I found out a few days later that one of the boys in an adjacent room heard me shouting but thought I said “the Rabins” rather than “the Arabs.”^[4] Rabbi Rabin was this guy who had a little shul in town and he would frequently visit the yeshiva with his two young daughters, cute kids who would run around the place. I was therefore dumbfounded the next day after lunch when he grabbed me on the way to the bais hamedrish and said, “I must speak to you immediately. ”I had never before exchanged a word with him. I blurted, “What’s going on?” but he was pulling me out the front door onto the sidewalk. He said, “I am a burden to you?”

I said, “What? No. I was just a bit startled.”

“You were startled? You have been startled by me?”

“Well, yeah, I mean, we’ve never talked before …”

He was squeezing my arm and raising his voice, obviously trying to control himself.

He said, “You are sure that I am the one who startled you?”
I said, “What do you mean?”

“When? When did I startle you? Tell me!”

“I don’t understand …”

“There is nothing to understand. Listen to me very carefully. Neither I nor any member of my family has ever subjected you to being startled!”

He stood there glaring at me, then he finally let go of my arm and stormed off. Wittgenstein tells the joke of someone who says “hello” in the middle of a conversation. That’s not a greeting; it’s not anything. In language and in life everything depends on the context.

My sister phoned me from Brooklyn to ask if I could come home to talk to her and Hannah about Reuven. I had set them up. It was a good match because I knew Hannah would accept his stammering. She was always open and outgoing. When she frequently visited our home during my yeshiva high school days she would flirt with me. I tried to shock her by expressing religious doubts that I didn’t realize were as real as they turned out to be. She teased me: “You’re a flight risk, Morty” and “You know my parents won’t let me marry you if you’re not religious.” But more seriously: “The mitzvos are supposed to be a yoke, Morty. Just to throw it over is taking the easy way out.”

That reminds me of a true story I once saw on TV about this guy, an accountant, who was having a lot of financial and marital problems. So he drove home one day, removed the rifle that was hanging on his wall, went upstairs and shot his wife and mother-in-law. Then he went back downstairs and waited for his three kids to come home, and killed them one by one. Then he drove far away to another city and started over. When he was tracked down 15 years later he had a new family and a small accounting firm. The judge who sentenced him was furious: “You took the easy way out!” Well, actually, judge, it wasn’t that easy.

Reuven and Hannah had several good dates and decided to get married. Let me give you some idea of how it worked in the yeshiva world. A date consisted of finding a nice public place to sit and talk. Sometimes people drove out to the airport. A very popular venue was the lobby of some large hotel in New York. In the yeshiva counterpart of locker room talk the paradox often discussed was how it is possible to converse with a girl. The problem was that, since girls did not study the Talmud, how could you possibly relate to someone who didn’t know how to “talk in learning.” Over the years many young men wearing black hats have discovered in the lobby of the Waldorf Astoria that given the right circumstances it’s possible to get by for a while without talking about the Talmud.

When I arrived home I found Hannah and my sister seated at the kitchen table waiting for me. I could see that Hannah had been crying. Once, with me present, my sister remarked to my mother, “When Hannah gets undressed you can see what a fantastic figure she has!” Think of it: that whole elaborate sartorial cover-up, the high collar, the long skirt and long sleeves, the loose sweater, after all of that, the underlying truth is casually leaked, no longer a secret, at least not to me.

As I entered the room my sister said, “So, is he crazy?” I said, “No, he’s not crazy.” He is a good man. A good, good man. Like Dave, the Arab. She said, “Look at what he has done to Hannah. You sent her to him!” It seemed to me that Hannah was trying not to make eye contact with me. Her glance bounced all around my body. She finally spoke: “He threw everything away. My parents know.” I said, “You told your parents.” My sister said, “Of course she told her parents! What did you expect? They were so, so upset, it was terrible. Her mother was crying. Her father called him a terrorist.” Hannah said, “What will happen now, Morty?” I said, “The wedding has to be called off.”

The next morning Hannah accosted Reuven in the vestibule of the yeshiva. While that was going on, I spoke to the rosh yeshiva and told him everything I knew. He did not say a word, didn’t ask a single question. At lunch it was announced that the rosh yeshiva was going to address us in the evening. That was completely unprecedented. He lectured once a week in the morning. The bais hamedrish was packed with students.

The rosh yeshiva always spoke to us in Yiddish. His talk lasted less than a minute. “It has come to our attention that a student in this yeshiva has comported himself in a manner that is not consonant with da’as Torah.” Da’as Torah. Torah insight, Torah understanding. Like mathematical intuition. He paused for probably half a minute. I thought that he might not say anything else. But then: “Reuven Izorsky has been banished from this yeshiva.” He strode off.

There was complete silence in the room. Everyone looked around for Reuven. But I had walked him to the station several hours earlier, where he took a train back to his home in Cleveland. He said the rosh yeshiva had spoken to him earlier in the day. “It’s OK. Don’t feel bad, Mordechai. It was me. I had too much gayva …”—pride, arrogance—“… Anyway. C’asher avadity, avadity.” I looked over at him. “If I perish, I perish. ”It’s a line from the Book of Esther. The Talmud says that Esther’s main concern was the estrangement from Mordechai.

After the rosh yeshiva’s announcement, I wandered around in a daze. I somehow found myself in an isolated area on the second floor near the rosh yeshiva’s office. To my amazement I saw him out in the hall with his back to me leaning against the windowsill as if he were looking outside. Something was terribly wrong, because his body was shaking, convulsing. I started to run toward him, but stopped in my tracks when I sized up what was actually happening. The rosh yeshiva was crying; his body was heaving with sobs.

Kant explained that if the point of our lives was to be happy, God would have designed us to go about our business mindlessly in the manner of superintelligent bees or ants. We were provided with the kind of consciousness we have because the purpose of our lives is to struggle to do the right thing. But I really like best Dostoevsky’s formulation: To be acutely conscious is a disease.

If you suffer from that disease, you will no doubt have troubling questions about Reuven’s behavior, questions that can, ironically enough, be posed in terms of collateral damage. Was Reuven himself collateral damage resulting from the distortions and extremities of yeshiva life? Did the collateral damage to Hannah, who seemingly blameless in what transpired, result from Reuven’s unreasonable obsession with collateral damage, and should Reuven be deemed a hypocrite for that? And what about me? Was I half in love with Hannah, with my best friend’s fiancé, and, as collateral damage, let everything fall apart? I don’t know. As philosophers like to say, I leave these questions open.

Reuven went on to learn in an advanced yeshiva in Manchester, England, where he eventually married the daughter of a rabbi and found a job teaching Talmud in a very good yeshiva high school. Hannah wound up marrying a yeshiva guy from Baltimore, who I gather was pretty decent in learning, though I doubt at Reuven’s level. After Reuven left the yeshiva I stayed through that z’man, that “semester,” then moved back to Brooklyn and started college, and a couple of years later ditched the whole religious business.

I’ve completely lost contact with the yeshiva guys I knew back then, all of them except for Reuven. Occasionally I’ll run into one of them on the street, and it’s immediately awkward because of my bare head. My yarmulke is saliently absent from my head, saliently present in the mode of absence, as Heidegger would have said. To this day when I pull a sweater over my head I instinctively reach to hold onto my yarmulke, and am slightly amazed that there isn’t one.

But Reuven and I remained friends. When we sometimes find ourselves in the same part of the planet we try to meet, even if just to shake hands and confirm that we are both still alive. Every year before Yom Kippur he phones me. The custom in yeshiva on the eve of Yom Kippur was to approach each of your friends and beg forgiveness, for any slight or insult or other infelicity that you might have been guilty of.

This year was no different. “I ask your forgiveness, Mordechai,” he said. There is a potential joke in there. A Torah transgression so basic that small children are taught about it is lashon hara, “evil speech”: You are not permitted to needlessly say bad things about people, even the truth. A corollary is that listening to lashon hara is itself a transgression and an offense to the person who is maligned. The joke in yeshiva was to say to a friend on the eve of Yom Kippur, “And I beg your forgiveness for all the lashon hara I heard about you during the year.” Who could quickly recover from that apology?