The End of Judaism

Aina said that every generation thinks they are the last. That everyone waits, like a hungry child, for the end of religion.

“Or of God, or of Judaism, whatever you want to call it,” she argued while extending a thin hand to the center of the table, furiously ripping off a piece of Tallinn bread. “Every generation thinks they are extraordinary. They think they’re witnessing the end of history, of the world. Your parents felt like that. Your grandparents felt like that, and their grandparents, too. And what happened? Nothing. We are still here. Like a goddamn joke.”

When I speak about the consensus on the end of Judaism, I am aware of the slightly moronic nature of it all. But the truth is that everyone, except for Aina, thought that the issue was about to expire—although we differed when assessing its causes and, above all, we differed in how we saw the future.

Since the start of October, we had spent entire afternoons arguing heatedly, as if imitating what is expected of us—five Jews, 15 synagogues—and we had never reached a single conclusion.

We lived in the fourth-floor walkup of Yiddish Hoyz in the Bronx. A house that was especially tailored for us—for our glistening scholarship, our promising bright future. Before the war, we barely talked to each other. Now, since the missiles and death and desperation have begun, we had started to hide our bodies in our apartment as if it were a battleship, a trench, and we rabidly tried to find an intellectual solution to the end, or a way to cope with it. Only Yael went out into Manhattan. The rest of us roamed the neighborhood looking at everyone, every passerby, as if sizing up a possible enemy.

Aina, a Polish convert, kept declaring that everything was a matter of time. That it would pass eventually. She would shrug her shoulder at the news, as a way to state that people had seen grimmer times. Yael, to oppose her, would announce the end at every turn. She delighted in the idea, in the same way that she found pleasure every time a man ghosted her and gave her another reason to think about the end of Judaism as something that she deeply deserved.

Yael looked for a boyfriend in a restless, thirsty way. Whenever she couldn’t find one, she would turn to her search of God. She had realized online that godlessness was no longer trending. At our dinner parties, she would read theological arguments that prophesied the end:

Unworthy children—
That crooked, perverse generation—
Their baseness has played God false.

Eli was the only one who knew Hebrew. He would correct Yael’s poor translations, negating with his head, putting her down in a way that aroused her. Then he would go silent, as if looking into an abyss.

If you had seen us six months ago, you wouldn’t have distinguished one from the other. Maybe you would have defined us as a slightly mixed group of students without a motherland, moving from one corner to the other in Crotona Park. Progressive, dressed up bien-pensants. We thought of each other as good people. We liked each other, were desperate and horny, but no one said anything. Instead, we would ignore the other’s presence during the day, telling ourselves that we were too focused in our studies, trying to find something beyond what we knew as home.

Salome needed a boyfriend, and before the war she had tried to find God.

Aina wanted to escape Europe, which she found dull, antisemitic and clean.

Eli wanted to escape himself, flee the bochers who chased him from the Lower East Side all the way to Brighton Beach.

I needed to escape Argentina. Needed to forget everything about our presidente, the obsession that my generation had with him, his ominous presence in everyone’s discourse.

So we moved to Yiddish Hoyz in September. My mother was proud of me—she argued that, for a Jew from Buenos Aires, moving to New York is like making aliyah. She said once that New York is our ancestral city, not Jerusalem, and that the Uniqlo on Fifth Avenue is our third Temple. Sometimes I believe her, and sometimes I think I studied Yiddish to forget myself, to unpick my own language, tearing away from the Roman alphabet and my archaic Spanish. Then I remember I am grossly paid for this.

I thought Yael was beautiful, feminine. Her desperation didn’t make her any less attractive.

Aina was a lesbian and could cut my throat with her tongue if she wanted to. Sometimes I wished she would.

Eli was short, fat, and atheist.

I felt very small, and when I didn’t know what to say during our dinners I would simply speak in Spanish, playing the role of the exotic, if neurotic, immigrant.

The war started in the middle of the night. I woke up and checked my phone, and there it was: spreading out in the Middle East, like a cancer. From then on, our naïve scholarship, our trade—which before the war was bizarre or eccentric, barely understandable—had, too, become a battlefield.

To protest the invasion, Yael had stopped speaking English entirely and now only communicated in bad, Duolingo Yiddish. She said it was her secular language, anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist. Every day she would leave for a different protest and tried to make us join by singing protest songs. Lomir geyn, she would say. Lomir geyn. Let’s go and leave the weak behind here. We would deny her because she made us uncomfortable.

We didn’t want to go outside. I didn’t want to say what I thought. We started living in secret.

To protest Yael’s protest, Eli started speaking in Hebrew. We didn’t understand him, except when he drank too much—then he would start speaking English with a Hebrew accent, and we would laugh at him.

Aina remained quiet, cynical.

War helps us see the fissures between each other. One time sees another. Our faces turned toward the past, and we saw history as a single catastrophe. To avoid thinking about the wreckage, I turned to the speeches of our mad presidente, and became suddenly obsessed, as if I had left Buenos Aires only to dig deeper into his plastic but auspicious sentences, his tone of false messianism.

Our presidente wanted to convert to Judaism and spent his days posting Sefaria screenshots. Judaism in Argentina was over. Played out. Fin.

One Friday, Yael skipped our dinner to protest an alliance between the Perlmutter Cancer Center on 34th Street and a partner institution in Tel Aviv. She came back home with a muddied face, a black-and-white handkerchief tied to her wrist and a bruise on her mouth. She and Eli got into a screaming match. Eli was drunk, and Yael was coked up.

Aina and I were left alone, like cousins whose parents got into an argument. I started talking to her about my presidente, about the nightmares I had where he chased me down Fifth Avenue, rolling in a kettle full of panna cotta, to tell me I had been conscripted into the Argentine army.

Instead of addressing it, Aina told me a story she had heard from a teacher.

One night, in January 1726, in a shtetl not so far from where I live in Poland, in Wadowice, three Jewish men were drinking. They were like us: drinking until they forgot their names, like athletes preparing for the end of the world. They were joking around, arguing. Then they heard voices of singing in the house next door.

When they got out into the street, they found an enormous house with its door left slightly open, but the curtains closed. They entered, and saw a gigantic salon full of people dancing, naked, around a woman. One of the men recognized her as the town’s rebbetzin, and she was also naked. Her breasts hung under a gigantic veil; on top of it she was wearing the crown of the Torah. Even as the strange men walked in, everyone kept dancing. They were wearing crucifixes. They were drinking treyf wine. They were the followers of Jacob Frank, a man who thought of himself as the new Shabtai Tzvi, who himself thought he was the new Messiah.

I looked at her like a fool. I loved her wisdom, her sharpness, how she always made me feel like an ignoramus. She continued:

All throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, Europe became crowded with these fake messiahs. Everyone thought they had reached enlightenment and would get involved in long orgies commanded by indecorous rabbis. They were like our friends here, although they actually fucked, they too thought they knew it all. They thought the end times had reached them.

She shrugged again.

And then nothing happened. They were repressed, and their cause was dismissed. Like now, where nothing will happen. The whole point of having a Messiah is that he doesn’t arrive. If he arrives, he’s fake. Like your presidente.

In November, it started pouring down heavily. Every day. We had leaks everywhere. Aina used to say that there was no difference between our floor and the Crotona Park Lake. Eli said that we could use our floor as a mikvah, and wielded halachic arguments that none of us understood. Mold started to grow around us.

I spent the entire winter wandering through the Bronx and trying to find the exact apartment where Trotsky had lived, before he met his death in Mexico. When I thought I discovered it, I rang the bell, but nobody answered. I convinced the super to let me in and stared at Trotsky’s door until an old man started yelling at me, threatening to call the police.

I started going every week, like a pilgrim from the City College alcoves. I visited Trotsky’s ghost, and asked him in Spanish: Please, enlighten me. Then I would walk through the Sholem Aleichem Houses and would imagine other possible futures. In Argentina, my high school friends started making aliyah—aliá, they would say, the real aliá, not the one that my poor mother defended. They would join the army and disappear for months.

One time I called my parents on FaceTime, and they started talking about the war. My father said that our presidente was going to send a whole battalion of the Argentine navy to end it for the terrorists, once and for all.

My mother cried and begged for the rescue of two red-headed babies—the grandsons of a friend of a friend—who were still being held somewhere in the tunnels. She started to weep, and demanded peace. As if I, or my father, could do anything. I felt useless. My father said he would kill them all.

“If I was a young man,” he said, “I would go to the war.” I understood that to be an insult.

“I wouldn’t,” said my mother. “I want peace. PEACE,” she started yelling in broken English, a trait of upper-class Argentines I found embarrassing. “PEACE IN THE MIDDLE EAST. I WANT THE LITTLE BABIES BACK. I WANT ALL CHILDREN TO GROW UP WITH PEACE.”

I stopped calling them shortly thereafter. My mother and father were even worse than Eli and Yael.

By the time spring started, we still lived in a puddle of water and mold. The leaking hadn’t stopped. We had ceased to speak in Yiddish. The parquet floor would breathe heavily every day and, every once in a while, it would spit out huge mushrooms that Eli and I picked up by hand.

Everything had become very expensive. We were poorer, and dumber, than last year.

In the street, men looked at us suspiciously. Eli had started to grow out two peyes, but only on the left side of his face, like a Hasidic flounder.

“To keep everyone guessing,” he told me with a smile.

At the bottom of Crotona Park, the Sufi mosque had been taken over by the Nation of Islam. Eli was afraid of them, though I always thought they were chill. My main preoccupation was still our presidente. One day, Eli yelled at a group of men at the mosque, and they got into a fight. Eli came back home and didn’t say a word, and it wasn’t until the beginning of summer that he confessed the source of the strange bump behind his head.

When the academic year was over, Yael stopped protesting all together. Eli said she fell in love with a man who’s twice his size, “6-foot-2 or 6-foot-3. Someone told me that the guy’s father works for a chemical company. They make rare compounds for pharmaceuticals in China. She’s using her boyfriend’s family money to fund protests and counter-counter-protests.”

Aina moved to Latvia for a few months.I saw online that she is starting a Ph.D. in Poland, and that she wouldn’t come back to America even if she was paid her weight in gold. She blames our city for all the evils in the world. Her dissertation is on Jacob Frank.

Eli is now married and lives with his wife in Crown Heights. He goes for a run every Sunday. I once saw him in the park: he spent 15 minutes talking about the war and then asked if I needed Shabbos candles. I left his presence without feeling like I had found a home. I hadn’t found a tradition, either. Those were the days of the end of Judaism.