Among Righteous Men by Matthew Shaer

Author:Matthew Shaer
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781118095201
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Published: 2011-12-22T16:00:00+00:00

10

Ben Lifshitz woke to the sound of the Motorola radio.

He heard the screeching first in his dreams, and when he opened his eyes, he was almost surprised to find himself back amid the familiar shapes and shadows of his Crown Heights bedroom. He peered over at the alarm clock. Two in the morning. September 2008. Outside, on the horizon, the cityscape glowed a ghostly orange.

Lifshitz sat up on the edge of his bed, wondering if the shrieking had woken his parents or his brother in the next bedroom over. Unlike Ben, Menachem was your traditional old-school Chabadnik, his eyes set on a rabbinical ordination and then a posting to a Chabad house in some foreign city. Increasingly, of course, that kind of future was a pipe dream. Two decades ago, most young men in Crown Heights followed the same path: a few months of fund-raising in the community and then an assignment from the official office of the shluchim. Twenty years in the field, far from your friends and family, the only company a bunch of goyim, maybe if you were lucky a few secular Jews, and every day a battle to convince outsiders to see things your way.

The work was hard and draining, but for the rabbis who managed to open successful Chabad houses and attract a fair share of converts, there was glory aplenty. Shluchim returning to Crown Heights after a spell abroad were treated like kings—they had joined the Rebbe’s Army, they had spread the rebbe’s message. They had done their part to bring Moshiach.

These days, not only was it harder to obtain funding, what with the economy the way it was, but it was harder to find a city not already claimed by a shaliach. All of the major cities in the United States, for instance, were already spoken for, as were many of the European capitals. And you certainly didn’t want to step on anyone’s toes. There was still space in Asia or Russia, but the odds of success out there were much lower, and who wanted to live in the middle of nowhere anyway?

So now recent yeshiva graduates were increasingly hoping to sign on as a kind of under-shaliach at an established Chabad house and from there attract the attention of the Lubavitch leadership. The process was slower than it had once been and the promise of reward greatly diminished. Lifshitz understood his brother’s motivations, but he was unable to share in his enthusiasm for a life lived abroad, the distances measured in miles and years. Wave good-bye to friends and family and board that plane and expect to be back in Brooklyn once a year, if you were lucky.

For Lifshitz, glory lay elsewhere. He had joined the Shomrim at seventeen, just months after he learned to drive. It was the fulfillment of a childhood dream, a day he remembered with fondness. His father, Yossi, had also been a member of a Crown Heights security patrol, and growing up, Ben had heard plenty of stories about the good old days.

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