Beyond the Window

Avraham Weiner

Rabbi Akiva taught: If a man and woman merit, the Divine Presence rests between them. But if they do not merit, fire consumes them (Sotah 17a).

One of water, one of fire, yet the Holy One, Blessed is He, makes peace between them (Zohar Vayikra 12b).

I
The train tears into the station, screeching to a halt.
Passengers spill onto the walkway—a swarm, half-dressed and mostly drunk.
I hustle toward the closing doors, asking myself, “Azoy farbrengtu a Motzai Shabbos?”
Is this how to spend the eve after Sabbath?
I’m surprised at my own harshness. I’ve been doing this, and much worse, for as long as I can remember.
Just my luck; an empty subway car. I have a puddle of vomit to thank for that. Perfect.
The subway pulls out and starts clacking away from Brooklyn, bound for Times Square.
I don’t need complete privacy to make the transition—indifference to passersby is a sort of superpower of mine. But the empty car on the express train makes for a more peaceful commute.
I take off my black brimmed hat and slide it gently into my suitcase. My velvet skullcap disappears into a side pocket, followed by my dark blazer—a baseball cap sufficing as my yarmulke tonight.
My hands creep along the buttons of my British-brand white dress shirt, revealing a woolen tzitzis garment: a black band running horizontally across my stomach, and fringes—plain white ones mixed with a mischievous blue—hanging from the four corners. I pull up the ends and tuck them into my dark green sports shirt.
I unclick my designer belt buckle, sliding off my pants to reveal shorts underneath. I pull the pants past my dress shoes, which I wrap and replace with sneakers.
Next Saturday, I’ll repeat the scene—just in reverse—returning to Brooklyn looking like a proper penguin, a rank-and-file ultra-Orthodox Jew.
I enjoy the energy of flying down an underground tunnel, lights flashing outside the window while I yank on a costume—like the protagonist of a superhero movie. Or did I just take off the costume? I’m not sure.
The question finds urgency—or, perhaps, its nafka minah—as I wonder what book I should read for the remainder of my trip to the Upper West Side. My hand hovers between my pocket-size tractate Kiddushin and a copy of The Overstory, both tucked into the folds of my luggage.
I compromise on neither, instead settling for a breathwork meditation.
I exit the station and walk quickly down West End Avenue.
Arriving at the apartment complex, I climb the stairs, knock quietly, and let myself in.
“Shavua tov, Mom. I’m home.”

II
They explained it to me right before I turned thirteen.
In Judaism, infant converts get a chance to renege on the choice made for them before their bar mitzvah. My parents thought it was a good age to let me decide whether I wanted to keep practicing the strange religion that was just my own—a pidgin of their rash creation that only I spoke.
The story went azoy:
When my father, Yaakov Klugman, reached marriageable age, he asked the matchmaker to find him someone “very nice and very smart.” He added, as an afterthought, “And pretty, I suppose.”
By ultra-Orthodox standards of eligibility, my father was a dreamboat. He stood at the top of his class in yeshiva, finishing the Babylonian Talmud by age fifteen and making headway through the Jerusalem one. People (correctly) predicted he’d outshine his father, Gavriel—a noted scholar, decisor of Jewish law, and kingmaker in the yeshivish political scene.
So the matchmaker set out to find the prettiest, smartest, and nicest girl “in our circles” to walk the face of the earth—and found my mother, Penina Gerbewitz.
Three dates later (falling far short of the community’s seven-date average) Yaakov and Penina were engaged. At nineteen, Penina was four years younger than my father.
Before the era when every seminary girl could receive a degree online in twenty-four hours from a shady Jewish clearinghouse—before moving on to train as a social worker or physical therapist—the bright wives of the Charedi elite still attended college.
Spiritual perils notwithstanding, Hashem exempted women from the mitzvah of talmud torah, so time wasted—bittul torah—was not so bad.
(My father himself had no need for college, whether for intellectual or professional development—he’d spent the last two decades of his life sharpening his mind and building his social capital in the sprawling network of olam ha-yeshivos, the world of higher Torah learning across the United States and Israel.)
Considering a career in medicine, Penina fell in love with biology. She received her B.A., summa cum laude, two months after I popped into this world.
She wanted to continue her education and pursue a Ph.D. While this was unusual in the community—college, if sanctioned, was typically approved only for the sake of durable and remunerative careers—my father appreciated the allure of scholarship and understood that his wife’s big brain thrived on intellectual challenge.
But there was a catch.
About six months prior, my mother came home and confessed, “Yanky, I believe in evolution.”
My father might have been willing to overlook his wife’s newfound preference for the scientific rejection of the six days of Creation and insistence that—rather than being shaped by the Lord’s hands and animated to life by His breath—humans, as the saying goes, “descended from monkeys.”
Only, however, if she were willing to overlook it too. In his mind, she could earn a Ph.D. in biology and spend the rest of her life researching organisms alive right now, pushing her beliefs about natural history deep into the closet—unbeknownst to others, sometimes even to herself.
But my mother was too smitten with Darwin’s view of life: the miracle of universal common ancestry, the mystery of abiogenesis, and the majesty of descent with modification yielding endless biodiversity.
When she encountered the celebrated sentence of Theodosius Dobzhansky—“Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”—she felt tears forming in her eyes.
For her, the sheer genius of evolutionary theory—the ability to explain all of life through a combination of the three ingredients of variation, selection, and reproduction—stunned her again and again, until the only lens she wanted to think through was evolutionary.
So when she blushingly but firmly declared her intent to pursue doctoral work in evolutionary biology, my father put his foot down.
It wasn’t about optics or saving his career—at age twenty-six, my father’s growing reputation as a sheer Torah genius made him nearly untouchable.
It was, rather, a genuine conviction that evolutionary theory contradicts core aspects of the Jewish people’s faith: that God created the world in six days, roughly five thousand years ago, and that humans were created sui generis from the get-go, in God’s image, breathing a trace of His own breath.
He appreciated my mother’s position. He knew what it meant to feel ideas consuming the soul, fusing with one’s core personality. He spent his days wending through recalcitrant texts, his mind exploring the Talmud’s conceptual plumbing until life in general began to resemble a giant sugya.
But he couldn’t stand it any more than he could stand her pursuing a doctorate in Christology.
Their marriage was a Jewish marriage, with the intent to build a Jewish home—building a career around evolution would destroy the sanctity of that bayis.
She agreed.
And so, two days shy of my first birthday, Yaakov and Penina Klugman appeared before a beis din and dissolved their marriage.
The story explained why I spent the rest of my childhood leaping between universes—an existential amphibian.
I surprised them by choosing not to ally myself with one world, preferring to keep arrangements as they were—their story seemingly doing nothing to change my mind.
My machinations, however, ran deeper than the maintenance of the status quo. I knew it as surely as my father knew he was destined for greatness at twelve: I would study Torah with utmost diligence, but also master the field of biology—and find a way to bring peace between the divided disciplines, removing the obstacle that stood between the estranged lovers.

III
Mom’s religious lifestyle evaporated shortly after her marriage.
She never changed back to her maiden name, however, thinking both to mean basically the same thing: a big neon sign screaming JEW.
Her graduate program arranged an impressive scholarship for the bright, blonde woman. The professors congratulated one another, proud to have saved a woman fleeing her oppressive marriage and restrictive community for the haven of enlightened science.
She always stayed within a reasonable radius of her little Avigdor Gedalya (that’s me), securing long-term research opportunities near New York City.
Her passion for the discipline made it easy for her to play her hand right—working hard all day, then taking interviews and writing pop-science articles by night. Tenure at her school of choice was an easier achievement for her than it was for most of her colleagues—awkward academics raised among the world of pipettes and ivy from infancy.
Things got busy for her during the weeks when I was around. My father and stepmother would’ve been happy to keep me all year long, preserving me in the cocoon of Jewish Brooklyn. But my mother, wedded to the world of survival and reproduction, was aghast at the notion of abandoning her role as a co-parent.
Despite the widening existential chasm between them, my parents found agreement on a core set of eclectic shared principles: a passion for knowledge, a disdain for conventional schooling, and an absolute ban on smartphone use. Mom says that while she no longer believes in a devil, she thinks the Satan wishes he existed so he could invent screens and distribute them among the youth.
Instead, Mom raised me on a strict diet of free play and independence.
It’s her holy grail as an evolution-savvy parent.
Biologically speaking, we don’t play just “because it’s fun.” We find play fun because our ancestors—who first found delight in the seemingly pointless, pre-verbal encounter with experimentation and exploration—were more likely to come up with new, better ways of surviving.
So much so that most animals, particularly those with complex nervous systems, also engage in play. Mom’s colleagues think they’ve even caught cichlids pushing around objects underwater in a play-like fashion.
Play has become essential to wiring mammalian nervous systems. Everything from eyesight to social skills thrives when allowed to develop in the context of free play.
And humans are mammals, of course, so we need our play too. Contrary to my father’s teachings, our human uniqueness doesn’t transcend this animal nature—it builds on it. Apparently, the seemingly infinite range of human potential is built on our capacity for the flexibility that comes from our extended, childlike playfulness.
The more we play, the more potential we unleash. And the more we grow as humans, the more we are really just playing in disguise.
Granted, my endless hours of unprogrammed free time saved her the effort most parents waste chauffeuring and structuring. But her ulterior motives notwithstanding, I know I wouldn’t be able to hold my own as a stranger in so many spaces were it not for my years-long training in being my own man and creating my own joy—beginning with walking myself down to the playground at age five.
Mom got some backup parenting when Tim swept into our lives.
He’s alright in my book—five foot seven and in charge of a gigantic ant farm in the basement of Columbia University.
He studies cooperation: hundreds of thousands of worker ants play their part and give their lives to enable the queen to reproduce—an astonishing altruistic accomplishment in a world supposedly dominated by the selfish survival of the fittest. He and his colleagues receive millions from governments and foundations worldwide, all hoping that humanity can learn a thing or two about checking our egos and desires for the sake of the greater good—from these formidable Formicidae.
(I like telling him it’s a waste of time and that he should bring his team and magnifying glasses to the second-floor balcony of any half-decent beis medresh. “That’s genuine competition and cooperation ecosystems among actual humans, instead of our distant invertebrate relatives!”
He just smiles, pats me on the head, and says, “Professor Wilson told us the same thing back in graduate seminar, my dude.”)
Tim—and Kyle, his German shepherd—moved in when I turned eight.
Once she saw that Tim had successfully established a rapport with me (largely through covertly sharing junk food that both my birth parents had prohibited), Mom assigned him to keep track of my homeschooling. My secular education was her responsibility, which she mostly discharged by making me read textbooks for an hour or so after dinner.
She made good use of the extra time at the office and soon inaugurated one of the highlights of my childhood: monthly nature excursions. From weekends in wooded cabins to weeklong hikes in Yosemite, Mom and Tim tried to atone for their sin of city-based living (and, even worse, city-based child-rearing) by forcing me back into the great outdoors: humanity’s environment of evolutionary adaptedness, where the earliest Homo sapiens bandied about in tribes, hunting for woolly mammoths.
When Rosemary came along, the nature excursions increased, with one parent disappearing from work midweek just to give my half sister and me a couple of extra hours of play alongside a waterfall, underneath a canopy of leaves.
Rose is a smart cookie. At age four, she was already harassing my parents, asking why she had to go to her play-centric, progressive education co-op while “Avi never go school.”

IV
Tatty, older and wiser following the divorce, asked the shadchan for someone “just nice” and spent nine full dates vetting my stepmom.
I never heard him express resentment toward Mom for what happened, and it’s possible he genuinely harbors none. But he still wasn’t looking to repeat the events of his previous marriage. He made sure Rochel genuinely loved her job as a morah and English teacher at the local Bais Yaakov before proposing.
Eight kids later—and counting—I guess he made the right decision.
All those kids are helpful, because according to Jewish law, Rochel’s not being my actual mother means we can never remain secluded. So even if Tatty’s not around the apartment, there’s a good chance that Eliezer Zev, Sarah Chana, Baila, Esther, Aharon Yehuda, Menachem Mendel, Azarya, or Aryeh Yitzchak is.
We get along pretty well. If there are any negative feelings between us half siblings, they’re an outgrowth of the sessions I spend with our father. He parents nine children on top of a demanding leadership role in the community and a solid daily Torah study schedule, so our regular one-on-one time stands out.
I homeschool—or more accurately, shul-school—spending time at the beis medresh down the block, where my father heads the kollel and holds court. I only learn with my father for about half an hour a day, but I’m never out of his watchful eye.
I started switching homes on a weekly basis when I turned five. Rav Yaakov Klugman’s son missing days of cheider on the regular would have kept the semi-scandal of the holy leader’s divorce perpetually in the public eye—and anyway, Tatty aligned with Mom’s distrust of all school systems. My semi-bastard status just gave him an excuse to do what he wished he could with all his children.
From the moment I learned to read, I spent my Brooklyn days sitting on a bench in the kollel, alternating between sessions of self-guided reading and learning in chavrusa with my dad or one of the other scholars in the room. The special treatment led to quiet rumors in the community that I was an iluy, a genius destined to outclass my father and grandfather. My yichus and precocious disposition certainly helped the rumor along, but the truth is that any boy lucky enough to stay away from the cheider rebbi’s restrictive influence would have excelled as much as I did.
In my father’s mind, the only thing a Jewish child needs to develop properly is Torah. Torah is the lifeblood—the gas in the tank—of the Jewish people and of a Jewish person’s soul. Least among the social-emotional benefits hypothetically supplied by learning Torah was what my father hoped would be a personal identification with the society of Torah learners—strong enough to protect me from my mother’s side of the world.
Freed from contemporary education conventions, my father was able to guide my development in line with the Sages’ dictum in Pirkei Avos.
I started Chumash Bereishis at age five and finished Divrei Ha-Yamim for the third time—this time with the peirush of the Malbim—at age ten.
(I did Rashi on my second round through the Hebrew Scriptures.)
I got bored reviewing mishnayos on my own a couple of months after my bar mitzvah, so my father let me cheat and work my way through Rambam’s Mishneh Torah, buying me time until I hit fifteen—the Tanna’s recommended age for diving into the sea of Talmud.
When my birthday finally came, I devoured tractate Brachos, deprived of Judaism’s most central books for years, as I had been from social media and sugary candy.
Since then, I’ve basically learned whatever the kollel is learning, while also taking time to cover a page of Talmud a day and review old material.
When I was younger, I floated between worlds in a polo or T-shirt, un-self-conscious of my head covering’s color, size, or shape.
Around the time I learned my life’s origin story, I also started donning the Brooklyn uniform: a white shirt and black jacket every day of the week. I couldn’t bring myself to wear it into Mom’s apartment. It seemed like a premature declaration of victory, for such visible yiddishkeit to swagger comfortably into the territory belonging to proud descendants of Homo erectus.
Five years later, I’m a pro at camouflaging—in all figurative senses of the word.
The other week I pulled up to a late-night class on Sefer Tehillim, the Book of Psalms. The rabbi was teaching Psalm 121.
He asked the group huddled around the table:
“Dovid Ha-Melech says, ‘Esa einei el he-horim’—‘I raise my eyes to the mountains.’ Why the mountains? What about them?”
The intimate audience spitballs a few answers.
“You’re closer to shamayim at the mountaintop.”
“It must mean the holy mountains, with the holy cities, like Yerushalayim and Tzefas.”
The maggid shiur turns to me.
“Nu, Avigdor. Any ha’aros?”
“Nothing, Rebbi.”
The truth is that I have nothing I know how to translate into the language of yeshivish Brooklyn.
Rabbi Eisenberg continues.
“Well, our Sages teach a deeper meaning in the kapitel—that we should read the verse not as saying ‘harim,’ mountains, but ‘horim,’ parents! King Dovid is reaching out to the zechus Avos, the merits of the forefathers, for protection…”
My mind drifts far away from the beis medresh.
Two years back, we visited the Rocky Mountains. We flew into Denver and drove out to the park, Mom and Tim taking turns behind the wheel while Rose and I sat gaping out the window. About an hour out from the park, the roadside grew thicker and thicker with trees and vegetation. I didn’t know the world could get this green. We wound around tight roads, my eyes jealously scouring the homesteads peppering the hillsides. Then, with a final descent into a clearing in the valley, we fell into Estes Park, the base camp–turned–town at the edge of the national reserve. The town drove like normal, a grid of traffic lights and light traffic, but…
If I lifted my eyes for even an inch above the rooftops, they just kept lifting—pulled like a magnet higher and higher, scouring the mountains which soared out of the horizon like fireworks leaving behind a frozen trace, climbing so high I felt vertiginous just trying to trace the peaks. Sitting in the same car, in the middle of a populated town, I felt small—unbelievably minuscule and empty in the face of the magnitudes surrounding me in this existence.
Rose stopped fidgeting; my blustery mind fell silent. No more agitations about the makeup of the eukaryotic cell, the legal status of a barrel of tithed wine that turned to vinegar, or what my half siblings in Brooklyn were saying about me in my absence—just communion with unfathomable height and scale, dappled in tree and snow, giving lie to the cliché that seeing is believing.
In that moment, I needed no psalm. The seeing was the psalm. I would need to pray in the future to remind myself of that moment—when I encountered the only sound quieter than the still, small voice: silence itself.

***

My siblings grew up with a transitory half-brother, so they’ve long since grown desensitized to their relative who prowls the wide world of falsehood and impurity.
But I get the sense, nonetheless, that the ones old enough to have seen friends fall off the derech await, with bated breath, my weekly return from the olam ha-tumah—wondering how long it will be before I start swallowing lungfuls of water and drown. They don’t seem to realize that it may be entirely possible to breathe in the great deep—or that they might be the ones underwater.

V
This fall, I’ll enroll in a school for the first time—a Jewish university in upper Manhattan, where students study Talmud in the morning and attend college in the afternoon.
Through my time on the internet, I gained exposure to these strange sorts of Jews who, instead of flitting between both worlds, mix them together—posting jokes about Daf Yomi and complaining about three-day yontif on Twitter.
Whether out of presumption or paranoia, I assume I won’t fit perfectly there either—my curious mix of cultural milk and meat standing in contrast with their pareve-cholent-like existence.
But my parents agree that I’ve spent enough time being the guinea pig of their complementary pedagogical projects.
I guess I seem okay enough to both of them at this point that they’re willing to turn me over to an educational institution. They’ve already had to relinquish me to each other for years, so it’s not such a major transition in their minds.
To me, however, entering the halls of a flagship devoted to both Torah and science marks the beginning of the fulfillment of my life’s mission.

VI
Things turn out to be both easier and harder than I imagined.
Orientation passes in a dreary mix of campus tours, internet log-ins, and city sightseeing—nary a word about justifying the enterprise of a Jewish university. Unlike my choosing this path, for most of my classmates this place was their destiny from birth. In their minds, there’s nothing surprising about wearing a blue button-down shirt into a beis medresh or sneaking out of iyun shiur early to make it on time to discrete mathematics.
I’m impatient, eager to get started on my project.
After the bus returns us from the Empire State Building on the third day of orientation, I make a beeline for the library and grab an open seat at a computer.
A few quick searches later, I land on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry for “Religion and Science.”
It begins: “The relationship between religion and science is the subject of continued debate in philosophy and theology. To what extent are religion and science compatible?”
I skim downward and notice “Section 2.5: Judaism.” I scroll back to the top and start the article in earnest.
A few paragraphs into the various approaches to the subject, I read The integration model is more extensive in its unification of science and theology.
Bingo! I’m aiming for nothing short of an aggressive reconciliation.
The next paragraph says:

While integration seems attractive (especially to theologians), it is difficult to do justice to both the scientific and religious aspects of a given domain, especially given their complexities. For example, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (1971), who was both knowledgeable in paleoanthropology and theology, ended up with an unconventional view of evolution as teleological (which put him at odds with the scientific establishment) and with an unorthodox theology (which denied original sin and led to a series of condemnations by the Roman Catholic Church). Theological heterodoxy, by itself, is no reason to doubt a model. However, it shows obstacles for the integration model to become a live option in the broader community of theologians and philosophers who want to remain affiliate [sic] to a specific religious community without transgressing its boundaries.

Hmmm… I’m not fazed. If integrating religion and science were easy, it would have been done already. My parents aren’t idiots—I know they didn’t get divorced over something easily surmountable. I’m trying to pull off something unprecedented here.
The Teilhard guy—and mention of a theory of teleological evolution—grabs my attention. Maybe he has some good ideas to offer my Torah–evolution synthesis.
Following the whim, I pull up de Chardin’s Wikipedia page and scan the infobox.
The Reverend

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
S.J.
Born
1 May 1881
Orcines, Puy-de-Dôme, France
Died
10 April 1955 (aged 73)
New York City, U.S.
Academic background
Alma mater
University of Paris
Influences
Paul, John, Origen, Ignatius, John of the Cross, Darwin, Henri Bergson, Édouard Le Roy
Academic work
Era
20th-century philosophy
Discipline
Western philosophy
School or tradition
Christian philosophy
Main interests
Philosophy of biology, Philosophy of religion
Notable works

            The Phenomenon of Man (1955)

            The Divine Milieu (1957)

Notable ideas
Omega Point, Noosphere
Influenced
De Lubac, Berry, Huxley, Dobzhansky, Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, Tipler, McLuhan, Ting, Swimme, Barlow

Something at the bottom catches my attention. Dobzhansky, Dobzhansky… where have I heard that name…?
I click the hyperlinked name.
Of course! Theodosius Dobzhansky! How many times did I hear that quote from Mom—that “nothing in life makes sense without evolution,”or something like that…
I keep reading until a statement stops me in my tracks. I look away from the computer, mulling it over.
He believed that God was in charge of evolution… and he was influenced by Teilhard!
Mom loves Dobzhansky, who followed Teilhard, who believed in integrating religion and science!
Two weeks later, I hand in the following as my writing sample for “Writing 101”:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a French priest and paleontologist, known for his contributions to the integration of religion and science. I admire Teilhard because I believe his novel approach regarding the synthesis of Christianity and Evolution offers a path for Judaism to similarly open itself to the wisdom of natural science.

As explained by subsequent interpreters, Teilhard’s scheme asks the believer to make a tough sacrifice: accept the scientific story of an ancient universe yielding life through evolution as the true narrative backdrop of the human condition, in place of creation narratives such as those found in the early chapters of Genesis. This costly displacement of cherished religious dogma allows for a profound theological twist: a defeat of material science on its own terms. Rather than posit the claims of science to be false, Teilhard more fully articulates the very picture science paints—of an unfinished universe, of chemistry transforming into biology, of complexifying life yielding consciousness and then self-consciousness itself—as a drama of sacred awakening, of a seemingly cold and empty universe surprising us with the capacity for life, intelligence, and love.

Thus the cosmic value of religion: to unite the only self-conscious species in the universe—the human race—in shared consciousness, love, and aspiration for infinite beauty. This is the next stage of evolution! One of Teilhard’s adherents has put it this way: “With the rise of conscious animals and self-conscious humans, the universe ‘woke up.’ With the rise of religion, the universe woke up to the notion of transcendent rightness.” This approach empowers Jews and non-Jews across the spectrum of belief to embrace their faith traditions with pride as the cutting-edge state of evolution, while working together toward establishing a more harmonious human community.

VII
“Hey, kiddo! How’s college?” Tim greets me as I plop my backpack on the couch and rummage through the pantry for a granola bar.
“Great!” I deliver my words naturally—real smooth. “In fact, I already submitted a report on the relationship between religion and evolution.” I turn my voice extra casual. “I would love to, y’know, present it to you and Mom.”
“Absolutely. During dinner or after? We’re ordering Chinese from that new kosher place.”
Presentation night is a regular occurrence in our household run by two career academics. Our lectures range in topic—Rose soon will have to give a revised version of my years-old classic talk, Observations of Flora and Fauna during a Walk in the Woods, and we still like to joke about Mom’s Keeping the Toilet Seat Down: A Thorough Review of Best Practices for Latrinal Customs.
Later that evening, I stuff some chicken and rice into my mouth, dim the lights, lower the projector screen, and pull out our two–in–one laser pointer and remote control.
(Like I said, our house is run by two career academics.)
I explain, “Since I’ve always lived going back and forth—y’know, between the religious world and the secular one—and now I’m starting at a school devoted to studying both, I wanted to do a project on their relationship. This is what I’ve found so far.”
My first slides introduce Teilhard and his life story, showing pictures and describing his time digging for ancient bones in China and serving in World War I.
Then I review how most religious people think that evolution contradicts religion.
(I include an AI-generated image of a Charedi refusing to drink from a soda bottle with a picture of a dinosaur on the side.)
Rose starts dozing on Tim’s lap and Kyle ambles off to his water dish, but Mom and Tim give me their full attention.
I take a deep breath and plunge into Teilhard’s intellectual legacy: how the narrative provided by scientific materialism is accurate but incomplete—not accounting for the interiority of the universe as manifest in the rise of conscious minds; how science itself tells us the universe is expanding, incomplete, still coming into full being; and how that fullness at the end of time may very well be something transcendent and unfathomable, something that aligns in many ways with the traditional Abrahamic God.
(I’m out of slides by now—it’s just me, blustering my way through the shpiel).
I finish to applause from Mom while Tim shakes Rose awake to give me a “Yay, Avi!”
My eyes unblur, like they usually do when I finish a presentation. But then my vision gets sharper still, as I register that they’re still sitting there—Mom offering me what’s left of the chow mein.
“Some extra protein to follow that great food for thought, dear?”
I feel like I’ve just woken from a dream, as if only seeing for the first time Kyle, Tim, and the box of Lucky Charms lying sideways on the kitchen countertop.
What did I expect? Mom rushing over to the phone, calling up Tatty, and blurting, “Yanky, we need to talk. I’ve made a huge mistake!”?
Even if she tried, she wouldn’t get through—he started leaving his personal phone with Rochel ages ago… I slump into my seat.
Tim catches my subdued affect. “Really interesting stuff, kiddo! I bet there aren’t many people on earth who know this subject like you do.”
“Yeah, thanks for listening,” I mumble, and bend over what’s left of dinner.

***

The clock strikes noon. My bags are packed, and I have shiur tomorrow. It’s time I headed back to school. It’s been a week since presentation night. I spent this past weekend enjoying Shabbos by Tatty and Rochel.
I make up my mind and slip out the door, leaving my bags for later. I make my way down the block to Koilel Zichron Avrohom Yitzchok.
I catch him enjoying the few quiet moments with his favorite masechta—Sanhedrin—between the bustling daylong crowds and fatigue’s overwhelming grip.
“Hey, Tatty. Can we talk?”
He smiles through the scraggly beard, closes his Gemara, and we make our way into the crisp night air.
I tell him—not the ideas, but the story behind them. That once, five years ago, a little boy named Avigdor got a silly idea in his head: that one day, if his learning got really good, he could reunite his divorced parents. How he waited ever so patiently until the day he asked his parents to shell out upward of thirty grand a year to bankroll his entrance into a space where he could develop his ideas—only to discover, quickly, that the ideas already existed, and then to discover further that it was a waste of time.
We round the block again, this time in silence, then head back toward our apartment.
He comments, “You sound ashamed of yourself.”
“Yeah.”
“Why?”
“I thought Teilha—this French man’s theories—were the greatest thing I’d ever learned, the most important idea in my life. How it would animate a years-old dream of mine. I didn’t realize how stupid the dream was.”
“What do you think would have happened if you presented to me first, instead of your mother?”
I pause, digesting the question—then, surprised by the answer forming on my lips, I speak.
“I mean… you probably would have said you always knew someone could change their view to connect Torah and evolution—but then it wouldn’t be your Torah, your Yiddishkeit. Right?”
We start climbing the stairs to our apartment.
“Exactly.”
We enter the apartment, and my father turns to whisper his thoughts.
“An outgrowth of our disagreement was how to educate you. Rav Wolbe teaches that a parent needs to balance binyan and zeriah, building and planting. Sometimes you tell the child exactly what to do, chart his next steps—that’s binyan. Other times, though, a parent needs to be strategic—gentle, subtle. Plant seeds that will only sprout later. Make sure the child is happy at three so he’ll want to learn at thirteen.”
His mouth curves into a smirk.
“Or start teaching the boy Shas Mishnayos years ahead of time, so when the cheider throws him into the middle of Gemara Bava Metzia, he’ll know exactly what’s flying. Maybe that example isn’t exactly relevant to you. But you get the idea.”
I nod.
“But your mother… for your mother and her newfangled Torahs, that was much too extreme. The notion of planting already infringed on the child’s autonomy. She found it… manipulative.
“Instead, she told me, she would provide you with as much independence as possible—let you figure everything out on your own. She said that this would make you… what did she say? ‘A strong and healthy Homo sapien.’ I believe this was the phrase.
“I was aghast. ‘How long before he’s, chas v’chalilah, doing drugs or worse?’ She said, ‘No drugs, no big dangers—you have to set some boundaries to keep the boy safe.’
I was scared to push further. These ideas sounded crazy. I was so worried about losing you. Her ideas sounded so nutty they put your guf in danger, let alone your neshama. But we had kept the divorce amicable. I didn’t want trouble with the courts. I wondered if a judge would agree with me that your mother’s notion of proper child rearing was sakanas nefashos…
“But I pushed one more time: ‘What about the internet?’
“And she smiled and said, ‘Don’t worry, no smartphones.’ And just like that, our grand experiment with your life began.”
He pauses. “But here’s the thing. She turned out to be more right than I could’ve imagined.”
I snap upright.
“What? I mean, I agree—it wasn’t ever so dangerous. But… I lived half my life in the secular world!” And I add, a little sheepish, “I… even got a smartphone. About a year ago.”
He waves his hand, shooing a fly.
(The tzibbur claims Tatty’s gaze kills flies. Maybe his razor-vision softens in the dark…)
“You have the whole world in front of you. Yet you come back every week, put on the white shirt, sit down in shul, daven and learn, and a visitor wouldn’t be able to tell where you were the day before.
“Do you know how many boys—and girls too, by the way—who’ve supposedly never left the koslei beis medresh, whose families, the ‘best’ families, call me up, saying, ‘Rav Klugman, my son won’t daven. Rav Klugman, my son does drugs, tainas kefirah, has a smartphone, whatever’? They’re all—the kids, the siblings, the parents—feeling the judgment, the shame, the eyes of the community on them when they walk down the street, walk into shul to learn. All of a sudden the next sibling starts checking out. But you just slide in and out, taking the best of both worlds.”
My father’s eyes shine.
“And that’s why I say: when you’re in the beis medresh, learning, that’s not just because we did a good job of saving you. No, that’s Penina’s world in you too—helping you be your own man, make your own decisions, and rise above the judgments of other people. Your siblings know this. You think being the Rabbi’s son does a child favors growing up, keeps the pressure off of them? No. It’s you. They see their friends struggle, but then they see you, and they think, ‘Avigdor Gedalya is doing who-knows-what with his krumpte mother in the oilam ha-sheker, but he comes back each week with a smile, a calm, a ruhigkeit, and toes the line—I can do it too.’ That’s not a koach we could’ve given you here.”
I’m still feeling the sting of defeat too strongly to accept the praise with satisfaction.
Instead I challenge, “Nu, so?”
“So? Don’t you see? You’re not a ben toirah who’s also something else. You’re a ben toirah because you’re something else. A lot of something else.
“And you need to decide—slowly and gradually, but decide nonetheless—how you’re going to balance the different parts inside of you: the parts we shaped in you, and also what you’ve done on your own.
“You will find your path and your tzibbur. Will you always want to be with these modernishe Jews? I don’t know. But if this is what you can do with them after two weeks—shoin—it’s a good enough place for you now.”
A half hour later, I’m riding the train en route to Washington Heights, clad in the same checkered shirt I’ve worn since Havdalah, my father’s closing words luring me toward a realization.
No bridge will ever close the gap between Yaakov and Penina Klugman.
But I will always be their son.