All Who Go Do Not Return Quotes

“Family hug,” I would announce as the children prepared to leave, after they were bundled into their coats and hats and mittens, and the six of us would gather near the door and squeeze together in a tight circle. “Kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss, kiss,” we would all go, puckering lips against cheeks and foreheads.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Zeal compensates for fear. A soldier is whipped into a jingoistic frenzy before battle—because how else does one withstand the fear of death? The religious zealot who shouts, beats, and kills is perhaps not the one who is secure with his faith but the one who is so fearful of the challenges, so aware of the fickleness of conviction, that he has no choice but to strengthen it with the drumbeat of mindless fanaticism.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“When caught in a world where your very essence feels shameful, life turns into a feverish obsession with suppressing your true identity in favor of a socially accepted one.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I had been grateful for her willingness to keep in touch. If I was not there to see my children each night when they came home from school, to have dinners with them and do homework and take them shopping and work on school assignments, I could at least get regular updates from her. How would I be a parent to them now?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“But what did it mean to have faith in the righteous? Was it to have faith in their very righteousness? There was something maddeningly circular about that—how did one know if they were righteous enough to have faith in? By faith?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“OK. Your father says faith is beyond reason.” “And so?” “I disagree,” Chezky said. “Faith is fully within reason.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I was like a visitor from a different era encountering our modern one, captivated by its very mundaneness.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“They found its teachings profound. So much love. So much joy. Such inner peace. In their idealism, they overlooked its harsher realities.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Logic will get you nowhere if it’s faith you’re after.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“You can’t invent a historically memorable event, unless it really happened.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“If the Talmud was built on the purported word of God, that word struck you as suspiciously human, with ambiguities and layers of meaning and all the arbitrariness of human language. The very idea of faith suggested something man-made--the idea that we must submit to conviction, rather than simply behold the universe in its natural order.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Some boys routinely left school at four, saying that their parents forbade them to study English, while the rest of us looked on in envy, wishing that our parents, too, were so pious.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“Skills?” Zundel asked finally. “Don’t you need to go to college for that?” Gavriel shook his head noncommittally. “Not necessarily. You can write if you’ve ever worked with computers. Or if you’re good at math. Things like that.” He looked around the room as the men looked timidly at the forms in front of them. “Don’t be modest,” Gavriel said. “This is the place to brag.” And so we sat and wondered what we might brag about. We knew a lot about commerce in first-century Palestine. We could write contracts on property sales that would be legally binding in fifth-century Babylonia. A handful of us knew exactly how to slaughter an ox in Jerusalem’s ancient temple, skin it, clean it, and separate the priestly portions. But this was the first we’d heard of rezemays. Slowly, we began to fill in our names, our addresses, and phone numbers and then tried to think of what we might consider a skill. Excellent English reading and writing skills, I wrote down.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I now lived deeply and fundamentally suspicious of any hint of dogma or ideology, of subjective values presented as Great Truths.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“People would ask, “Don’t you ever feel guilty? For leaving them like that?” And I would wonder about the question, about their assumptions, casting it all into the inglorious tradition of male irresponsibility”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I wouldn’t tell them that, no, in fact, you don’t get used to it at all, at least not for a very long time. So many memories were sparked by sights and sounds around me—a mother and daughter on a movie screen, a father and son playing catch in the park, parents and children on the subway. These small moments would evoke feelings I did not know were possible, a kind of grief that would, at times, strike me with such force that it would impair my daily function, throwing me for hours, days, into a nearly catatonic depression.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I didn’t understand. It didn’t matter.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“The realization that I had lost my role as a father, not by the courts but because my children’s minds had been turned against me, sent me tumbling into an emotional sinkhole. I yearned for some way to shut down my mind and was gripped with the increasing conviction that death was the only way to do so.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I came to a low place, depressed and suicidal and angry at the world and myself. Most of all, at myself. I could not understand how it had all happened. I could not understand how I had lost my children before the fight had even begun. I blamed myself for not having foreseen it, for not being better prepared, for lack of cunning and craftiness to match the qualities so deftly used by the other side.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I had been many things in adulthood—a husband, an entrepreneur, a computer programmer, a blogger—but for fourteen years, fatherhood defined me most. Now, I no longer knew who I was. After months of harrowing court appearances, I felt drained.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I could not know then that this was the last I would see of Tziri and Freidy for a long time. I could not know then that my many phone calls and letters would go unanswered, my messages unreturned. That for years, I would not know whether they even received my messages, or whether they were intercepted and discarded by those tasked with keeping their minds pure.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I cried so much those days, it felt as if my tear ducts would clog, but I wept still, unceasingly, in anger and in despair and in yearning for my children to return, but all I got in response was the rustling of leaves outside my window and another exorbitant bill from my attorney.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“With a single careless thought, under the guise of “temporary,” he had declared me a “visitor” rather than a father, and the children’s attitudes had changed immediately, as if the courts had confirmed Gitty’s accusations.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I blamed the family court judge most of all.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“A parent for fourteen years, I was accustomed to my children’s pendulous moods, but this—complete and determined withdrawal from one day to the next—was something else.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“When a child is taught that a parent is wicked, the child’s love for the parent does not subside immediately. What the child feels instead is shame. Shame over her own feelings of affection for someone she has been told is a bad person. Shame over her biological association with that bad person.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“I lost my children’s hearts, and with them, very nearly, my sanity.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“We may not have a legal case,” Shragi said. “But we can beat him down emotionally and financially. He’ll have to give up eventually.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“It was an odd accusation, not only because it was so far from reality but also because it betrayed what I had long suspected: a glimmer of envy. As if underneath it all, those who begrudge the godless their godlessness do so not because the godless are sinners but because sinners have more fun—and how dare they?”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return

“At first, I wasn’t very concerned. A family court judge could not rule on the basis of religion, I imagined. But when the judge ordered overnight and weekend visitation rescinded and reduced visits from twice weekly to once a week, I grew alarmed. “It’s only temporary,” my attorney explained. Until it went to trial and a permanent arrangement was decided. “How long until the trial?” I asked my attorney. “Hopefully, within the year.”
― Shulem Deen, All Who Go Do Not Return