Free All Who Go Do Not Return by Shulem Deen Page B

and released, but we weren’t pacified. Unsatisfied with the relative moderation of warnings, we wanted more.
    Mendy Klein had not appeared when summoned, so a handful of students were dispatched to find him. They checked the synagogue, the study hall, the lecture rooms, and the basement dining room, but Mendy was nowhere to be found. His dorm room was reported locked, the persistent knocking on the door unanswered. The thought of Mendy’s locked door ignited our imaginations. A locked door meant something hidden, something forbidden.
    “Let’s get in there,” someone said.
    We looked at one another in silence. “We can’t go into the dorms,” someone said finally.
    All of us in our righteous clique were married, and yeshiva policy—as ordered by the rebbe himself—forbade married students to enter the dormitory area. The reasons were never made clear, but like the rule that two students alone were never to lock the door, this hinted at fears of sexual transgression.
    The sense of urgency was now heightened. An opportunity for acting on our zeal was slipping away on a technicality. As we stood outside the study hall, Reb Yankel Gelbman, a rabbi at the yeshiva and one of the village’s foremost scholars, came up the stairs carrying a stack of texts. One of us left the huddle and approached the rabbi to ask the question.
    Reb Yankel furrowed his brow, and looked around at our group. “And thou shalt be rid of the evil within your midst,” he said finally, quoting the Bible. “An unequivocal biblical command!”
    A ransacked room is an ugly thing, but for us it was a thing of beauty. The door smashed in, blankets and linen ripped off the mattresses, dressers overturned, its contents on the floor in disarray, the mob of dozens searching, picking through items, certain that somewhere in that room lay the evidence of transgression and abomination, proof that our zeal had not been in vain, our impassioned assumption of a sacred guardianship justified.
    A locked cabinet was discovered, a hammer procured, and the lock smashed. We didn’t know what we were looking for but were sure that the evidence existed somewhere. A cheer went up when someone found a pile of unmarked audiocassettes. A cassette player was found and one of the cassettes inserted. Hebrew music by a male singer came out of the tinny speakers, and someone hit the Stop button in disgust. The singer sounded secular, Israeli, though we weren’t sure; even so, it was not a sin worthy of our zeal. If the singer was female, that would’ve been something else, but it wasn’t, and the cassette was ejected with disappointment. A second unmarked cassette was inserted but was only a scratchy recording of one of Avremel’s old talks.
    Someone discovered a pile of photographs, and leafing through it found a photo of Mendy and several other students wearing T-shirts and baseball caps. It was quickly taken as evidence of something illicit. Why else would they discard their long black coats and wide-brimmed black hats for the vulgar sartorial habits of common Americans? Later we learned that Mendy and the others had been on an outing to cut phragmite weeds from the New Jersey Meadowlands to cover the sukkah booths for the Sukkos holiday, and had simply donned clothing more suitable to the task.
    We found little else. Soon we heard the sound of an emergency siren. Someone came running from the outside: “Mendy called the police!” The room had all but cleared out in seconds, and my friend Mayer Goldhirsch and I were the last ones in the room. Mayer was still looking through the scattered mess on the floor and I grabbed his arm. “Mayer, let’s go!” But he wouldn’t leave. I let go of his arm to leave on my own, and he looked up and grabbed me. “Shulem, we have to find something. I know we’ll find something.”
    “Find what , Mayer? We don’t even know what we’re looking for!”
    Reluctantly, he stood up, looked around, and followed me out of the room.