Arts and Culture: Secular Jewish Author Examines Why Brother Embraced Orthodoxy

Even though he’s been a journalist for more than 20 years, Joshua Hammer faced a major obstacle when he set out to author a book about his relationship with his fervently Orthodox brother: writing about his personal life.

As a journalist, Hammer, 42, is experienced at going into a situation as a detached observer and telling a story. But dredging up painful family history was something new.

“I’m often uncomfortable reading other people’s memoirs, so it was very excruciating,” says Hammer, a correspondent for Newsweek who was recently named the news weekly’s Berlin bureau chief.

But this work was necessary in order to write “Chosen by God,” Hammer’s new book about his attempt to reconcile with his brother after almost two decades of estrangement.

“For years my brother’s religious transformation filled me with a rage and an embarrassment so profound that even today I struggle to understand it. I had always hoped Tony would find a focus — he always seemed dissatisfied, searching — but ultra-Orthodox Judaism was never what I had in mind.”

Hammer’s rage stemmed from his view that Tony, who changed his name to Tuvia, had rejected “who our family was — secular, liberal agnostics. I regarded his metamorphosis as a sign of weakness, and even felt disgusted by his surrender to what I viewed as blind faith. Most repugnant, I felt, was the exclusionary nature of that faith — an oft-expressed disdain for homosexuals, African Americans, Reform Jews, and gentiles that found its justification, according to my brother, in the words of the Torah.”

His rage slowly dissipated, and upon returning to the United States after several years living abroad, Hammer decided he wanted to look at his brother – – and his brother’s world — with fresh eyes.

With the help of letters and journals, interviews with friends and family members, and even a guidebook of Jerusalem, Hammer was able to flash back through the pain of their respective childhoods — their parents’ divorce, untimely deaths, their father’s professional and financial ruin — in an attempt to discover what led his brother to reject their shared secular upbringing and adopt a sheltered, Chasidic lifestyle in Monsey, N.Y.

He also frequently visited his brother, his wife and their six children in the suburb north of New York City in an attempt to understand their world of Jewish tradition.

Tuvia’s world of prayer and devotion to God is one that Hammer paints with the anthropological skills that have served him as a journalist. As he unflatteringly depicts seeing his brother on his initial visit, Hammer writes:

“A shapeless black coat draped his body to his ankles. A wide-brimmed black hat covered his head, and his features were almost completely concealed behind a wild bird’s nest of a beard that dangled in uncombed strands nearly a foot below his chin, like a Biblical prophet’s.”

Even in that world, Tuvia, who does not hold a regular job when his brother first meets him, is considered a marginal character, even becoming involved with a rabbi who was jailed for four years for kidnapping.

The book evocatively describes his brother’s world, but the sections about the family’s past, while brutally honest, are somewhat detached, as if Hammer is writing about somebody else’s family.

But examining his own family has changed him.

The author’s time in Monsey made him appreciate the community and traditional Jewish life. While he hasn’t had a Jewish awakening, he did attend synagogue this year for the High Holidays for the first time in years — “not because my belief in God had suddenly emerged, but from a cultural point of view,” he says.

Since an excerpt of the book was published in Newsweek, Hammer has learned that he’s not alone. He has heard from a few people who also have brothers who have “converted” to fervent Orthodoxy.

Having spent a lot of time in the Chasidic world, Hammer thinks he understands why.

There is something “very reassuring and comforting about a slowed-down world that the religious life represents. American society on the cusp of the millennium is a world full of irony and technology, and a real sense of acceleration and materialism and consumer craziness. There’s such a sense of ephemerality in our culture, and you look at something like religion and you see a sense of permanence and enduring values that mock the culture we live in.”

But despite the understanding that the two brothers gained from each other, they still move in different worlds — and they have not completely reconciled.

While he knew that baring his brother’s journey was a risk, Hammer, who had received Tuvia’s permission before he wrote the book, hoped that Tuvia would be able to view the project as the author intended it, as a desire to renew their ties.

But while the final results are not in, the first returns are not good. His brother has sent him several e-mails expressing his displeasure with the book, particularly with how much of his personal life is laid bare and how he believes it depicts the Chasidic world as full of marginal characters.

But Joshua Hammer hopes their relationship will improve.

“There are bonds of blood that go very deep. You don’t have to settle for permanent estrangement.”