By Julian Biller
“You cannot go home again. To the family back home, to the childhood back home. You cannot go home again, to the old farms and the systems which once seemed everlasting, you cannot go home again.” With these words by Thomas Wolfe, Yehonatan summed up his life’s path, and his understanding of his relationship to it. He shared with us his personal story, including an ultra-Orthodox upbringing at the most prestigious yeshiva (“the Harvard of the Yeshiva world”), the realization that he could not stay there and remain true to himself, and ultimately the success he achieved with his influence on the show Srugim and his creation of Shtissel.
All of this, he views through the lens of memory (there is something jarring in seeing someone in their thirties speak so strongly of memory and their ‘past life’). But when he speaks, you feel nostalgia at its’ strongest- a sense of longing for what was mixed with a feeling of sorrow over the realization that it will never be again. And yet his sorrow has an extra layer to it. When many of us think of what we miss from our childhood, it often still exists, though not necessarily in a way accessible to us. Yehonatan, however, made clear that he did not merely leave the world of his childhood, but it no longer exists.
For many of us, it is easy to see an ultra-Orthodox person on the street and assume their world is provincial (I am not arguing that it is; merely that we often are guilty of perceiving it that way), to say the least. It was thus fascinating to hear Yehonatan speak about what his greatest personal success and tragedy. He was back home, in the ultra-Orthodox neighborhood he was raised in. He ran into one of his old teachers, who, recognizing him, told him how much he loved the show Shtissel. Yehonatan proudly told us how elated he was that someone whom he so admired appreciated his work. But then his expression dampened. He looked down and said, almost too casually, that there was a catch: When he was growing up, in the world that lives on in his mind and memories, that teacher does not have a TV with which to watch Shtissel. His teacher's complement, one which was genuinely appreciated, simultaneously drew Yehonatan even further than where he already felt himself to be. He told us that he has sometimes felt like a tourist in his own home, but had the humility to admit that sometimes this can be a good thing- viewing things from the outside can often let us see what we ordinarily miss from within.
Most tellingly, however, Yehonatan ultimately described himself as an immigrant from the religious world. One who leaves an old culture behind, but nevertheless carries it with them, always. Among all that he said, this resonated with me most strongly. Being born in Canada, but immediately moving to Montgomery, Alabama, only to return to Ontario several years later, and having divided the rest of my life among New Jersey, and Israel, I understood him. There is at once a sense of universal comfort, drawn from the knowledge that you can succeed and be comfortable anywhere, contrasted with a sense of rootlessness- a way of wondering not which place wants you more, but which one you feel most at ‘home’ in. To compound this, I often end up in a catch-22 of being ‘American’ while in Canada, and ‘Canadian’ while in America. But much like Yehonatan, rather than merely lament or regret the path of my life, instead, I am appreciative of its richness and depth. And besides all that, I am lucky that Yehonatan’s final words to us ring true, and home is always somehow accessible, whatever it may be: “Sometimes the only way to return home is through a story because in a story the home is the same as you remember it”. Wherever we are, we always have our memories.
