This crisis was the beginning of his religious return. Another key moment happened while he was in Manhattan to give a “Shtisel” lecture in 2021. News came from home, and it was devastating. His mother had received a cancer diagnosis. He promised her that he would go to the tomb of Menachem Mendel Schneerson, a towering rabbi of the Lubavitch Hasidic sect and esteemed by most Haredi, to pray for her there. At the tomb, in Queens, he called his mother, then laid his phone near the gravestone, so she could pray to Schneerson directly. She was loud, “crying, sounding like some animal,” he said, “begging to God.” It is a tradition to leave letters of supplication, in scraps, at the tomb. He hadn’t planned on doing that, but he wrote a letter to the rabbi, saying “that I’m lost in this world, that I can’t live without my mother.” He wept as he recounted this. “I tore up the letter and put it there” in bits by the grave. “You trust that even so, the rebbe or God can read it. It was maybe the first time I became again an innocent Jewish boy, believing.”
This wasn’t yet a reconversion, only a crucial dalliance. But on Tinder, he met the woman who would become his wife, a French Jew who had recently moved to Israel and wished to become more observant. “In slow motion,” he said, she helped to lure him toward his past.
Another force, perhaps much more essential than the role played by his mother or his wife, also drew him back. This force was, for him, both difficult to capture in words and inescapably palpable. It was a longing, he said, for “the shtetl,” the impoverished Eastern European settlements where great numbers of the ultra-Orthodox once dwelled. There, into the first decades of the 20th century, they were segregated and preyed upon in pogroms. Indursky’s yearning for a place of such darkness might sound baffling, but during our conversations, he spoke about Isaac Bashevis Singer, whom he considers a literary soul mate. (He doesn’t compare their talents, though it wouldn’t be far-fetched to call him a Singer for our age.) For Singer, who spent part of his youth in a shtetl and part in a shtetl-like pocket of Warsaw, a persistent theme was the paradoxical flourishing of religious belief precisely where and when God seemed to be scarcely in evidence. For Indursky, the Haredi of today are a reminder of history and of an appealing religious ardor, a counterintuitive and powerful faith in God, amid the cruelties of shtetl existence.
Indursky spoke, too, about something infinitely darker than the shtetl: a longing, which he tried to explain several times during our week together, for Auschwitz.
“I ask myself, how was I not there?” Indursky said about the concentration camp. “I have something inside me that wants to be there. I feel I was there, because it was such a huge thing in our history, in my identity, as the grandchild of Holocaust survivors” and as a relative of the dead. “When I have been to Eastern Europe, I feel them, I hear them, I smell them, I walk with them.”