I told them I was splitting the class into two teams. “We’ll do things differently here,” I said before I opened the volume of Kiddushin on Mashinsky’s desk. I wanted to be a “good rebbe,” and so, when I finished the two weeks with Srulik Schmeltzer’s sixth-graders, I took on Reuven Mashinsky’s seventh-graders, and had a new method. Walking home from school, I thought about Berel Eisenman’s words. The other rebbes thought his approach too lenient. Now I use ice cream pops.” Instead of punishing for bad behavior, he rewarded for good.
Berel Eisenman, a teacher for nearly two decades who was once known to be the most brutal of all rebbes, had done a complete turnabout. Whipping a boy until he howled for hours was no longer advisable. “If it hurts the child, it should hurt you, too.” Others thought the rod was acceptable but that strikes must be meted out judiciously. “Feel the sting in your hand,” one fifth-grade rebbe said to me earnestly.
Some only slapped the students, instead of using a rod. One of my friends told me of a first-grade rebbe who had spanked his backside so raw that he couldn’t sit for days, all because the rebbe had accused him of taking a small bag of candies from his desk drawer, only to find the candies in a different drawer a few minutes later. Another thwacked a boy’s palms several hundred times, until his welts began to bleed. One rebbe beat a boy with his gartel mercilessly until the boy lay on the floor howling for hours. The rebbes in New Square were always more brutal than the rebbes in Borough Park. In the teachers’ room down the hall, the rebbes would talk about changes. They had broken me, and I hated them for it. I had demonstrated not strength but weakness, and I saw in their eyes that they knew it. I had gained the boys’ obedience but not their respect. They remained silent for the rest of the afternoon, and the day after and the day after that. The rest of the class, too, was silent as I made my way back to my desk. He could fife and fife, but I was the one with the authority to use force, to strike him, and I watched as this realization sunk in and he looked back at me, angry but silent. I could see the anger in his eyes but did not care. Berry’s hand flew up to cover the spot I had struck, his mouth forming a sudden, silent “AH!” For a moment, I intended to order him to “hold out your hand.” Instead, as if my body acted on its own, I delivered a strike to the boy’s upper left arm, a hissing sshhwisscchh-thwack! that frightened even me with its violence. I reached into the inside breast pocket of my coat, where the rubber cord lay coiled flat against my chest. Because you are nothing to me.īut I was not nothing to this boy. I do not care for you or for your orders or your requests or desires, and so I blow my whistle at you. The language of defiance in the schoolyard, or among siblings in their rivalries, a child’s bluster. He muttered it under his breath, not brazen enough to say it out loud, but the words were unmistakable.
The next day, however, the boys grew even rowdier when I called to Berry Glancz to stop speaking to the boy sitting next to him, his response sent me over the edge. I would deal with the boys as best I could and somehow get through it. I would not use the wire in my pocket, I decided. There were the usual bouts of shouting and laughter across the classroom that afternoon, and I began to grow accustomed to it. Without thinking, I picked up the rubber cord, wrapped it around my fingers, and then placed it inside my coat pocket. I remembered the hundreds of times I had heard it. It was the perfect size, twice arm’s-length, just right to fold in half and hold at one end. It looked almost exactly like the one my fourth-grade rebbe had used instead of a rod, a white length of round, hollow rubber. Along Clinton Lane, near the site of a new home construction, I spotted a “wire” on the ground, at the side of the road. But how could I, a twenty-two-year-old man, be cowed by a class of ten-year-olds?Īt 12:45, I walked the two blocks home for an hour of lunch, before I would return for the afternoon. I could not imagine how I would last two weeks. I felt a kind of physical weakness in my body, a tremor in my jaws, and I clenched my teeth to keep it from showing. I could not process any thoughts beyond the feeling of humiliation. I could feel the blood rush to my head as my body froze. “Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” the boy mimicked, then grinned at his friends as he walked to his seat and the class burst into laughter. “Chaim Nuchem Braun, can you please sit down and keep quiet?” I called to a skinny boy who had stood up to look out the window and shouted something to a friend across the room.
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