Anatoly Altman spent nine years in the Gulag.

Anatoly, later known as Natan, was one of 16 Soviet dissidents, all but two of them Jews, who in 1970 hatched a wild plot in Leningrad. Having purchased every ticket on a small aircraft, they planned to hijack it, deposit the crew unharmed in a forest, and fly to Sweden. There, they would declare before the world that the Soviet Union was holding millions of Jews hostage.

The KGB was onto them from the beginning. They got as far as the tarmac before they were all arrested. A public trial followed, with all of the plotters receiving harsh sentences. Altman, then 29, was sentenced to 12 years. He was released early, in 1979, at the age of 38.

Altman, who passed away in 2018, was a family friend. I remember in particular one summer Shabbat I spent with him about 15 years ago in the southern Israeli kibbutz of Sde Boker. That Friday evening, after prayers and the Shabbat meal, we sat for hours in the cool desert night drinking tea and talking.

He told me about what compelled him to embark on the doomed mission, and the interrogations that followed. About the pressures of the labor camps, the rumors and threats of violence, particularly against Jews, that drove some of his fellow prisoners to madness and left an indelible mark on each of them. How camp life irreversibly changed a person, and made acclimating to life outside difficult, in some ways impossible.

As a result, Altman understood and appreciated freedom better than most. During our conversation, he recalled his first visit to America, in the early 1980s. “I rented one of those American pickup trucks in California and just drove,” he said, eyes twinkling. “It was big, like they only have in America, and you could drive without end.” The big truck and the open road symbolized to him a particularly American form of freedom and expansiveness.

I say “expansiveness” but what I really mean is the Yiddish word breitkeit. Alexander Harkavy’s 1928 Yiddish-English-Hebrew dictionary translates breit as “broad” and “wide,” and figuratively as “liberal.” For the Hebrew, he uses the word harchavah.

In its ideal, America is all of these things—big and wide, enterprising and brave. It has a multi-dimensional bigness that touches on everything.

While for a Gulag survivor like Altman, American breitkeit might come in the form of a big pickup truck on the open road, for the entrepreneur it is the unhindered ability to transform an idea into a thriving business, and for the artist to freely express his soul. It can be seen in something as grand as our choosing to go to the moon, or as simple as the way one walks down the street, upright and hiding nothing.

We know what American Jewish material success looks like. But when a Jew walks down the street, what do you see?

What should you see?

A Time for Doing

The afternoon of Simchat Torah, 1944, the Sixth Rebbe, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak Schneersohn, of righteous memory, sat at his holiday meal at 770 Eastern Parkway in Brooklyn, N.Y.

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak, 64 years old and confined to a wheelchair, had narrowly escaped Nazi-occupied Poland four years earlier. Before that, he had lived in Latvia, to which he had been exiled following his 1927 arrest and imprisonment in the Soviet Union.

Now he was in America.

“Today is not a time for talking, certainly not at length,” he began. “This is a time of doing…. Therefore, that which we must discuss today will only be in short points.”1

Simchat Torah, he explained, is about action, because the order of the day is to sing and dance with the Torah. “What is dancing?” the Rebbe asked, “to train the body to take pleasure in a mitzvah.”

The body, he continued, desires rest. It wants good food and good drink. Dancing with the Torah forces it up onto its feet instead. You—the person to whom the body belongs—are exhausted from a long day’s work and the general pressures of life. All you want is sleep! But on Simchat Torah, Judaism demands that you dance—that you grab hold of the Torah by its heavy wooden rollers and dance on your tired feet.

That is how you train the physical body to take pleasure in a mitzvah, the soul’s true desires.

But like any form of exercise, you will not get very far training the body once a year. Making any real and lasting change requires daily exertion. So how do we continue this exercise on the morning after Simchat Torah? By establishing fixed times of Torah study, an ironclad schedule without which you will not allow yourself to lie down for the night.

“It should not just be that the person has his fixed times of study that he must fulfill, but that the body itself must demand this Torah study,” Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak exclaimed. “One must raise the body up so that it itself should demand this.”

The individual, he continued, must be like an old soldier: Military life was surely difficult in the beginning, when he was just a newly drafted private. But then, through hard work and discipline, he was transformed. So drastic was this transformation that even years after his military service, when he is dressed like a civilian and behaves like one, you can recognize in his gait and in his bearing: there goes a soldier.

Where the Streets Are Paved With Gold

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak understood America.

Physically frail when he arrived at New York Harbor in 1940, a legacy of the harsh treatment he was subjected to in Soviet prison, he had been to the United States before. On a 1929-1930 trip that lasted 10 months, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak visited New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, Milwaukee, Detroit, St. Louis, Boston, and Washington, D.C., where he met with President Herbert Hoover at the White House.

“When I was in America … I came in contact with a very wide range of people, old and young,” Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak remarked in the early 1930s. “I was particularly struck by the way in which the American lifestyle had created certain characteristics, both good and otherwise….”2

For example, there is a uniquely American way of referring to a person’s value: “How much is he worth?” one might ask. “He is worth $1 million,” his friend will reply. This particularly American turn of phrase emphasizes an individual’s financial status as the ultimate marker of value and importance.

“Comic as this expression may sound, it is characteristic of life in today’s world,” Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak observed, “where each individual is unfortunately measured according to the extent of his property.”

Indeed, America’s pioneering, can-do spirit placed a premium on innovation that would bring in its wake material wealth, sometimes mind-boggling wealth. What more American story is there than, say, a Greek immigrant creating an ice cream empire, or a German-Jewish one inventing blue jeans?

Thinking big the American way would seem to require a single-minded focus on material prosperity.

But Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak rejected the idea that the American spirit stopped at materiality. Sitting at that Simchat Torah holiday table in Brooklyn in 1944, he proceeded to make what must have been a shocking statement:

I know that some of you are laughing at me. “How is it possible,” you think, “that here in America one should be able to tell, just by looking, that the person walking down the street3 is a Jew, a Torah Jew?” Even those who do not laugh openly are laughing deep in their hearts in disbelief. Nevertheless, my hope to G‑d is that soon enough people will be able to tell, just by looking, that someone they see in the street is a Torah Jew. And then they will laugh out of sheer joy.

Jewish life in America—a land of opportunity, and, with it, of lodges, sweet sixteens, drive-in movie theaters, the Dodgers, respectability, Columbia University, white picket fences, and Bloomingdale’s—would yet change, the Sixth Rebbe declared.

The day would soon come when one would look out at those streets paved with gold and see not a man or woman climbing the ladder of success while trying desperately to shed his or her identity, but a proud Jew.

A Torah Jew.

Plain English

The afternoon of Simchat Torah, 1969, twenty-five years later, emphatically still Brooklyn. Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s son-in-law and successor, the Rebbe, Rabbi Menachem M. Schneerson, of righteous memory, led a farbrengen gathering in the much-expanded synagogue at 770 Eastern Parkway.

To observe the awe and respect the Rebbe had for his father-in-law is to encounter a Rebbe-chassid relationship in its purest form.

On that Simchat Torah afternoon, the Rebbe repeated his father-in-law’s words from a quarter-century earlier—that the day would come when a Jew would be recognizable on the streets of America—and began to analyze them, finding a lesson in each detail.4

“My father-in-law, the Rebbe, said ‘in the street,’ using the language of this country,” the Rebbe observed, meaning English. “He doesn’t say in gasse, as it would be said in Yiddish, and not chutz or rechov, as it would be said in Hebrew.”

Why? Because, the Rebbe explained, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak intended for his words to be understood by those who did not speak the mame lashon of Yiddish, even if their parents or grandparents once did.

And why not the Hebrew word for “street”—rechov? Because Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak likewise intended to reach the Jew who may know that Hebrew term, but only within the context of the 24 books of Scripture. The individual who does not connect a proud, muscular Judaism with the “street” in Manhattan or the “street” in Brooklyn.

It is specifically this person, who knows neither Yiddish nor Hebrew as a living language, who will look out onto the “street” in the near future and see a Torah Jew. It is so because, the Rebbe continued, quoting his father-in-law’s famous first words on American soil in 1940, America iz nit andersh, “America is not different.”

G‑d is eternal, as is His Word, the Torah. Even in America.

What Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak meant when he said that America is not different, the Rebbe explained on another occasion, was that “the New World was neither ‘new’ nor any different from the ‘Old’ - insofar as Yiddishkeit is concerned; that there is no need, nor any real excuse, to make any concession in regard to any aspect of the Jewish way of life that our parents and forebears upheld so tenaciously for thousands of years back home in the ‘Old World.’ Indeed, in many respects it is vastly easier to follow the Torah way in this Land of Opportunity - opportunity not only in terms of material prosperity, but also and more importantly in the realm of the spirit.”5

“The only obstacle” for Jews in America, the Rebbe wrote, “is an inferiority complex.”6 (Inferiority complexes are distinctly not American.)

Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak recognized all of this and predicted that American Jewry would change. Speaking on Simchat Torah 25 years later, the Rebbe pointed out that his father-in-law’s “words … have been fulfilled.”

‘Publicity’

That Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak’s vision had come true, the Rebbe continued, was visible in the fact that now, in 1969, “one sees Jews walking on ‘the street’ with their heads covered” with a kippah.

What’s more, aside from a kippah, Jews in America had no issue walking in public with their tzitzit dangling out. In the Old World of Europe even pious Jews had not done this, for fear of their gentile neighbors.

“Now, however, [in America] even a child walks down the street wearing his tzitzit out!” the Rebbe exclaimed. And it was no accident that this form of Jewish pride had been pioneered right here in the United States, for it went hand-in-hand with that other thoroughly American tradition: publicity.

Like his father-in-law before him, the Rebbe, speaking in Yiddish, specifically used the English word, publicity.

“When you enter a city, follow its customs,” the Midrash teaches.7 For the Jew, the Rebbe explained, this directive is not about abandoning the G‑d of his ancestors and the holy Torah, but utilizing the special strengths and customs of his new land for the service of G‑d.

America’s innate knack for big, loud publicity could be expressed in selling clothes, toys or music, but it also could—and therefore should—be channeled by the Jew in his service of G‑d. Properly harnessed, this American expansiveness, this breitkeit, can be utilized not only for material gain, but also for matters of the spirit, uplifting himself, his family, his community and the nation he now calls home.

In America, Rabbi Yosef Yitzchak had witnessed “good characteristics and otherwise.” One of America’s less positive “customs,” the Rebbe noted, was that parents and children occupied two separate worlds. Where the Torah counsels youth to “ask your father, and he will tell you; your elders, and they will inform you,” America had adopted an order of each new generation going its own way—never more than in 1969.

Yet even this could be utilized for holiness, the Rebbe emphasized. Let daughters rise up against their mothers, he said, citing the Talmudic description of the last generation before Moshiach—for matters of holiness.8 For it is the child proudly walking down the street, kippah on his head, tzitzit dangling at his side, who will ultimately be the catalyst for his parents’ own return to their Jewish heritage. “That he may turn the heart of the fathers back through the children,” Malachi prophesied.

“And so it comes out that the saying America iz andersh, ‘America is different,’ actually does contain a grain of truth,” the Rebbe concluded.

“To follow the customs” of America is to take its penchant for publicity—and advertisement, enterprise, inventiveness, fearlessness, bravery, discovery, imagination—and utilize it for matters of holiness and goodness. “To follow the customs” of America is to do that now, even—or especially—as some argue that this country’s blessings are a thing of the past.

The Jewish child self-confidently walking down the street and comfortably displaying his Jewishness, not even realizing that what he’s doing would have been unheard of a few generations ago?

That, like Altman in a pickup truck on the open road, is American breitkeit.

And that’s what you ought to see when a Jew walks down the street in America.