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All Who Go Do Not Return

A Memoir

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All Who Go Do Not Return

By: Shulem Deen
Narrated by: Shulem Deen
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About this listen

A moving and revealing exploration of Hasidic life and one man's struggles with faith, family, and community.

Shulem Deen was raised to believe that questions are dangerous. As a member of the Skverers, one of the most insular Hasidic sects in the US, he knows little about the outside world - only that it is to be shunned. His marriage at 18 is arranged, and several children soon follow.

Deen's first transgression - turning on the radio - is small, but his curiosity leads him to the library and, later, the Internet. Soon he begins a feverish inquiry into the tenets of his religious beliefs until, several years later, his faith unravels entirely. Now a heretic, he fears being discovered and ostracized from the only world he knows. His relationship with his family at stake, he is forced into a life of deception and begins a long struggle to hold on to those he loves most: his five children.

In All Who Go Do Not Return, Deen bravely traces his harrowing loss of faith while offering an illuminating look at a highly secretive world.

©2015 Shulem Deen (P)2016 Audible, Inc. Judaism
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I am grateful to Shulem Deen for writing this book, for choosing to describe the experiences that led him to have to leave a community that, while full of love and faith, would not allow him full autonomy in love or faith or the seeking of knowledge and personal fulfilment. As someone who left a more permissive community and lost my faith for similar reasons to Shulem, and has only recently regained it in a more free form, I am immensely grateful to him for writing everything he wrote. This book made me feel less alone. I hope it helps people of faith and without faith understand the experience of losing faith and losing community, so that we can build better communities in future.

Nuanced, sorrowful, tender and true

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