In Yaakov Lehman’s sheltered life among God-fearing Torah scholars and their families, he had never come into contact with people who used this kind of language, let alone who were responsible for these kinds of deeds. He didn’t know what to do. Even if he had wanted to, he had no idea how to resort to brute force, threats, lies, or ugliness. He knew nothing about underhanded stratagems. In his straightforward, simple life, his whole experience had been in perfecting his character so as to live ever more honestly and kindly, treating those he came into contact with as he himself would have wanted to be treated. He had no weapons of self-defense. None. But these people, he thought, they were also part of his community. They were his brothers. But they were also his enemies, evil people incapable of repentance who wished him and his family harm. They were Esau to his Jacob.

He crushed the letter in his fist.

Leah caught his hand. “No, don’t. We might need it.”

“For what?”

“Evidence.”

He nodded, feeling distraught at the very thought of breaking the community’s strong taboo against bringing in outside, secular authorities. Yet simultaneously, something inside him shouted wildly, They all belong in jail! Those who would harm his wife, his young daughter, should be strung up, beaten to a pulp! But even if they went to the police, until they did anything … Police were reluctant to get involved in Boro Park disputes, trying to stay out of the neighborhood. For the first time in his life, Yaakov Lehman wished he had the unrestrained physical power of a simple, primitive man with no conscience.

“We need to find out ourselves who’s behind this.”

“Who do you think?” She was bitter.

That alone was the worst thing they could have done to his family, he realized: taken the light from his happy, loving, kind, devout wife, filling her soul with darkness. Never would he forgive them for this, not if they asked for mechilah a thousand times! They needed to be found! To be punished! Surely, the good people whom he had known all his life would help him: Meir, Rav Alter, the men he had studied with for over twenty years, the rav of his shul, the friends of his father, of his father-in-law … surely? But then he thought of those men, those good, kind men, and how they, too, disliked to get involved in anything unpleasant, anything that smacked of scandal. How they actively avoided openly taking sides in public quarrels. They were men of peace, of dignity. Men who watched their tongues out of piety but also men who lived in these narrow, congested streets who could ill afford to make enemies of the Hasidim who ran the businesses, owned the apartment houses, and established free loan funds.