The Promise

by Chaim Potok

They were great Talmudists. They valued nothing but Talmud and knew nothing but Talmud.

But Abraham Gordon was a humanist, a naturalist. For him

supernaturalism and mysticism were irrelevant to modern thought.

Revelation was a fiction, believed in by the ancients but no long...

God was a lofty human idea, a goal, a man-created aspiration, an abstract guarantor of the intrinsic meaningfulness of the universe. None of this was I able to accept—yet, I remained intrigued by Abraham Gordon.

He was finding it somewhat difficult to make friends. The non-observant Jewish students in the department were embarrassed by his skull-capped presence;

the non-Jewish students treated him as some kind of holy man, an Alyosha Karamazov thrown suddenly into their midst, a Jew with the mind of an Einstein and the soul of a Schweitzer, someone to talk to perhaps about a sticky experiment,

Danny did not really care about his nonexistent social life. As a matter of fact, he would not have gone anywhere to eat even if he had been asked, for he was holding rigidly to the laws of kashruth and he ate only those foods he prepared by himself in his apartment.

And he was not interested in idle talk, had never been interested in conversation that served merely to help time pass, was awkward and inept at it,

He had told me he couldn’t afford anything else; he was spending most of his money on books. All he needed was a place to eat, sleep, and study. What else did he need?

I became a little angry that night at the way he was living. I told him the least he could do was keep the place clean.

“How is Rav Kalman?” “A beauty. An absolute beauty. Yesterday it was the graduate school. A twenty-minute tirade against the graduate school. It teaches goyische subjects and should be abolished.

You don’t get that kind of tan from studying Talmud.”

“Why did you take him sailing?” “He was very upset by the carnival. I wanted him to do something he would enjoy.” “He enjoyed it. I can report to you that he enjoyed it.”

Yet there was a faint aura of darkness about them too, a hint of strain to the cheerfulness; a sense of foreboding seeped through the occasional lapses in their talk.

“I meant it seriously. She edits my uncle’s books. She edits them, types the final drafts, checks the galleys, goes over the footnotes, and sees to it that everything gets published correctly. In between she worries about Michael and about my uncle having another heart attack one day.”

I saw Rachel glance at the small black skullcap on Danny’s head and at his face. She seemed tense and weary.

“He’s very sick. He breaks things. He burns books. He shattered his telescope a week before he came up here. He’s a serious discipline problem in school. And he resists therapy. That’s always an indication of something very deep-seated and serious. They’ve been told he might harm himself. They’re very frightened.

“I never saw it.” I felt my hands cold with icy sweat. “I never saw any of that in Michael.” “Yes you did,” Danny said quietly. “But you didn’t know what you were seeing.”

“Abraham Gordon is a great scholar,” my father said. Danny said he wasn’t questioning Abraham Gordon’s scholarship, only his theology.

“But Abraham Gordon has achieved something that is remarkable. To develop a theology for those who can no longer believe literally in God and revelation and who still wish to remain observant and not abandon the tradition—that is a remarkable achievement.”

“Why did they pick the treatment center where Danny is working?” “They know of Danny.”

Danny’s father, had deliberately created a barrier of silence between himself and his son, except when they studied Talmud together. He was frightened of Danny’s cold brilliance; he wanted to teach his son what it meant to suffer.

Did I know what a kind and warm and sympathetic friend I had?

Danny had really overwhelmed them a little with his warmth and the patient way he had answered their questions. Where had I found such a friend? she asked.

“I wanted to meet Danny,” she said. Then she said, “My mother has an awful headache from that double feature.” “ ‘Messengers for good deeds are never injured,’ ” I said in Hebrew, quoting the Talmud.

“Why didn’t they want me to meet him?” he said. “I wanted to meet him because he’s your friend. I may never be able to meet him now.” I told him there would probably be another chance for him to meet Danny one day. I felt very cold telling him that, but I didn’t know what else to say.

He paused again. “They’re planning something. I can tell they’re planning something. We weren’t supposed to go home today.” He sounded a little panicky.

Our first-floor brownstone apartment felt drained of air.

On the afternoon of the Shabbat before the interview his parents told him what they were planning. He was terrified. He became hysterical. He would not go. He screamed that he would not go.

Michael went for the interview. He was calm, polite, responsive. Once back in the house, however, he became hysterical again. He would not go. He wasn’t crazy, he screamed. He would not go to a place where people were crazy.

Michael and Danny spent almost two hours alone on a morning in the first week of October. In the second week of October, two days after Yom Kippur, Michael entered the residential treatment center.

a fight over loyalty oaths that was brewing in her school,

For the last twenty years of his life he had closed himself in his room and refused to come out.

Michael was doing as well as could be expected, he said, repeating the words that became the liturgical response to every question I asked about Michael that fall.

A Talmud class in which a student is fearful of asking questions can become a suffocating experience. I suffocated.

There had been a great musar movement among Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly in Lithuania, during the latter part of the last century and in the decades before the Second World War.

I kept my eyes on the text—all of us kept our eyes on the text when someone was reading—

“If the body is made unclean by contact with the smallest of things that is unclean,” Rav Kalman said in Yiddish, “how much more so is it made

unclean by contact with bigger things which are unclean.”

“In America, everything is called Yiddishkeit,” Rav Kalman said. “A Jew travels to synagogue on Shabbos in his car, that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew eats ham but gives money to philanthropy, that is called Yiddishkeit.

eeism—“everything in America calls itself Judaism.”

“In America there are schools that teach Judaism,” he said, talking to the class and looking at me. “The students do not wear skullcaps and the teachers do not believe in Torah from heaven, and they teach Judaism.” His voice was low but edged with contempt. “Judaism,” he said. “Everything in America is Judaism.”

This was the first time Rav Kalman had ever turned one of his tirades into a question-and-answer affair.

“Unclean,” he said, his voice suddenly angry. “Unclean. Such a school is unclean. And whoever has contact with it becomes unclean himself.”

“Such a school is a falsehood. It is worse than a falsehood. It is a desecration of the Name of God. Do you hear? A desecration of the Name of God. It is a perversion. Where is the holiness in such a school? The Bible they change whenever they do not understand what they read.

the Gemora they change. Whatever they do not like, they change. Where is the holiness in such a school?”

“Malter, you understand that a student does not receive smicha from me simply because he knows Gemora. You understand that.” I did not say anything. “You understand, Malter? I do not give smicha only for Gemora.”

“There are rumors that you’re planning to apply to that seminary,” he said somewhat plaintively. “Don’t get angry at me, Reuven.”

How can something as small as this get blown up that way?” “Lashon hara,” he said. “Gossip, gossip, gossip. Rumors. Tongues. ‘Life and death are in the power of the tongue,’ ” he quoted in Hebrew.