The Promise

by Chaim Potok

“A teacher can change a person’s life. A good teacher or a bad teacher. Each can change a person’s life.” He was silent again. Then he said, very softly, “But only if the person is ready to be changed.

My father was quiet. “It is a bigger problem than I realized,” he said after a moment. “What energies we waste fighting one another.”

“It’s always easier to learn something than to use what you’ve learned.”

“You’re alone when you’re learning. But you always use it on other people. It’s different when there are other people involved.”

“You don’t want to make mistakes with people. Sometimes when you make a mistake you lose a human soul.”

They wanted more freedom. They wanted the right to read secular books and periodicals and newspapers. They wanted secular studies introduced into the school. A rebellion in a yeshiva. The Slobodka Yeshiva no less.”

He explains and justifies Finkel’s actions. It was for the sake of Torah, he says. It was in order to preserve Torah.

“We are at war, friend. Didn’t you know we are at war?”

“The enemy surrounds us. The evil forces of secularism are everywhere.

“You had for yourself a choice between the Gemora and mathematics, and you chose mathematics. Yes?

A choice tells the world what is most important to a human being. When a man has a choice to make he chooses what is most important to him, and that choice tells the world what kind of a man he is. You understand me, Greenfield?”

“A man must be forced to choose. It is only when you are forced to choose that you know what is important to you. It is very clear, Greenfield, that the Gemora is not as important to you as mathematics.”

“A man must sometimes be forced to make choices, for it is only by his choices that we know what a man truly is.”

sick of the oppressive Eastern European ghetto atmosphere of his class, sick of his fanatic zeal for Torah.

The

“Tell

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did not want you to be so angry, Greenfield. I wanted you to understand what it means to make a choice for Torah. You understand now, yes? All right. Enough. We have spent enough time away from the study of Torah.”

“A book,” he murmured. “It is only a book. But what it means to write a book.”

“Rishonim” is the Hebrew term for the earliest and greatest of the medieval commentators on the Talmud.

In a yeshiva you never said that a contemporary scholar could understand Talmud better than the Rishonim.

No one in the present could possibly be compared in depth of learning to the great ones of the past.

Tell me, Malter, do you believe the written Torah is from heaven?”

A person must understand himself, improve himself, learn his weaknesses in order to overcome them.

“I

cannot give smicha to someone who does not stand with true Yiddishkeit, no matter how great a Gemora student he is. Do you understand me?”

“Speak to me anytime you wish,” he said stiffly. “I am not so difficult to speak to as it sometimes appears.”

Know yourself. He was forcing me into a choice and I did not know what I could do.

He comes home very tired and very sad. He’s afraid religion is going to die.

“Rav Kalman’s?”

“But why does he have to say those things about him? My father is killing himself for religion. Why does he say those things?”

these remnants of the concentration camps had changed the face of things. They were the remnants, the zealous guardians of the spark.

And now everything traditional was being drawn toward that zealousness.

“Why would he want to attack the book? They never attack works of technical scholarship.”

“At least it is for Torah. We are fighting for Torah.

I cannot stop writing because some people do not like what I say.” “Rav Kalman?”

don’t want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking. He can keep his smicha.”

He used me against my own father. I wonder who he used when he was reading Abraham Gordon’s book.

“What is all this about the Kotzker Rebbe?” My voice sounded strangely loud. “What is this with Byrd and Zimmerman and the Kotzker Rebbe and solitude?

That’s what I love about you Hasidim. You either don’t talk at all or you talk too much.

The room was cluttered with books; it was always cluttered with books.

“A wire. Two instruments. And human beings who are far apart are suddenly close together. We have been given a world full of wonders by the Master of the Universe. People whose lives are separated come together because of a wire.

“The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil.

“Rav Kalman is an influential man. There will be trouble. But I will not write about it. I will say nothing. I owe your father—too much. You will tell your father this for me.”

“There will be great trouble with that book. Rav Kalman has taken it upon himself to combat it.

“No,” he said quietly. “Mine carries a certain authority. It is my reputation that he sees as a threat. He is a musarnik. He is defending the Torah.”

But you will do me a favor and not speak disrespectfully of one of your teachers.