The Promise

by Chaim Potok

because text criticism was a dangerous threat to the sanctity of the Talmud,

When I read what they say about my father it makes me feel like a toilet.”

“Like a bug,” he muttered. “That’s what it feels like. There it is. There’s my house.”

I also think the sky is

the only thing Michael feels is safe. It’s constant and far away and it never attacks you even when you’re poking around in it.

“Is Michael afraid of hurting someone?” “I think that’s what it’s all about. He’s terrified of his rage.

People are frightened of being alone. Most people, anyway.

But they enjoyed their solitude because they knew they could always come back to people. You don’t enjoy it when you’re really cut off. You hate it.

Kotzker Rebbe. You ought to read up on him sometime. He was a lonely, bitter, angry man. I think he really hated being a rebbe. He wanted rational and spiritual perfection in everyone, and in himself too.

A man begins to disintegrate when he’s completely alone.

He says that the absence of conversation makes it difficult for him to think in words.

“Tonight was very serious. How long do you think the people here are going to let him roam around loose?

“When the alternative is possible disaster, a man must gamble,”

He had virtually stopped pacing back and forth behind his desk.

And much of the sarcasm was gone from his voice.

very depressing because the city was under a pall of terror as a result of McCarthy,

Rav Kalman’s attack against my father.

He kept referring to the attack as vicious ...

“Almost everything of importance that a person does is a

gamble, isn’t it? Every crucial decision is a gamble.”

How was one to regard the Master of the Universe if one could simply go ahead and rewrite the Bible? How was one to regard the Revelation at Sinai? The entire fabric

the tradition would come apart as a result of this kind of method. It was a dangerous method, an insidious method; it could destroy the very heart of Yiddishkeit. And it was dangerous not only to Jews but to all religion.

he was destroying not only Yiddishkeit but also the very essence of religion—the belief that the sacred texts were given by God to be studied by man, not to be rewritten by him.

there is a numbing sameness to the way religious zealots express themselves.

It was like moving back through centuries to a dead world that came to life once every seven days.

“They want,” he said, his voice hoarse and filled with anger and contempt. “What they want and what I will do are two different things.” I had never heard him so full of rage.

“No one will ever dictate to me what I may and may not publish.”

Slowly over the past few years the make-up of the faculty had begun to change.

The new ones were fiercely Orthodox.

My father had been warned that its publication might jeopardize his position in the school.

“Tenure,” he said bitterly. “Reuven, do you know what it is to teach in a school where

people despise you? What does it mean to have tenure when the air you breathe is poisoned?”

Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the

battles are the same. Only the people are different.”

Politics and religion always brought out the best in people, Dr. Grossman said.

But it’s my world, best friend. And I haven’t seen anything outside that’s better.”

that the months of seesawing between the two worlds had finally ended for me this night with nothing but an awareness of how deep the separating chasm really was and how impossible it seemed to bridge it—

Maybe Rav Kalman was

right. Maybe one had to take a stand and abandon one or the other entirely.

The world of Rav Kalman was too musty now with the odors of old books and dead ideas and Ea...

“Can a son hate a father and not know it?” I asked.

“Yes,” he said in a very tight voice.

“Suppose he had just become an adolescent with all that that implies and had absolutely no

one his age he felt he could trust and talk to and was afraid to talk to adults. What would it do to him?”

I had never in my life come across a man who was so zealous a guardian of Torah that he did not care whom or how he destroyed in its defense. I had never thought Torah could create so grotesque a human being.

To my surprise and anger most of the students agreed with much of what he had written: the method of study used by my father was dangerous to all religions; it was a threat to the sanctity of the Talmudic text; it did endanger the structure of religious law; it did make possible the specter of biblical emendation.

there was a sudden raging argument between Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson in the corridor outside the synagogue.

“You want too much!” Rav Gershenson was shouting. “You want to make them all into saints! You are destroying the Torah!”

He was with the partisans and killed German soldiers for Torah. Now he defends it with words. I do not agree with everything he says. But it is his right.”

she said that’s what life was all about, the way we cheat and hurt each other and still try to live together somehow.