The Promise

by Chaim Potok

Then Danny stopped his psychological analysis of Willy Loman and began to talk about what it must

mean for a man to see everything he worked for cracking apart, his life suddenly rubble, his dreams suddenly smoke—

He can stay inside his world and try to reshape it somehow, or he can leave it and make his life over again elsewhere. Either choice involves further suffering, but it would be a creative suffering that might ultimately give rise to

something worthwhile.

No modern revolution ever really succeeded. They all substituted one tyranny for another.”

Then I said, “Not everyone who resorts to violence is a fool. Remember the story of Abraham lopping off the heads of the idols.”

“I can understand violence if a person makes a rational decision that his world is utterly evil and irredeemable and that nothing in it is worth saving.”

Who isn’t full of rage?” “Yes. But most people manage in one way or another to handle it.” “Why are people so full of rage?

“My father says Hasidim are medieval. He’s not at all medieval. I didn’t think Rachel would find someone who was medieval.”

“Do you find that really brilliant people are scary sometimes?”

“Let’s walk and talk” was an expression Abraham Gordon liked to use.

“He was very cool and polite. He acted as if we were stealing Danny from him.”

“Reuven,” she said. “What does it mean to bring up a son in silence?” “Yes,” I said. “I was waiting for that. I’ve been waiting for that for months now.

“Rachel, listen. You love him.” “Yes.” “Then trust him. He’ll never hurt you. He is incapable of hurting anyone unless it’s a hurting in order to help.

Hasidim don’t raise their children in silence. It’s something that’s done by only a very few Hasidic families—and then only in extraordinary circumstances.

I grew up free and sophisticated, with my parents trusting me to take care of myself.

And once again I found myself agreeing with all of Abraham Gordon’s questions and none of his answers.

He never really rebelled against his religion. He simply stopped taking it seriously.

Rebellion, said Abraham Gordon, is a conscious act of the will directed toward the remolding of ideas or institutions whether by force or by persuasion. Turning one’s back upon ideas or institutions is therefore not an act of rebellion but an act of

disengagement. The old is cons...

All through college he considered the old dead. And yet, strangely enough, he found it impossible to abando...

so he continued to observe the rituals while no longer believing in the theology, all the time gambling that he would one day develop a new theology for the old rituals.

But during the trip back, he decided he would rather be a professor of Jewish thought than of gentile logic, and entered the Zechariah Frankel Seminary.

He had seen Germany. “I could smell the smoke of the crematoria even before anyone knew what a crematorium was,”

I wanted American Judaism to become something an intelligent person would have to take seriously and be unable to laugh at and want to love.

“I call it the scrapbook of hate. There’s more than a decade of villification pasted to those pages. It’s grim reading. But no one laughs at what I write.”

Philosophers sometimes write with the grace of an elephant,”

They were under the impression that he liked the times he was with them, watching them work together.

At that moment there was the feeling that I could walk away from Rav Kalman and his world with infinite ease and with no

regret.

“But we won’t show you those. ‘Let a stranger praise you, and not your own mouth,’ ” he quoted in Hebrew.

“He would have put all his energy into the pulpit and left nothing for his writing,” Ruth Gordon said. “I couldn’t have that.”

“I might have liked it. Helping people. Being part of their sorrows and joys. I might have liked it very much.”

“I find most of them quite detestable,” Ruth Gordon said quietly, a sudden hardness entering her voice. “They have cobwebby minds, and I find them dangerous and detestable.”

“Some excellent ideas were taught in those musar yeshivoth. Love of man, obedience to God, honest self-criticism and criticism of others,

sincerity in the performance of the Commandments. Those were some beautiful ideas.”

“They were nice people as long as you agreed with them,” I said. “That’s the way it is ...

“Rav Finkel never experienced Maidanek.” He paused, eyeing me intently. “You might want to

think about that, Reuven.”

“I will probably be leaving my school,” he said quietly. “I am too old and too

tired to continue teaching in such an atmosphere of repression.”

“Hirsch University is planning a graduate department in rabbinic studies.

“Your Rav Kalman is not the only voice at Hirsch.”

“Malter,” he said quietly, “you are planning to leave the yeshiva?” I looked at him and realized I was no longer frightened of the truth and told him that I had not yet made up my mind.

“You are no longer afraid?” “No.” He smiled at that. He actually smiled. I saw his lips curve upward behind the dark beard. He seemed pleased.

In a traditional Talmudic disputation you never offered an explanation of a Mishnah

that contradicted the Gemara. Nothing could contradict the Gemara. Rav Kalman looked astonished. But before he could say anything, Danny added that he had offered the explanation given by the Vilna Gaon.

“Nu,” Rav Kalman was saying, “it was good to sit and talk Torah with the Dubrover ilui.” “Ilui” is the term attributed to one who is young and has a phenomenal knowledge of Talmud.

“Psychology is also a weapon,” I said.

“It’s not a weapon. It’s tool to heal people with. When it’s used as a weapon it’s ugly, and the people who use it are ugly.”