The Promise

by Chaim Potok

If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it? Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves. But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide. A book must be an ice-axe to break the sea frozen inside us. FRANZ KAFKA

All during those last weeks of August it had seemed as if the separate lines of our lives were being manipulated somehow, purposefully and carefully brought together by some master weaver. Now it seemed the weaver had wearied of his game. The lines hung free. So the summer turned slowly into the mist and smoke of autumn.

You have to promise you won’t tell anyone. You have to promise.

But the rituals—particularly prayer, kashruth, the Shabbat, and the festivals—had intrinsic value for him; and 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 by the time he was done with graduate school all of it was a joke, including the rituals.

“How can we teach others to regard the tradition critically and with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That’s everyone’s problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect.” We