The Promise

by Chaim Potok

He stood there, staring up at the sky. “Look at it,” he said. “Look at it for a minute.” His voice had a soft, dreamy quality to it now. “It’s like every star in the universe is out tonight.”

“Sometimes I feel better after I play if I tell myself the truth about how they look. You have to tell yourself the truth.”

God, listen to me talking. I can’t stop talking. Why can’t I stop talking? What was I saying? Problems. The Schmidt telescope has problems too. everything has problems. There’s nothing anywhere without problems. There’s no one without problems. Look at the clouds. They’re beautiful. God, they’re beautiful. There’s one that looks like someone burning. Yes. Someone is burning. Who doesn’t have problems?”

“He asks very good questions. I don’t like his answers. But he asks some very important questions.”

He became angry. “It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”

Religion was the creation of man; its purpose was to make meaningful certain aspects of human existence. Religious rituals heightened the routinized activities of man. God was a lofty human idea, a goal, a man-created aspiration, an abstract guarantor of the intrinsic meaningfulness of the universe.

I read without errors whenever I was called on, answered all his questions correctly, and contributed nothing on my own to the class. A Talmud class in which a student is fearful of asking questions can become a suffocating experience. I suffocated.

“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. A teacher rarely causes such a change, Reuven. I am not saying it is impossible. Do not misunderstand me. I am saying it is rare. More often he can only occasion such a change.

“The son of Reb Saunders working with the son of Abraham Gordon.” He came back with the coffee and went over to the desk and sat down. “I’m working with a human being,” he said.

A teacher has a right to be angry at a student if he does not come prepared. Your mathematics professor would also be angry at you if you came unprepared. But I went too far with you, Greenfield. I apologize.”

He put the book down and sat behind his desk. “A book,” he murmured. “It is only a book. But what it means to write a book.”

He shook his head. “It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon, Reuven. But I did not intend my book to be a weapon. I simply intended it to be—a book.” He was silent a moment. Then he shook his head again. “I expected it. But what could I do? I could not stop writing. I cannot stop writing because some people do not like what I say.”

“The Master of the Universe has so created the world that everything that can be good can also be evil. It is mankind that makes a thing good or evil, Reuven, depending upon how we use the wonders we have been given. A telephone can also be a nuisance. But if it is used wisely, it is a mighty thing.” He stopped playing with the earlock and put his hand on the desk. “My Daniel receives many telephone calls when he is here. Sometimes they are from his friends in school. Sometimes they are from the hospital where he works. It is not so big a house, Reuven, that telephone calls can be easily concealed. Tell me, Reuven, Daniel has a patient by the name of Michael Gordon?”

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

They were my own people, but we were as far apart from one another as we could possibly be and still call ourselves by the name “Jew”—and I had never felt as distant from them as I felt that evening walking along Lee Avenue with my father on our way to the synagogue where we prayed.

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

My father’s father had been his student and talked of him often to my father. And my father talked of him to me. I feel I know him well. But I did not think I would ever be reliving a part of his life. That is the way the world is, Reuven. Each generation thinks it fights new battles. But the battles are the same. Only the people are different.”

A person can do one of two things in that kind of situation, assuming that he isn’t a Willy Loman but is capable of making a decision. 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.

“Yes,” he said. “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.” “Not many people can make a decision like that rationally.” “They ought to read some good books.” “Marx read a lot of good books.” “Marx was full of rage. Books don’t do much good when you’re that full of rage.” “We’re all full of rage. That’s something I’ve begun to think about these days. Who isn’t full of rage?”

“It has. But we’re dealing with a human being, not with one of your deductive systems.”

A state of deprivation not only brings on regressive disorganization but also promotes a constructive reorganization of deeper resources within a person. It breaks him down so that, sometimes with help—in Michael’s case, the help would be normal therapy—he can then build himself back up.

The book was about prayer, and the part of it that I read that afternoon was a moving and poetic account of what prayer had once meant and why it could no longer mean that today. 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 considered dead.

We saw the Talmud as containing almost a thousand years of ideas and traditions that had been in flux; we saw the text of the Talmud as fluid, alive, like a body of rushing water with many tributaries leading into it and from it. And the Mishnaic passage which Rav Kalman had just led me to was one example of the nature of that fluidity.

I was not surprised—but again there was the feeling of old worlds crumbling to pieces.

“Once I had students who spoke with such love about Torah that I would hear the Song of Songs in their voices.” He spoke softly, his eyes half closed. “I have not heard the Song of Songs now for—for—” He blinked. “I did not hear the Song of Songs in America until I heard your voice at the examinations. Not your words, but your voice. I did not like the words. But the voice … Do you understand what I mean, Reuven?”

I did not understand them and they did not understand me, and our quarrels would continue. But I was part of the chain of the tradition now, as much a guardian of the sacred Promise as Rav Kalman and the Hasidim were, and it would be a different kind of fight from now on. I had won the right to make my own beginning. And I thought I might try to learn something from the way Rav Kalman and the Hasidim had managed to survive and rebuild their world. What gave them the strength to mold smoke and ashes into a new world? I could use some of that strength for the things I wanted to do with my own life.

I listened to the silence. It moved against me like something alive, and I found myself trying to reach beyond it for a sound, any sound, the tick of a clock, the tapping of shoes on a floor, the soft clearing of a throat, the wind in the branches of a tree, the skittering of leaves across the ground, anything. But there was nothing—only the silence, like a giant hand around the room. I was trembling and sweating. Danny sat beside me, gazing at Michael, and there was on his face a look of pain and anguish and suffering, as if he were somehow inside Michael, peering out at me through Michael, and I had come to talk to him in his entombing silence.

I panicked then and heard myself begin to babble. I did not really know what I was saying, but I talked. I talked on and on, quietly, my voice shaking, using the words to push away the silence and fill the room with something that was truly alive, with words, driving out the silence with words, beating against the silence with words, pouring the wind and the lake and the memories of the summer into the emptiness of the room.

You have to talk if you want to fight. I fought Rav Kalman and he’s giving me smicha. I tried not to hurt him too much. I fought with words, Michael. And sometimes you have to fight even if it means hurting people terribly. Sometimes you have to hurt a person you love if you want to be yourself. We can talk about that too in the summer. We can go sailing and you can take the tiller and the mainsail and we—