The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

“I can’t read at all?” “No reading. So I brought you the radio. Very important things are happening, Reuven, and a radio is a blessing.” He put the radio on the night table. A radio brought the world together, he said very often. Anything that brought the world together he called a blessing.

“No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate,”

The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?” “Choose a friend,” I said.

“What did he say?” “He didn’t say anything. I told you, he never talks to me except when we study. But a few days later, while we were studying, he said that man was created by God, and Jews had a mission in life.” “What mission is that?” “To obey God.”

“Now, Reuven, listen very carefully to what I am going to tell you. Reb Saunders’s son is a terribly torn and lonely boy. There is literally no one in the world he can talk to. He needs a friend. The accident with the baseball has bound him to you, and he has already sensed in you someone he can talk to without fear.

It was a light, dreamless sleep, a kind of half-sleep that refreshes but does not shut off the world completely. I felt the warm wind and smelled newly cut grass, and a bird perched on a branch of the ailanthus and sang for a long time before it flew away. Somehow I knew where that bird was, though I did not open my eyes.

You want to know how I feel about my father? I admire him. I don’t know what he’s trying to do to me with this weird silence that he’s established between us, but I admire him. I think he’s a great man. I respect him and trust him completely, which is why I think I can live with his silence. I don’t know why I trust him, but I do. And I pity him, too. Intellectually, he’s trapped. He was born trapped. I don’t ever want to be trapped the way he’s trapped. I want to be able to breathe, to think what I want to think, to say the things I want to say.

A word is worth one coin; silence is worth two. —The Talmud

“Are you going for another checkup soon?” “Soon,” he said. “I am feeling fine, Reuven. You worry like Dr. Grossman. Worry better about your schoolwork. I am fine.” “How many fathers do I have?” I asked. He didn’t say anything, but he blinked his eyes a few times. “I wish you’d take it a little easy,” I said.

a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something.

If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist—what sense is there to it? A fly also lives.”

I couldn’t say anything else. I was afraid my anger would bring me to say the wrong words.

My classmates had all heard the news by the time the semester began, but their words of consolation didn’t help very much. The look on Danny’s face, though, when I saw him for the first time, helped a little. He passed me in the hallway, his face a suffering mask of pain and compassion. I thought for a moment he would speak to me, but he didn’t. Instead, he brushed against me and managed to touch my hand for a second.

His face was sad. “A father can bring up a child any way he wishes,” he said softly. “What a price to pay for a soul.”

The boy she married was a Hasid, with a black beard, long earlocks, and dark eyes. He looked rather severe, and I quickly decided that I didn’t like him. When I congratulated him after the wedding and shook his hand, his fingers were limp and moist.

One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain,

In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying.”