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Couldn’t I come over some Shabbos afternoon? I told him I would try, and Danny and I went out.
That was all he said. Not a word about Zionism. Not a word about the silence he had imposed upon Danny and me. Nothing. I found I disliked him more when I left than when I had entered. I did not see him again that July.
“The tzaddik sits in absolute silence, saying nothing, and all his followers listen attentively,” and the laughter left his lips as suddenly as if he had been slapped, and his face froze.
“There’s more truth to that than you realize,” he murmured. “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”
“What do you mean, it talks to you?” “You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes—sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”
He looked at me, his eyes sad. “My wife has been chosen for me,” he said quietly. I gaped at him. “It’s an old Hasidic custom, remember?”
He nodded soberly. “That’s another reason it won’t be so easy to break out of the trap. It doesn’t only involve my own family.”
Reb Saunders asked me quietly why I wasn’t coming over to see him anymore, and I explained that my father and I were studying Talmud together on Shabbat afternoons.
There was something helplessly fragile about him; he looked as if a wind would blow him down. Yet at the same time his dark eyes burned with a kind of inner fire that told of the tenacity with which he clung to life and of his growing awareness of the truth that for the rest of his days his every breath would depend upon the pills he put into his mouth at regular intervals.
“Yes.” “And all this time you did not tell me?” “It was a secret between us, abba.” He looked at me grimly. “Does Danny know what pain this will cause his father?” “He dreads the day he’ll have to tell him. He dreads it for both of them.”
“Is Danny thinking to abandon his Judaism?” I stared at him. “I never thought to ask him,” I said faintly.
“Reuven, how will Danny become a psychologist while looking like a Hasid?”
“It is important that Danny know exactly what he will tell his father. He must anticipate what questions will be on Reb Saunders’s mind. Talk to Danny. Let him think through exactly what he will tell his father.”
“Danny is now like a person waiting to be let out of jail. He has only one desire. To leave the jail. Despite what may be waiting for him outside. Danny cannot think one minute beyond the moment he will have to tell his fathe...
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head. Then I told him what Danny had said about silence. “What does it mean to hear silence, abba?” That seemed to upset him more than the news about Danny’s not becoming a tzaddik.
“It is a way of bringing up children,” he said. “What is?” “Silence.”
Then his voice went hard. “There are better ways to teach a child compassion.”
I had planned to talk to Danny the next day, but when I saw him he was in such a state of panic over his brother that I didn’t dare mention what my father had said.
He told me quietly that he was planning to write to three universities that day—Harvard, Berkeley, and Columbia—and apply for a fellowship in psychology.
He pulled nervously at an earlock. “Can you see me practicing psychology and looking like a Hasid?” he asked tightly.
My father sighed softly. “It will be a very uncomfortable situation. For you and for your father. You are determined not to take your father’s place?” “Yes,” Danny said.
Then my father leaned forward in his chair. “Danny,” he said softly, “you can hear silence?”
“Columbia.”
“Why don’t you tell him and get it over with?” “I’m afraid.” “What difference does it make? If he’s going to throw you out of the house, he’ll do it no matter when you tell him.”
“I’m afraid. I’m afraid of the explosion. I’m afraid of anytime I’ll have to tell him. God, I’m afraid.”
“It is for Reb Saunders to explain,” he told me quietly. “I cannot explain what I do not completely understand. I cannot do it with my students, and I cannot do it with my son.”
But I didn’t try very hard. I didn’t want to see Reb Saunders. I hated him as much now as I had when he had forced his silence between me and Danny.
He stopped talking about the silence between him and his father. He seemed to be shouting down the silence with his work. Only his constantly blinking eyes gave any indication of his mounting terror.
But when I talked to my father that night, he said, with a strange sharpness in his voice, “You
did not tell me Reb Saunders has been asking to see you.” “He’s been asking all along.” “Reuven, when someone asks to speak to you, you must let him speak to you. You still have not learned that? You did not learn that from what happened between you and Danny?”
“You only study Talmud? You have forgotten so quickly?” I stared at him. “He wants to talk to me about Danny,” I said, and felt myself turn cold. “You will go over the first day of the holiday. On Sunday.” “Why didn’t he tell me?” “Reuven, he did tell you. You have not been listening.”
“Listen next time. Listen when someone speaks to you.”
“You will go on Passover. He has a reason if he asked you to come especially on Passover. And listen next time when someone speaks to you, Reuven.”
Scientific criticism, ah! Your father is an observer of the Commandments.
It is not easy to be a true friend. Soft, silent echoes.
“You have become a man,” he said quietly. “The first day you sat here, you were only a boy. Now you are a man.”
“My son, my Daniel, has also become a man. It is a great joy for a father to see his son suddenly a man.”
“My Daniel will receive his smicha in June,” he said quietly. Then he added, “In June. . . . Yes. . . . His smicha. . . . Yes. . . .” The words trailed off, aimless, disconnected, and hung in the air for a long moment of tight silence.
“Nu,” he said, speaking softly, so softly I could barely hear him, “in June my Daniel and his good friend begin to go different ways. They are men, not children, and men go different ways. You will go one way, Reuven. And my son, my Daniel, he will—he will go another way.”
“I know,” Reb Saunders murmured, as if he were reading my mind. “I have known it for a long time.”
“Reuven, I want you to listen carefully to what I will tell you now.” He had said:
Reuven. His eyes had said: Danny. “You will not understand it. You may never understand it. And you may never stop hating me for what I have done. I know how you feel. I do not see it in your eyes? But I want you to listen.
“A man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the re...
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Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.
Not a smart son, Reuven, but a brilliant son, a Daniel, a boy with a mind like a jewel. Ah, what a curse it is, what an anguish it is, to have a Daniel, whose mind is like a pearl, like a sun.
There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind. He was a mind in a body without a soul. It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. He looked at me proudly and told me back the story from memory, and I cried inside my heart. I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, ‘What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a
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What a mind. But he was also not like my Daniel. My Daniel, thank God, is healthy. But for many, many years my brother was ill. His mind burned with hunger for knowledge. But for many years his body was wasted with disease.
But it was a cold mind, Reuven, almost cruel, untouched by his soul. It was proud, haughty, impatient with less brilliant minds, grasping in its search for knowledge the way a conqueror grasps for power. It could not understand pain, it was indifferent to and impatient with suffering. It was even impatient with the illness of its own body.
“When I was very young, my father, may he rest in peace, began to wake me in the middle of the night, just so I would cry. I was a child, but he would wake me and tell me stories of the destruction of Jerusalem and the sufferings of the people of Israel, and I would cry.
He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul.
