The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

“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.”

“Sure I believe it,” he said quietly. His shoulders were bowed. “Sometimes I’m not sure I know what God wants, though.”

“I read anything good that I can get my hands on. I’m reading Hemingway now. You’ve heard of Hemingway.”

The hero, this American, is watching the ants, and instead of taking the log out of the fire and saving the ants, he throws water into the fire. The water turns into steam and that roasts some of the ants, and the others just burn to death on the log or fall off into the fire. It’s a great passage. It shows how cruel people can be.”

“I just get so tired of studying only Talmud all the time. I know the stuff cold, and it gets a little boring after a while. So I read whatever I can get my hands on.

I don’t know. But it’s exciting being able to read all those books.”

“If you’d’ve ducked that ball I would still be wondering,” he said, and put his hands back into his pockets.

You sound almost as if you don’t believe in God.”

Finally, he said very quietly, “I have to take my father’s place. I have no choice. It’s an inherited position. I’ll work it out—somehow. It won’t be that bad, being a rabbi. Once I’m a rabbi my people won’t care what I read.

“I have no choice,” he said again. “It’s like a dynasty. If the son doesn’t take the father’s place, the dynasty falls apart. The people expect me to become their rabbi.

“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s really funny. I have to be a rabbi and don’t want to be one. You don’t have to be a rabbi and do want to be one. It’s a crazy world.”

“Well, they try to deduce all of mathematics from simple logical principles and show that mathematics is really based on logic. It’s pretty complicated stuff. But I enjoy it.”

“I don’t read seven or eight books a week, though, like you,” I said. “Only about three or four.”

It was my father who finally broke the silence. He did it gently and with quiet warmth. He said, “I see you play ball as well as you read books, Danny. I hope you are not as violent with a book as you are with a baseball.”

I suddenly realized it was my father who all along had been suggesting books for Danny to read. My father was the man Danny had been meeting in the library!

“I told him,” Danny said. He had begun to relax a bit, and the look of surprise was gone from his face now.

Some days I am there, and he comes over to me, apologizes for interrupting me in my work, and asks me if I can recommend a book for him to read. He does not know me, and I do not know him. I ask him if he is interested in literature or science, and he tells me he is interested in anything that is worthwhile. I suggest a book, and two hours later he returns, thanks me, and tells me he has finished reading it, is there anything else I can recommend.

Do you really think, Reuven, I should have told you? It was for Danny to tell if he wished, not for me.”

“There is nothing to be grateful for, Danny,” my father told him. “You asked me for books and I made recommendations. Soon you will be able to read on your own and not need anyone to make recommendations. If you continue to come to the library I will show you how to use a bibliography.”

When I got to my bed, I saw that not only was the curtain still around Mr. Savo’s bed, there was now a curtain around Billy’s bed, too.

Mr. Savo grinned. “That’s the way to do it, boy! Can’t make a career out of lying around in hospitals.”

Mr. Savo told me to relax, I was spoiling his lunch.

That’s the breaks.”

Silence is good everywhere, except in connection with Torah. —The Zohar

We lived on the first floor of a three-story brownstone house that stood on a quiet street just off busy Lee Avenue.

She planted a wet kiss on my forehead, then held me at arm’s length and began to babble in Ukrainian.

Lunch turned out to be a massive affair, with a thick soup, fresh rye bread, onion rolls, bagels, cream cheese, scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, and chocolate pudding.

I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around me seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life.

I felt I had crossed into another world, that little pieces of my old self had been left behind on the black asphalt floor of the school yard alongside the shattered lens of my glasses.

Whenever he did not respond immediately to one of my questions, the answer was always a lengthy one. I could see he was arranging it in his mind, so that it would be carefully organized. When he finally spoke, his voice was soft, and the words came out slowly.

with the centuries of horror our people had experienced in Poland. Because it was really in Poland, or, more accurately, in the Slavic countries of eastern Europe, that Danny’s soul had been born.

“Poland was different from the other countries of Europe, Reuven. Poland actually encouraged the Jews to come and live and be part of her people.

Why did Poland want Jews when almost every other country was persecuting them? Because Poland was a very poor country, with a bankrupt aristocracy and a crushed peasantry. Her upper-class nobles would not engage in work and instead managed to survive by what they could squeeze out of the labor of the serfs.

The Jews were helping the nobility, but in doing so, in collecting taxes from the serfs and peasants, for example, they were building up against themselves the hatred of these oppressed classes.

The revolution lasted ten years, and in that time something like seven hundred Jewish communities were destroyed and about one hundred thousand Jews were slain. When the horror was over, the great Jewish community of Poland had been almost completely destroyed.”

Remember, Reuven, that those Jews who believe in the Messiah believe also that just before the Messiah comes there will be an era of great disaster. At the moment when there seems to be no meaning in life, at that moment a person must try to find new meaning.

His name was Shabbtai Zvi. He revealed himself about the same time as the massacres began. More than half the Jewish world became his followers.

Pilpul, these discussions are called—empty, nonsensical arguments over minute points of the Talmud that have no relation at all to the world.

“Now, Reuven, if everywhere around you there are forces that wish to harm you, what is it that you can do to help yourself? Of course, you try to destroy those forces. But the masses of Jews did not believe they had the power to do this.

To such a level had our people sunk in Poland by the eighteenth century. And here, Reuven, is where my answer to your questions about Reb Saunders’s son really begins.”

“I am not sounding too much like a schoolteacher?” “I don’t mind it when you sound like a schoolteacher,” I said.

All day long he would sit around, listening to the learned discussions that went on inside the synagogue walls, and at night, when everyone else slept, he would take the holy books in his hands and study them carefully. But it was not the Talmud that he studied, it was the Kabbalah, the books of Jewish mysticism.

He came to be regarded as a wise and holy man, and one day the father of Rabbi Abraham Gershon of the city of Brody came to him and asked him to settle a business dispute he had with another man. He was so impressed with Israel that he offered to give him his daughter Hannah in marriage.

They were very poor, but very happy. Israel earned a living by selling the lime which they dug in the mountains.

She must have suffered terribly because of their poverty, but she believed in him and was very devoted.

“Reuven, it was in these mountains that Israel gave birth to Hasidism. He was there many years, thinking, meditating, singing his strange songs, listening to the birds, learning from peasant women how to heal sickness with grasses and herbs, to write amulets, to drive out evil spirits.

He mingled with the people and talked to them about God and His Torah in plain, simple language that they could easily understand. He taught them that the purpose of man is to make his life holy—every aspect of his life: eating, drinking, praying, sleeping. God is everywhere, he told them, and if it seems at times that He is hidden from us, it is only because we have not yet learned to seek Him correctly. Evil is like a hard shell. Within this shell is the spark of

God, is goodness. How do we penetrate the shell? By sincere and honest prayer, by being happy, and by loving all people. The Ba’al Shem Tov—his followers later shortened his name and called him the Besht—believed that no man is so sinful that he cannot be purified by love and understanding.

God could be worshipped through a sincere heart, through joy and singing and dancing. In other words, Reuven, he opposed any form of mechanical religion.

Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones.