The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

“I am not satisfied with it, either, Reuven. We cannot wait for God. If there is an answer, we must make it ourselves.”

“Six million of our people have been slaughtered,” he went on quietly. “It is inconceivable. It will have meaning only if we give it meaning.

“There is only one Jewry left now in the world,” he said softly, staring up at the ceiling. “It is here, in America. We have a terrible responsibility. W...

“Now we will need teachers and rabbis to lead our people.” He opened his eyes and looked at me. “The Jewish world is changed,” he said, almost in a whisper. “A madman has destroyed our treasures. If we do not rebuild Jewry in America, we will die as a people.”

And Danny’s father was forever silent, withdrawn, his dark eyes turned inward, brooding, as if witnessing a sea of suffering he alone could see.

and sometimes at the kitchen table I would see him begin to cry suddenly, and he would get up and walk out of the room, then return a few minutes later and resume eating.

spend the morning studying Talmud. After lunch, we would go together to the library, where we would spend the early hours of the afternoon.

Danny used the evenings to read the books on Jewish subjects I kept giving him—or, if his father was free, we would go up to the study and do battle over the Talmud.

And once, during a supper meal, I saw tears come slowly from his eyes and disappear into the tangle of his dark beard. He did not leave the table this time. He sat there, weeping in silence, and no one said anything. And then he dried his eyes with a handkerchief, took a deep, trembling breath, and went back to his food.

I almost had the impression that they were physically incapable of communicating with each other about ordinary things.

Freud’s picture of man’s nature was anything but complimentary, it was anything but religious. It tore man from God, as Danny put it, and married him off to Satan.

And I, too, became upset. Freud contradicted everything I had ever learned. What I found particularly upsetting was the fact that Danny didn’t seem to have rejected what Freud taught. I began to wonder how it was possible for the ideas of the Talmud and the thinking of Freud to live side by side within one person.

He was reading everything he could find that told of the destruction of European Jewry. He talked of nothing else but European Jewry and the responsibility American Jews now carried.

but mostly he was concerned about American Jewry and the need for teachers and rabbis.

He was very tired, he said; he would talk to Danny about Freud another time. Danny shouldn’t think that Freud was the final word in psychoanalysis; many great thinkers disagreed with him.

Did we know, he asked us, that on December 17, 1942, Mr. Eden got up in the House of Commons and gave the complete details of the Nazi plan, already in full operation, to massacre the entire Jewish population of Europe?

There had been public meetings in England, protests, petitions, letters—the whole machinery of democratic expression had been set in motion to impress upon the British Government the need for action—and not a thing was done. Everyone was sympathetic, but no one was sympathetic enough.

No one had cared enough. The world closed its doors, and six million Jews were slaughtered. What a world! What an insane world! “What do we have left to us now, if not American Jewry?”

We must rebuild American Jewry! And Palestine must become a Jewish homeland!

I said quietly, not mentioning my father’s name, that a lot of people were now saying that it was time for Palestine to become a Jewish homeland and not only a place where pious Jews

God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim! When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim!”

“The land of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob should be built by Jewish goyim, by contaminated men?” Reb Saunders shouted again. “Never! Not while I live! Who says these things? Who says we should now build Eretz Yisroel? And where is the Messiah? Tell me, we should forget completely about the Messiah? For this six million of our people were slaughtered? That we should forget completely about the Messiah, that we should forget completely about

the Master of the Universe?

Yisroel? Because it is better to live in a land of true goyim than to live in a land of Jewish goyim! Who says we should build Eretz Yisroel, ah? I’ll tell you who says it! Apikorsim say it! Jew...

Danny told me to think ten thousand times the next time I wanted to mention anything like that again to his father. His father was fine, he said, until he was confronted by any idea that he felt came from the contaminated world.

My father takes God and Torah very seriously, Reuven. He would die for them both quite gladly. A secular Jewish state in my father’s eyes is a sacrilege, a violation of the Torah. You touched a raw nerve. Please don’t do it again.”

“I said my brother would probably make a fine tzaddik,” Danny said quietly. “It occurred to me recently that if I didn’t take my father’s place I wouldn’t be breaking the dynasty after all. My brother could take over. I had talked myself into believing that if I didn’t take his place I would break the dynasty. I think I had to justify to myself having to become a tzaddik.”

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.

“My father promised my sister to the son of one of his followers when she was two years old. It’s an old Hasidic custom to promise children away. She’ll be married when she reaches eighteen.

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

the chairman of the department, Professor Nathan Appleman, had an intense distaste for psychoanalysis in general and for Freud in particular.

“What do rats and mazes have to do with the mind?”

I wasn’t sure I knew what a behaviorist was, and I didn’t want to make him more miserable by asking him. I felt a little sorry for him, mostly because I had found college to be exciting and was thoroughly enjoying my books and my teachers, while he seemed to be going deeper and deeper into misery.

Hirsch had been a well-known Orthodox rabbi in Germany during the last century and had fought intelligently through his writings and preachings against the Jewish Reform movement of his day.

It was a rigidly Orthodox school, with services three times a day and with European-trained rabbis, many of them in long, dark coats, all of them bearded. For the first part of the day, from nine in the morning to three in the afternoon, we studied only Talmud. From three-fifteen to six-fifteen or

seven-fifteen, depending on the schedule of classes we had chosen for ourselves, we went through a normal college curriculum.

The length of the school day, though, was something else; I was frequently awake until one in the morning, doing homework.

He had been placed in Rav Gershenson’s class, the highest in the school, and I had been placed one class below.

He was the talk of the Talmud Department by the end of two weeks and the accepted referee of all Talmudic arguments among the students.

He was also learning a great deal from Rav Gershenson, who, as Danny put it, loved to spend at least three da...

He just couldn’t see himself spending four years running rats through mazes and checking human responses to blinking lights and buzzing sounds, he told me. He had received a B for his semester’s work in psychology because he had messed up some math equations on the final examination. He was disgusted. What did experimental psychology have to do with the human mind? he wanted to know.

I shook my head slowly. Reb Saunders had stopped inserting deliberate errors into his Shabbat evening talks the week we had entered college, but the memory of it still rankled. I told Danny that I had disliked the mistake business and had never really gotten used to it, despite my having witnessed it many times. “So what makes you think sitting long enough through something you hate will get you to like it?”

They are interested solely in confirming highly dubious

theoretical hypotheses by the logic of analogy and induction, and make no attempt at refutation or intersubjective testing.’

“About Freudians being dogmatic?” “What followers of a genius aren’t dogmatic, for heaven’s sake?

‘Gentlemen, psychology may be regarded as a science only to the degree to which its hypotheses are subjected to laboratory testing and to subsequent mathematization.’

“I don’t know a thing about the Freudians,” I told him quietly. “But I know a lot about inductive logic. One of these days remind me to give you a lecture on inductive logic.

never even mentioned the followers of Freud in class! I was talking about Freud himself!

What do rats have to do with the ...

“No. He’s teaching me scientific method.”