The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

He had become involved in Zionist activities and was always attending meetings where he spoke about the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland and raised money for the Jewish National Fund.

He had begun taking his teaching with almost ominous seriousness these past months. He had always prepared

was a kind of heaviness to the way he went about preparing now, writing everything down, rehearsing his notes aloud—as if he were trying to make certain that nothing of significance would remain unsaid,

“So,” he said, “Danny is discovering that Freud is not God.”

said about psychology being a science only to the extent to which its hypotheses can be mathematized. “Professor Flesser made the same remark once about biology,” I said.

“This is not a time to take things easy, Reuven. You read what is happening in Palestine.”

He hated violence and bloodshed and had an intense distaste for the terrorist policy of the Irgun, but he hated the British nonimmigration policy even more. Irgun blood was being shed for the sake of a future Jewish state, and he found it difficult to give voice

“Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when

he was about to die?”

have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest.’ ”

Three years ago, you were still a child. You have become a small giant since the day Danny’s ball struck your eye.

There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?”

A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant.

with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with

meaning. That I do not think you un...

“I will live for many more years, with God’s help,” my father said, trying a smile. “Between my son and my doctor, I will probably live to be a very old man.”

only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. 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.”

Jack Rose and my father had been boyhood friends in Russia and had come to America on the same boat.

“It is strange what is happening,” my father said. “And it is exciting. Jack is on the Building Committee of his synagogue. Yes, he joined a synagogue. Not for himself, he told me. For his grandchildren. He is helping them put up a new building so his grandchildren can go to a modern synagogue and have a good Jewish education. It is beginning to happen everywhere in America. A religious renaissance, some call it.”

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. “Haven’t you learned that yet, Reuven?”

“I don’t envy his rabbi.” My father shook his head soberly. “Why not? You should envy him, Reuven. American Jews have begun to return to the synagogue.”

“God help us if synagogues fill up with Jack Roses.” “They will fill up with Jack Roses, and it will be the task of rabbis to educate them. It will be your task if you become a rabbi.”

“America needs rabbis,” my father said. “Well, it’s better than being a boxer,” I told him.

He said that in a year or two the crisis in Palestine would come to a head. There would be terrible bloodshed, he predicted, unless the British would give over the problem to the United Nations.

“I wonder how Reb Saunders will feel when he finds out that Danny is the friend of the son of a Zionist,” I mused. I had told my father about Reb Saunders’s explosion.

My father sighed. “Reb Saunders sits and waits for the Messiah,” he said. “I am tired of waiting.

Now is the time to bring the Messiah, not to...

It was Friday, and I had nothing planned. Danny always spent his mornings studying Talmud, so I decided that rather than waste the day I would go over to the college library and see if I could find something on experimental psychology.

I found some books on experimental psychology

I had chosen the books at random, but even a quick glance at them made it apparent that they were all structured along similar lines. They dealt only with experimental data and were filled with graphs, charts, tables, photographs of devices for the measuring of auditory, visual, and tactile responses, and with mathematical translations of laboratory findings.

It is impossible here to discuss the “new psychology of the unconscious,” but exaggerated as are many of the statements made as to the revolution in psychology caused by psychoanalysis there is little doubt that it has influenced psychology permanently. And it is well that the teacher should study something of it, partly because of its suggestiveness in many parts of his work, and partly to be on guard against the exaggerated statements of extremists, and the uncritical advocacy of freedom from all discipline, based upon them.

Magic depends on tradition and belief. It does not welcome observation, nor does it profit by experiment. On the other hand, science is based on experience; it is open to correction by observation and experiment.

I understood what he had meant when he said that experimental psychology had nothing to do with the human mind.

How could you experiment with their minds? How could anyone subject Freud’s concept of the unconscious to a laboratory test?

Poor Danny, I thought. Professor Appleman, with his experimental psychology, is torturing your mind. And your father, with his bizarre silence—which I still couldn’t understand, no matter how often I thought about it—is torturing your soul.

nervous. I suggested that he be polite but honest, and that he listen to what Appleman might have to say.

How could you have a science without experimentation? I wanted to know. And how could anyone experiment on the unconscious, which, by definition, seemed to defy laboratory techniques of testing?

I told him I had a pretty thick skin and, besides, what was a friend for if not to be blown up at every now and then.

“We had a long talk about Freud, Freudians, psychology, psychoanalysis, and God.” “And?” “He’s a very fine person. He said he’s been waiting all term for me to talk to him.”

“Anyway, he knows Freud forwards and backwards. He told me that he wasn’t objecting to Freud’s conclusions as much as to his methodology. He said Freud’s approach was based on his own limited experiences. He generalized on the basis of a few instances, a few private patients.” “That’s the problem of induction in a nutshell,” I said. “How do you justify jumping from a few instances to a generalization?”

Freud evolved a theory of behavior based only on the study of abnormal cases. He said that experimental psychology was interested in applying the methodology of the natural sciences to discover how all human beings behaved. It doesn’t generalize about personality behavior only on the basis of a certain segment of people. That makes a lot of sense.”

“He also said his quarrel was mainly with the Freudians, not so much with Freud himself. He said they were happy to earn their fat fees as analysts and refused to let anyone challenge their hypotheses.”

But Danny had become increasingly self-conscious about his appearance ever since the time he had read Graetz on Hasidism. He looked straight ahead, trying to ignore the stares.

He told me that it was almost impossible to study human subjects because it was too difficult to control the experiments. He said we use rats because we can vary the conditions.

He said he admired my knowledge of Freud but that in science no one was God, not even Einstein. He said even in religion people differed

about what God was, so why shouldn’t scientists take issue with other scientists?

He said experimental psychology would be a healthy balance to my knowledge of Freud. Maybe. I still don’t think it has anything to do with the human mind. It’s ...

I enjoyed coaching him and learned a lot of experimental psychology. I found it fascinating, a lot more substantial and scientific than Freud had been, and a lot more fruitful in terms of expanding testable

knowledge on how human beings thought and learned.

I also kept arguing for the value of experimentation. Danny remained convinced of his original argument that experimental psychology had nothing to do with the human mind, though he began to see its value as an aid to learning theory and intelligence testing.