The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

He completely ignored Dr. Grossman’s suggestion that he rest more, and every time I brought up the subject he either waved it away or talked about the violence now going on in Palestine.

There was nothing more important to him now than the two ideas around which his life revolved: the education of American Jewry and a Jewish state in Palestine.

Every shade of Zionist thought was represented in Hirsch College, from the Revisionists, who supported the Irgun, to the Neturai Karta, the Guardians of the City, the city being Jerusalem. This latter group was composed of severely Orthodox Jews, who, like Reb Saunders, despised all efforts aimed at the establishment of a Jewish state prior to the advent of the Messiah.

Even the rabbinic faculty was split, most of the rabbis voicing their hope for a Jewish state, some of them opposing it, while all of the college faculty seemed to be for it.

dual loyalty—what sort of allegiance could an American Jew have toward a foreign Jewish state?—and invariably these arguments revolved around this hypothetical question: On what side would an American Jew fight should America ever declare war against a Jewish state?

Despising as they did all efforts in behalf of a Jewish state, they despised as well all discussions that had to do with even its possible existence. They called such discussions bitul Torah, time taken away from the study of Torah, and looked upon all the disputants with icy disgust.

In the lunchroom one day, one of the Hasidim accused a member of the Revisionist youth group of being worse than Hitler. Hitler had only succeeded in destroying the Jewish body, he shouted in Yiddish, but the Revisionists were trying to destroy the Jewish soul.

Zionists among the Hasidic students looked upon him as their leader. How would it be if he joined a Zionist group? It would do nothing but add to the already existing bitterness. He was trapped by his beard and earlocks, he said, and there was nothing he could do.

I saw him look with hatred at the Hasidic student who had started the quarrel.

In it he described the two-thousand-year-old Jewish dream of a return to Zion, the Jewish blood that had been shed through the centuries, the indifference of the world to the problem of a Jewish homeland, the desperate need to arouse the world to the realization of how vital it was that such a homeland be established immediately on the soil of Palestine. Where else could the remnant of Jewry that had escaped Hitler’s ovens go? The slaughter of six million Jews would have meaning only on the day a Jewish state was established.

Only then would their sacrifice begin to make some sense; only then would the songs of faith they had sung on their way to the gas chambers take on meaning; only then would Jewry again become a light to the world, as Ahad Ha’am had foreseen.

His face was flushed with excitement. The rally had been a wild success. The Garden had been packed, and two thousand people had stood on the street outside, listening to the speeches over loudspeakers.

the crowd’s response to the speeches urging an end to the British mandate and the establishment of a Jewish state had been overwhelming.

I was the center of considerable attention on the part of the Zionist students and the target of icy hatred from the ranks of the anti-Zionists.

I was sitting at a table preparing for the Talmud session, when I saw him pass me and nod his head in the direction of the door.

He wasn’t all right, he told me bitterly. His father had read the account of the rally in the Yiddish press. There had been an explosion yesterday

at breakfast, last night at supper, and this morning again at breakfast. Danny was not to see me, talk to me, listen to me, be found within four feet of me. My father and I had been excommunicated from the Saunders family.

If we tried meeting in secret, Reb Saunders would find out about it.

I had expected it, but now that it had happened I couldn’t believe it. Reb Saunders had drawn the line not at secular literature, not at Freud—assuming he knew somehow that Danny had been reading Freud—but at Zionism.

My father and I had been excommunicated—not only from the Saunders family, apparently, but also from the anti-Zionist element of the Hasidic student body.

It seemed so incredible to me, so outrageously absurd. Not Freud but Zionism had finally shattered our friendship.

When I told my father about it that night, he listened in silence. He was quiet for a long time afterward; then he sighed and shook his head, his eyes misty. He had known it would happen, he said sadly. How could it not happen?

“Reuven, what went on between you and Danny all these years was private. Who really knew?

But he has no answer anymore to my Zionism.

“Reuven,” my father said quietly, “the fanaticism of men like Reb Saunders kept us alive for two thousand years of exile. If the Jews of Palestine have an

ounce of that same fanaticism and use it wisely, we will soon have a Jewish state.”

It was an agony to sit in the same class with him, to pass him in the hallway, to see him in a trolley, to come in and out of the school building with him—and not say a word. I

I talked about it with my father as often as I could, but there seemed to be little he could do to help me. He would listen somberly, sigh, and repeat that he had no intention of quarreling with Reb Saunders, he respected his position in spite of its fanaticism.

I hated the silence between us and thought it unimaginable that Danny and his father never really talked. Silence was ugly, it was black, it leered, it was cancerous, it was death. I hated it, and I hated Reb Saunders for forcing it upon me and his son.

I never knew myself capable of the kind of hatred I felt toward Reb Saunders all through that semester. It became, finally, a blind, raging fury, and I would find myself trembling with it at odd moments of the day—waiting to get into a trolley car, walking into a bathroom, sitting in the lunchroom, or reading in the library. And my father only added to it, for whenever I began to talk to him of my feelings toward Reb Saunders he invariably countered by defending him and by asserting that the faith of Jews like Reb Saunders had kept us alive through two thousand years of violent persecution.

Ideas should be fought with ideas, my father said, not with blind passion. If Reb Saunders was fighting him with passion, that did not mean that my father had to fight Reb Saunders with passion.

Its aims were clear: no Jewish homeland without the Torah at its center; therefore, no Jewish homeland until the coming of the Messiah. A Jewish homeland created by Jewish goyim was to be considered contaminated and an open desecration of the name of God.

even at one point threatening to boycott neighborhood stores owned by Jews who contributed to, participated in, or were sympathetic with Zionist activities.

I couldn’t talk to him at all about his health. He refused to listen. Our Shabbat afternoon Talmud sessions had stopped; my father spent all of Shabbat resting so as to be prepared for each coming week of furious activity.

I sat very still, listening to the registrar, and felt myself get angry. To hell with you, Danny Saunders, I thought. You could at least show you know I’m alive. To hell with you and your fanatic father. I became so completely absorbed in my anger that I stopped listening to the instructions.

By the time the fall semester officially began two days later, I had promised myself to forget Danny as quickly as possible. I wasn’t going to let him ruin another semester’s work.

But it proved to be a good deal more difficult to forget him than I had anticipated, mostly because I had been moved up into Rav Gershenson’s Talmud class, where Danny’s presence was always felt.

He was an exciting teacher, though, and he taught Talmud the way my father did, in depth, concentrating for days on a few lines and moving on only when he was satisfied that we understood everything thoroughly.

There was almost always a point at which the student who was reading the text would become bogged down by the cumulative intricacies of the questions and would stare down at his Talmud, drowning in the shame produced by his inability to answer.

The hours of the Talmud classes in the school were arranged in such a way that we were able to spend from nine in the morning to noon preparing the material to be studied with Rav Gershenson.

But it never really helped, because no matter how hard we worked there would always be that dreaded moment of silence when the questions could no longer be answered and Rav Gershenson’s fingers would begin their drumming.

My father had begun to look almost skeletal as a result of his activities, and I dreaded the nights he came wearily home, drank his glass of tea, spent some minutes with me in my room, looking hollow-eyed and not really listening to what I told him, and then went into his study. Instead of studying Talmud with him on the Shabbat, I studied alone while he slept. The Palestine issue was being debated now by the United Nations, and the Partition Plan would soon be voted upon.

My father spoke at that rally, his voice booming out clearly through the public address system. He seemed so huge behind the microphones, his voice giving his body the stature of a giant. When he was done, I sat and listened to the wild applause of the crowd, and my eyes filled with tears of pride.

The death of the six million Jews had finally been given meaning, he kept saying over and over again. It had happened. After two thousand years, it had finally happened. We were a people again, with our own land. We were a blessed generation. We had been given the opportunity to see the creation of the Jewish state. “Thank God!” he said. “Thank God! Thank God!” We alternately wept and talked until after three in the morning when we finally went to bed.

The leaflets denounced the United Nations vote, ordered Jews to ignore it, called the state a desecration of the name of God, and announced that the league planned to fight its recognition by the government of the United States.

as the toll of Jewish dead increased daily, Reb Saunders’s league grew strangely silent. The faces of the anti-Zionist Hasidic students in the school became tense and pained, and all anti-Zionist talk ceased. I watched them every day at lunch as they read to each other the accounts of the bloodshed reported in the Jewish press and then talked about it among themselves.

“Hitler wasn’t enough. Now more Jewish blood, more slaughter. What does the world want from us? Six million isn’t enough? More Jews have to die?” Their pain over this new outbreak of violence against the Jews of Palestine outweighed their hatred of Zionism.

I would go out of the house and take long walks in the bitter, cold winter nights. But my schoolwork began to suffer, and I finally took hold of myself. I spent as much of the early parts of every evening as I could visiting my father in the hospital.

I began especially to study Talmud. In the past, I had done all my Talmud studying on Shabbat and during the morning preparation periods. Now I began to study Talmud in the evenings as well. I tried to finish my college work as quickly as I could, then I would turn to the passage of Talmud we were studying with Rav Gershenson.

After I was done memorizing the text and the commentaries, I began to go over the text again critically. I checked the Talmudic cross-references for parallel texts and memorized whatever differences I found.