The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

“You did a foolish thing, Reuven,” he told me sternly. “You remember what the Talmud says. If a person comes to apologize for having hurt you, you must listen and forgive him.”

He told me once he wishes everyone could talk in silence.” “Talk in silence?” “I don’t understand it, either,” Danny said, shrugging. “But that’s what he said.

“No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate,” my father said quietly. “That is the way the world is.”

“People are not always what they seem to be,” he said softly. “That is the way the world is, Reuven.”

“Reuven, listen to me. The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself. One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?” “Choose a friend,” I said.

A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.”

“I read about seven or eight books a week outside of my schoolwork. Have you ever read Darwin or Huxley?”

“No. You’re not the only person who reads a lot.” For a moment he looked at me in astonishment. Then he laughed. “I don’t read seven or eight books a week, though, like you,” I said. “Only about three or four.”

the moment when there seems to be no meaning in life, at that moment a person must try to find new meaning.

“Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important things that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them—‘ordinary things’ is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”

difference between ‘this world’ and ‘the world-to-come’ comes out to nine. Nine is half of eighteen. Eighteen is chai, life. In this world there is only half of chai. We are only half alive in this world! Only half alive!”

of my teachers in school had told me about gematriya. Each letter of the Hebrew alphabet is also a number, so that every Hebrew word has a numerical value. The words for “this world” in Hebrew is “olam hazeh,” and by adding the numerical value of each letter, the total numerical value of the word becomes one hundred and sixty-three.

If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste.

“There’s so much to read,” he said. “I’ve only really been reading for a few months.

“Believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see.”

“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. 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?”

“I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. 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.

A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to...

A life filled with meaning is wor...

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.”

Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship,

He disagreed with Reb Saunders, yes, but he would countenance no slander against his name or his position. 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.

I was constantly being reminded by these dialogues of the way Danny argued Talmud with his father. It made it not only difficult to forget him but quite impossible. And now it was also I and not only Reb Saunders who was able to listen to Danny’s voice only through a Talmudic disputation.

We wept quite openly that Friday in the second week of May when Israel was born. And on my way to the synagogue the next morning, I saw the newspaper headlines announcing the birth of the Jewish state. They also announced that the Arab armies had begun their threatened invasion.

He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul.

words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence.

And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe.

Let my Daniel become a psychologist. I have no more fear now. All his life he will be a tzaddik. He will be a tzaddik for the world. And the world needs a tzaddik.”