The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

“Be careful with words, they’re dangerous. Beware of them. They beget demons or angels. It’s up to you to give life to one or the other. Be careful, I tell you, nothing is as dangerous as to give free rein to words.”

“Urban wanderings that result in core-culture confrontations often shape a certain kind of individual. I call that individual a Zwischenmensch, a betweenperson. Such an individual will cross the boundaries of his or her own culture and embrace life-enhancing elements from alien worlds.”

It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one. —KARL A. MENNINGER

“Whenever I do or see something I don’t understand, I like to think about it until I understand it.”

I looked at him, and suddenly I had the feeling that everything around me was out of focus. There was Danny Saunders, sitting on my bed in the hospital dressed in his Hasidic-style clothes and talking about wanting to kill me because I had pitched him some curveballs. He was dressed like a Hasid, but he didn’t sound like one. Also, yesterday I had hated him; now we were calling each other by our first names. I sat and listened to him talk. I was fascinated just listening to the way perfect English came out of a person in the clothes of a Hasid. I had always thought their English was tinged with a Yiddish accent. As a matter of fact, the few times I had ever talked with a Hasid, he had spoken only Yiddish. And here was Danny Saunders talking English, and what he was saying and the way he was saying it just didn’t seem to fit in with the way he was dressed, with the side curls on his face and the fringes hanging down below his dark jacket.

“He reads a lot, but he never writes. He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart. He doesn’t like to talk too much, either. Oh, he talks plenty when we’re studying Talmud together. But otherwise he doesn’t say much. He told me once he wishes everyone could talk in silence.”

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

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. “Yes. You know what a friend is, Reuven? A Greek philosopher said that two people who are true friends are like two bodies with one soul.” I nodded. “Reuven, if you can, make Danny Saunders your friend.” “I like him a lot, abba.” “No. Listen to me. I am not talking only about liking him. I am telling you to make him your friend and to let him make you his friend.

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

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.

“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.”

“Weeks and weeks go by, one Shabbat follows another, and I’m the same, nothing has changed, and suddenly one day something happens, and everything looks different.”

The noise inside the synagogue ceased so abruptly that I felt its absence as one would a sudden lack of air. It stopped in swift waves, beginning at the rear of the synagogue and ending at the chairs near the podium. I heard no signal and no call for silence; it simply stopped, cut off, as if a door had slammed shut on a playroom filled with children. The silence that followed had a strange quality to it: expectation, eagerness, love, awe.

Great men are always difficult to understand.

BEAUTY IS TRUTH, TRUTH BEAUTY, THAT IS ALL YE KNOW ON EARTH, AND ALL YE NEED TO KNOW—JOHN KEATS

A secular Jewish state in my father’s eyes is a sacrilege, a violation of the Torah.

“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?”

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

what was a friend for if not to be blown up at every now and then.

Silence was ugly, it was black, it leered, it was cancerous, it was death.

Ideas should be fought with ideas, my father said, not with blind passion.

you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own.

“Danny is now like a person waiting to be let out of jail. He has only one desire. To leave the jail. Despite what may be waiting for him outside.

Master of the Universe blessed me with a brilliant son. And he cursed me with all the problems of raising him. Ah, what it is to have a brilliant son! Not a smart son, Reuven, but a brilliant son, a Daniel, a boy with a mind like a jewel. Ah, what a curse it is, what an anguish it is, to have a Daniel, whose mind is like a pearl, like a sun. Reuven, when my Daniel was four years old, I saw him reading a story from a book. And I was frightened. He did not read the story, he swallowed it, as one swallows food or water. There was no soul in my four-year-old Daniel, there was only his mind. He was a mind in a body without a soul. It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story,

‘What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!’ ”

I would like to believe that before he died he learned how much suffering there is in this world. I hope so. It will have redeemed his soul.

words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence. One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. 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.

A tzaddik must know how to suffer for his people, he said. He must take their pain from them and carry it on his own shoulders. He must carry it always. He must grow old before his years. He must cry, in his heart he must always cry. Even when he dances and sings, he must cry for the sufferings of his people.

Better I should have had no son at all than to have a brilliant son who had no soul.

will I teach this mind to understand pain? How will I teach it to want to take on another person’s suffering? How will I do this and not lose my son, my precious son whom I love as I love the Master of the Universe Himself? How will I do this and not cause my son, God forbid, to abandon the Master of the Universe and His Commandments?

There is nothing noble or redemptive about poverty, nothing; I’ve lived in it long enough to be able to say that with certainty. Mostly it enervates; sometimes one can turn it into anger. And the anger, if wisely and carefully managed, may help stoke the furnaces of the imagination.

The Chosen was my first attempt to answer the question of who I had once been and what had happened to me in Korea, though Korea appears nowhere in the book.

One of the ways a writer knows he or she is working with a great editor is when the editor voices the writer’s own deepest doubts and gently suggests possible solutions.

core-to-core culture confrontation: individuals raised in the heart of one culture encountering alternate readings of the human experience that come to them from the heart of a possibly adversary culture.

When it fails—and it fails too often—there are riots in the streets, as there were in my teens when the city grew dark with the rage of one of its suffering people.

Saul Bellow’s Herzog is about such a culture confrontation: Herzog at the heart of western secular humanism experiencing the crises of our world and his life through his peripheral emotive connection to his sub-culture, his memories of an ethnic past.

Urban wanderings that result in core-culture confrontations often shape a certain kind of individual. I call that individual a Zwischenmensch, a between-person. Such an individual will cross the boundaries of his or her own culture and embrace life-enhancing elements from alien worlds.

To be a Zwischenmensch is to feel at home everywhere and nowhere simultaneously, to be regarded with suspicion by those along the banks as they watch you float by on your raft.

Different cities boil within each of us. There is so much we hate—the dirt, the poverty, the prejudice; there is so much we love—the one or two friendships that somehow crossed boundaries, the libraries where we joined ourselves to the dreams of others, the places where we composed dreams of our own, the museums where we learned how to defeat time, certain streets, alleys, staircases, apartment-house roofs, certain radio stations we would listen to deep into the night, certain newspapers we read as if they were a testament to the ages. We remember the terrors and joys of our early urban wanderings. We write, and continue the journey.

Repeatedly the narrator in The Chosen asks Danny how he can come to terms with Freud’s anti-religious view of the nature of man. And Danny Saunders does not respond. For him, psychoanalysis is a tool for research and healing. He will not use the Freudian system as a statement about the nature of man. For that, he will go to his native world, the culture of Hasidic Judaism. This method of handling an antagonistic system of thought is culture compartmentalization.

Culture compartmentalization enables you to take on an antagonistic system of values and to use that part of it with which you feel most comfortable, while letting you ignore those elements toward which you feel the greatest measure of antagonism. There is no ongoing crossover of the two cultures.

He would describe the Jews as the reconnaissance troops of mankind. He would say to me over and over again that reconnaissance troops take the highest casualties.

“You owe this sort of book an investment of sixty to eighty pages of time and effort before you make the decision whether or not to continue reading it.”

Now many look upon the artist as secular creator and prophet, as the only one capable of carving into some sort of significance the anarchic storms of contemporary experience, and perhaps finding new patterns and myths in the roiling and commonplace events of our present lives. Nothing is sacred to the serious novelist, save perhaps the act of writing.

Israelites enter a new land after a long wilderness wandering and encounter what we now know to have been the highly sophisticated, literate, feudal culture of ancient Canaan. Eight hundred years of culture war follow. Out of that war emerges a remarkable literature, elements of which consist of fusions of core elements of both cultures. Much of the Book of Psalms is a result of core-to-core culture confrontation: Canaanite literary forms and Israelite monotheistic content.

Any living culture will have at least two elements at its core: one fixed upon the past, the other facing the present and the future.

The Chosen is about two components of the small and particular world of Orthodox Judaism.

What does one do with the truths one senses in an alien system of thought? Is blindness to any possibility of new, threatening knowledge the price one must pay for loyalty to one’s small and particular world?

One might ask: By what right does one go about picking, choosing, accepting, rejecting this or that element in another system of thought? Don’t we compromise intellectual honesty when we do that? Well, perhaps. But we do it all the time.

when we confront an intriguing, challenging, compelling, threatening body of ideas: we select out of those ideas those elements toward which we feel a measure of affinity; those we take into ourselves, the rest we ignore.