The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

He went into his bedroom and stayed there the rest of the afternoon, and I lay on my bed, staring up at the ceiling, my hands clasped behind my head, trying to grasp what had happened. I couldn’t. I saw only emptiness and fear and a kind of sudden, total end to things that I had never experienced before. I lay on my bed and thought about it a long time. It was senseless, as—I held my breath, feeling myself shiver with fear—as Billy’s blindness was senseless. That was it. It was as senseless, as empty of meaning, as Billy’s blindness. I lay there and thought of Roosevelt being dead and Billy being blind, and finally I turned over and lay with my face on the pillow and felt myself crying. I cried a long time. Then I slept, fitfully. When I woke, the room was dark, and I heard the radio going again in the kitchen. I lay on the bed awhile, then joined my father. We sat together in the kitchen. It was after midnight when we went to sleep.

“Thank God!” my father said, his eyes wet with joy. “What a price to have paid for Hitler and his madmen!” And he lay back on the pillow and closed his eyes.

And then, together with the official report of the signing of the unconditional surrender on May 7, there came the news, at first somewhat guarded, then, a few days later, clear and outspoken, of the German concentration camps. My father, recuperating slowly and looking worn and weary, sat in his bed propped on pillows, and read the newspaper stories of the horrors that had occurred in those camps. His face was grim and ashen. He seemed unable to believe what he was reading.

I just couldn’t grasp it. The numbers of Jews slaughtered had gone from one million to three million to four million, and almost every article we read said that the last count was still incomplete, the final number would probably reach six million. I couldn’t begin to imagine six million of my people murdered. I lay in my bed and asked myself what sense it made. It didn’t make any sense at all. My mind couldn’t hold on to it, to the death of six million people.

“The world kills us,” he said quietly. “Ah, how the world kills us.” We were sitting in his study, and he was in his straight-backed chair. His face was lined with suffering. His body swayed slowly back and forth, and he talked in a quiet singsong, calling up the memories of his youth in Russia and telling us of the Jewish communities of Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Germany, and Hungary—all gone now into heaps of bones and ashes. Danny and I sat silent and listened to him talk. Danny was pale and seemed tense and distraught. He tugged constantly at an earlock, his eyes blinking nervously.

“How is Reb Saunders?” he asked quietly. I told him what Reb Saunders had talked about that afternoon. My father nodded slowly. He was pale and gaunt, and his skin had a yellowish tint to it and was parchmentlike on his face and hands. “Reb Saunders wanted to know how God could let something like this happen,” I told him quietly. My father looked at me, his eyes somber. “And did God answer him?” he asked. His voice had a strange quality of bitterness to it. I didn’t say anything. “Did God answer him, Reuven?” my father asked again, that same bitterness in his voice. “Reb Saunders said it was God’s will. We have to accept God’s will, he said.” My father blinked his eyes. “Reb Saunders said it was God’s will,” he echoed softly. I nodded. “You are satisfied with that answer, Reuven?” “No.” He blinked his eyes again, and when he spoke his voice was soft, the bitterness gone. “I am not satisfied with it, either, Reuven. We cannot wait for God. If there is an answer, we must make it ourselves.” I was quiet. “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. We cannot wait for God.” He lay back on the pillows. “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. We must replace the treasures we have lost.” His voice was hoarse, and he coughed. Then he was quiet for a long time. I saw him close...

A word is worth one coin; silence is worth two.

Samson Raphael Hirsch which was prominently displayed on a white wall—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.

“You talk about biology in a symbolic logic class?” my father asked. “We were discussing inductive logic.” “Ah. Of course. The point about mathematizing hypotheses was made by Kant. It is one of the programs of the Vienna Circle logical positivists.” “Who?” “Not now, Reuven. It is too late, and I am tired. You should go to sleep soon. Take advantage of the nights when you have no schoolwork.” “You’ll be working late tonight, abba?” “Yes.” “You’re not taking care of yourself, you know. Your voice sounds awful.” He sighed again. “It is a bad cold,” he said. “Does Dr. Grossman know you’re working so hard?” “Dr. Grossman worries a little bit too much about me,” he said, smiling. “Are you going for another checkup soon?” “Soon,” he said. “I am feeling fine, Reuven. You worry like Dr. Grossman. Worry better about your schoolwork. I am fine.” “How many fathers do I have?” I asked. He didn’t say anything, but he blinked his eyes a few times. “I wish you’d take it a little easy,” I said. “This is not a time to take things easy, Reuven. You read what is happening in Palestine.” I nodded slowly. “This is a time to take things easy?” my father asked, his hoarse voice rising. “The Haganah and Irgun boys who die are taking it easy?” He

This was the latest of a growing list of terrorist activities against the British Army in Palestine. While the Irgun engaged in terror—blowing up trains, attacking police stations, cutting communications lines—the Haganah continued smuggling Jews through the British naval blockade in defiance of the British Colonial Office, which had sealed Palestine off to further Jewish immigration. Rarely did a week go by now without a new act of terror against the British. My father would read the newspaper accounts of these activities, and I could see the anguish in his eyes. 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 to his feelings of opposition to the acts of terror that were regularly making front-page headlines now. Invariably, the headlines spurred him on to new bursts of Zionist activity and to loud, excited justification of the way he was driving himself in his fund-raising and speechmaking efforts in behalf of a Jewish state.

“You are no longer a child, Reuven,” my father went on. “It is almost possible to see the way your mind is growing. And your heart, too. Inductive logic, Freud, experimental psychology, mathematizing hypotheses, scientific study of the Talmud. Three years ago, you were still a child. You have become a small giant since the day Danny’s ball struck your eye. You do not see it. But I see it. And it is a beautiful thing to see. So listen to what I am going to tell you.” He paused for a moment, as if considering his next words carefully, then continued. “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 fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of r...

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

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 wait for him.”

He told me that before his heart attack he had been asked to go as a delegate to the Zionist General Council that was to meet in Palestine during the coming summer. “Now I will be glad if I can go to the cottage this summer,” he said, and there was a wry smile on his lips. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked him. “I did not want to upset you. But I could not keep it to myself any longer. So I am telling you now.” “Why didn’t you tell me when they asked you?” “They asked me the night I had the attack,” he said.

“Reuven, when someone asks to speak to you, you must let him speak to you. You still have not learned that? You did not learn that from what happened between you and Danny?” “He wants to study Talmud, abba.” “You are sure?” “That’s all we’ve ever done when I go over there.” “You only study Talmud? You have forgotten so quickly?” I stared at him. “He wants to talk to me about Danny,” I said, and felt myself turn cold. “You will go over the first day of the holiday. On Sunday.” “Why didn’t he tell me?” “Reuven, he did tell you. You have not been listening.”

man is born into this world with only a tiny spark of goodness in him. The spark is God, it is the soul; the rest is ugliness and evil, a shell. The spark must be guarded like a treasure, it must be nurtured, it must be fanned into flame. It must learn to seek out other sparks, it must dominate the shell. Anything can be a shell, Reuven. Anything. Indifference, laziness, brutality, and genius. Yes, even a great mind can be a shell and choke the spark.

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.

never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my 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.

But I had to prevent it from driving him away completely from the Master of the Universe. And I had to make certain his soul would be the soul of a tzaddik no matter what he did with his life.”

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.”

He cried for a long time, and I left him in the chair and went to the window and listened to his sobs. The sun was low over the brownstones on the other side of the yard, and an ailanthus stood silhouetted against its golden rim, its budding branches forming a lace curtain through which a wind moved softly. I watched the sun set. The evening spread itself slowly across the sky.