The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

two diametrically opposed worldviews of Zionism and Messianism: the position that the Jewish state should be founded by men and women, and the belief that it could not be established without divine intervention and the coming of the Messiah.

apikorsim. The word had meant, originally, a Jew educated in Judaism who denied basic tenets of his faith, like the existence of God, the revelation, the resurrection of the dead. To people like Reb Saunders, it also meant any educated Jew who might be reading, say, Darwin, and who was not wearing side curls and fringes outside his trousers. I was an apikoros to Danny Saunders, despite my belief in God and Torah, because I did not have side curls and was attending a parochial school where too many English subjects were offered and where Jewish subjects were taught in Hebrew instead of Yiddish, both unheard-of sins, the former because it took time away from the study of Torah, the latter because Hebrew was the Holy Tongue and to use it in ordinary classroom discourse was a desecration of God’s Name. I had never really had any personal contact with this kind of Jew before. My father had told me he didn’t mind their beliefs. What annoyed him was their fanatic sense of righteousness, their absolute certainty that they and they alone had God’s ear, and every other Jew was wrong, totally wrong, a sinner, a hypocrite, an apikoros, and doomed, therefore, to burn in hell.

“The great and holy Rabban Gamaliel,” he said, “taught us the following: ‘Do His will as if it were thy will, that He may do thy will as if it were His will. Nullify thy will before His will that He may nullify the will of others before thy will.’ What does this mean? It means that if we do as the Master of the Universe wishes, then He will do as we wish.

“Rabbi Halafta son of Dosa teaches us, ‘When ten people sit together and occupy themselves with the Torah, the Presence of God abides among them, as it is said, “God standeth in the congregation of the godly.” And whence can it be shown that the same applies to five? Because it is said, “He had founded his band upon the earth.” And whence can it be shown that the same applies to three? Because it is said, “He judgeth among the judges.” And whence can it be shown that the same applies to two? Because it is said, “Then they that feared the Lord spake one with the other, and the Lord gave heed and heard.” And whence can it be shown that the same applies even to one? Because it is said, “In every place where I cause my name to be remembered I will come unto thee and I will bless thee.”’ Listen, listen to this great teaching. A congregation is ten. It is nothing new that the holy Presence resides among ten. A band is five. It is also nothing new that the holy Presence resides among five. Judges are three. If the holy Presence did not reside among judges there would be no justice in the world. So this, too, is not new. That the Presence can reside even among two is also not impossible to understand. But that the Presence can reside in one! In one! Even in one! That already is a mighty thing. Even in one! If one man studies Torah, the Presence is with him. If one man studies Torah, the Master of the Universe is already in the world. A mighty thing! And to bring the Master of the ...

the gematriya, and they strained forward to listen. One 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.

I sat at the kitchen table and slowly told my father everything that had taken place in Reb Saunders’s synagogue. He sipped his tea and listened quietly. I saw him grimace when I began to go over the gematriyot. My father did not particularly care for gematriya. He had once referred to it as nonsense numerology and had said that anything could be proved that way, all that had to be done was to shift letters around adroitly so as to make the values come out any way you wanted.

the Mishnah is the written text of rabbinic oral law; in form and content it is for the most part terse and clipped, a vast collection of laws upon which are based almost all the rabbinic discussions which, together with the Mishnah, compose the Talmud.

The synagogue door stood open. I peered inside. Its emptiness whispered echoes at me: mistakes, gematriya, Talmud quizzes, and Reb Saunders staring at my left eye.

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.

In The Chosen, Danny Saunders encounters Freudian psychoanalytic theory; in The Promise, Reuven Malter encounters text criticism; in My Name Is Asher Lev, a young man encounters western art; in In the Beginning, David Lurie encounters modern Bible scholarship.

Hasidism arose in eighteenth-century Poland as a reaction against the formal learning and intellectuality stressed by the rabbinic Judaism of the time.

apikorsim”: The word had meant, originally, a Jew educated in Judaism who denied basic tenets of his faith, like the existence of God, the revelation, the resurrection of the dead.

Jewish American literature is traced back to the late 1800s. This first wave of writing was steeped in the experiences of immigrants, particularly European immigrants and their struggles building new lives in America. The next wave, roughly the period between 1930 and 1945, happily left immigrant culture behind and looked to America for hope in the face of crises such as the Depression and the Holocaust. Lewis Fried remarks, “Assimilation was a welcome fact of their American existence.”12 Most scholars, however, agree that the heyday of modern Jewish American literature began in the 1950s, and references to great Jewish American literature most often take us back to this period. Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Philip Roth came onto the scene and dominated Jewish American fiction for decades to come. No list of Jewish American writers was complete without their names.