The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

Among Potok’s papers—which are housed in the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, at the University of Pennsylvania—he kept a copy of Elie Wiesel’s 1966 article “My Teachers” and underlined the following lines in red ink: The “Shelishter Rebbe” told me one day: “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.”

Potok attended Yeshiva University and then the Jewish Theological Seminary, where he received his rabbinic ordination. He then served for sixteen and a half months as a U.S. Army chaplain in Korea, in a medical battalion and in a combat engineering battalion. Raised to believe that Judaism made a fundamental difference in the world, Potok found himself, in Asia, in a world where Judaism meant nothing and where, to his astonishment, he witnessed deep faith in the heart of pagan idol worship. His cultural encounters in Korea and Japan relativized his Jewishness, Americanness, and Westernness simultaneously, creating a fundamental paradigm shift: he had entered that world with a coherent sense of who he was as a Jew, as an American, and as a Westerner. But in Japan, Korea, and the other parts of Asia he visited as an American soldier, that coherence came undone. The paradigm shift, and its attendant notions of unraveling and reconstituting identity, became the driving force behind his novels.

Daniel Walden, the preeminent scholar of Potok’s work, takes up that self-description and uses it as the basis for an analysis of the author’s writing in “Chaim Potok: A Zwischenmensch (‘Between Person’) in the Cultures.” Potok, suggests Walden, was formed by his urban Jewish upbringing in the Bronx and then encountered the umbrella culture of Western secular humanism. As a result, his urban, intellectual, and literary wanderings produced a Zwischenmensch—a person, a novelist, occupying the interstitial space between Western secular humanism and religious orthodoxy. In “The Chosen Borough: Chaim Potok’s Brooklyn,” Joan Zlotnick picks up on these ideas in her discussion of the urban landscape of the Bronx, where Potok grew up, and of Brooklyn, where his novels are set.

In his foreword to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of The Chosen, Potok calls the work a “seemingly fragile raft of a novel; this rarefied weave of signs, symbols, and metaphors; this odd tale of two boys from different backgrounds spinning out their adolescent lives in an arcane realm of Brooklyn homes, streets, playgrounds, libraries, houses of workshop, and academies of learning around the closing years of the Second World War.”

Its author enjoyed a prolific career of writing, exploring ideas, and asking questions, always cross-referencing texts and ways of reading. And it all started with a story conceived in a small, cold Jerusalem apartment and written in those gray-covered, spiral-bound notebooks more than five decades ago. Rena Potok August 2016

Acknowledgments and thanks to David McKnight and Tom Hensle at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts, the University of Pennsylvania Libraries, and to Megan Hogan at Simon & Schuster.

When a trout rising to a fly gets hooked on a line and finds himself unable to swim about freely, he begins with a fight which results in struggles and splashes and sometimes an escape. Often, of course, the situation is too tough for him. In the same way the human being struggles with his environment and with the hooks that catch him. Sometimes he masters his difficulties; sometimes they are too much for him. His struggles are all that the world sees and it naturally misunderstands them. It is hard for a free fish to understand what is happening to a hooked one. —KARL A. MENNINGER

BOOK ONE I was a son to my father . . . And he taught me and said to me, “Let your heart hold fast my words. . . .” —Proverbs

“My father doesn’t write,” Danny said. “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.”

“I’ll be happy to be out of this hospital,” I said. “I walked around a little today and saw the people on the street outside.” My father looked at me and didn’t say anything. “I wish I was outside now,” I said. “I envy them being able to walk around like that. They don’t know how lucky they are.” “No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate,” my father said quietly. “That is the way the world is.” “It’ll be good to be home again. At least I won’t have to spend a Shabbat here.” “We’ll have a nice Shabbat together,” my father said.

“A quiet Shabbat where we can talk and not be disturbed. We will sit and drink tea and talk.”

“Crazy world. Cockeyed.” I wondered how he was feeling and if the curtain was still around his bed. “What kind of mathematics are you interested in?” Danny asked. “I’m really interested in logic. Mathematical logic.” He looked puzzled. “Some people call it symbolic logic,” I said. “I never even heard of it,” he confessed. “It’s really very new. A lot of it began with Russell and Whitehead and a book they wrote called Principia Mathematica.” “Bertrand Russell?” “That’s right.” “I didn’t know he was a mathematician.” “Oh, sure. He’s a great mathematician. And a logician, too.” “I’m very bad at mathematics. What’s it all about? Mathematical logic, I mean.” “Well, they try to deduce all of mathematics from simple logical principles and show that mathematics is really based on logic. It’s pretty complicated stuff. But I enjoy it.” “You have a course in that in your high school?” “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.” He laughed again.

It was a warm night, and the window between the stove and the sink was open. A breeze blew into the kitchen, stirring the ruffled curtains and carrying with it the odors of grass and flowers and orange blossoms. We sat at the table dressed in our Shabbat clothes, my father sipping his second glass of tea, both of us a little tired and sleepy from the heavy meal. There was color now in my father’s face, and his cough had disappeared. I watched him sip his tea and listened to the soft rustling of the curtains as they moved in the breeze. Manya had done the dishes quickly after we had chanted the Grace After Meals, and now we sat alone, embraced by the warm June night, the memories of the past week, and the gentle silences of the Shabbat.

“Psychology. Master of the Universe, psychology. And Darwin.” They came out as a soft, whispered moan. He took the hand away from his face and let it drop to the Talmud. “What can I do?” he asked himself softly. “I can no longer speak to my own son. The Master of the Universe gave me a brilliant son, a phenomenon. And I cannot speak to him.” He looked at me and seemed suddenly aware again of my presence. “The pain of raising children,” he said quietly. “So many troubles. So many troubles. Reuven, you and your father will be a good influence on my son, yes?” I nodded slowly, afraid now to speak. “You will not make a goy out of my son?” I shook my head, feeling numb at what I was hearing. His voice was an ache, a plea. I saw him stare up at the ceiling. “Master of the Universe,” he almost chanted.

I listened to his voice and felt myself go cold. There was so much pain in it, so much bewildered pain.

“The Jewish world is changed,” he said, almost in a whisper. “A madman has destroyed our treasures. If we do not rebuild Jewry in America, we will die as a people.” Then he closed his eyes again and was silent. My father recovered slowly, and it was only at the end of May that he was able to return to his teaching.

Danny used the evenings to read the books on Jewish subjects I kept giving him—or, if his father was free, we would go up to the study and do battle over the Talmud. But Reb Saunders was rarely free. There seemed to be an endless number of people coming into the house and walking up the three flights of stairs to see him, and by the time we were ready for supper he was always visibly fatigued, and he would sit lost in thought, his eyes dark and brooding. And once, during a supper meal, I saw tears come slowly from his eyes and disappear into the tangle of his dark beard. He did not leave the table this time. He sat there, weeping in silence, and no one said anything. And then he dried his eyes with a handkerchief, took a deep, trembling breath, and went back to his food.

Had my father been well at that time, I would have talked to him about it, but he was in the hospital, recuperating slowly, and I didn’t want to upset him with an account of Danny’s reading. He was upset enough as it was with his own reading. Whenever Danny and I came to visit him, we found newspapers strewn all over his bed. He was reading everything he could find that told of the destruction of European Jewry. He talked of nothing else but European Jewry and the responsibility American Jews now carried. Occasionally he spoke of the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland, but mostly he was concerned about American Jewry and the need for teachers and rabbis. Once he asked Danny and me what we were reading these days, and Danny answered honestly that he was going through Freud. My father sat in his hospital bed, propped up on pillows, looked at him, and blinked. He had grown very thin—I hadn’t thought he could ever get any thinner than he had been before his heart attack, but it seemed to me he had lost at least ten pounds—and he seemed to become easily upset by little things. I was frightened for a moment, because I didn’t want him to get involved in an argument with Danny about Freud. But he only shook his head and sighed. He was very tired, he said; he would talk to Danny about Freud another time. Danny shouldn’t think that Freud was the final word in psychoanalysis; many great thinkers disagreed with him. He let it go at that, and went back to talking about the de...

There had been public meetings in England, protests, petitions, letters—the whole machinery of democratic expression had been set in motion to impress upon the British Government the need for action—and not a thing was done. Everyone was sympathetic, but no one was sympathetic enough. The British let some few Jews in, and then closed their doors.

The world closed its doors, and six million Jews were slaughtered.

It was bad for my father to get excited that way, but there was nothing I could do to stop him. He could talk of nothing else but the destruction of European Jewry.

I said quietly, not mentioning my father’s name, that a lot of people were now saying that it was time for Palestine to become a Jewish homeland and not only a place where pious Jews went to die.

“Who are these people? Who are these people?” he shouted in Yiddish, and the words went through me like knives. “Apikorsim! Goyim! Ben Gurion and his goyim will build Eretz Yisroel? They will build for us a Jewish land? They will bring Torah into this land? Goyishkeit they will bring into the land, not Torah! God will build the land, not Ben Gurion and his goyim! When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim!” I sat there stunned and terrified, engulfed by his rage.

“How was I supposed to know that Zionism is a contaminated idea?” I said. “My God, I feel as if I’ve just been through the seven gates of Hell.” “Herzl didn’t wear a caftan and side curls,” Danny said. “Neither does Ben Gurion.” “You can’t be serious.” “I’m not talking about myself. I’m talking about my father. Just don’t talk about a Jewish state anymore. My father takes God and Torah very seriously, Reuven. He would die for them both quite gladly. A secular Jewish state in my father’s eyes is a sacrilege, a violation of the Torah. You touched a raw nerve. Please don’t do it again.”

“The way he cries all the time like that. Is he—is something wrong?” Danny’s hand went slowly to an earlock, and I watched him tug at it nervously. “Six million Jews have died,” he said. “He’s—I think he’s thinking of them. He’s suffering for them.” I looked at him. “I thought he might be sick. I thought your sister said—” “He’s not sick,” Danny broke in. He lowered his hand. “I—I really don’t want to talk about it.”

BOOK THREE A word is worth one coin; silence is worth two. —The Talmud

“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.”

“Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die?” I stared at him. “No,” I heard myself say. “He said to Moses, ‘You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest.’ ”

“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?” He paused again, his eyes misty now, then went on. “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. Do you understand what I am saying? 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 rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Do you understand what I am saying?”

My father looked at me, then sighed quietly. “I was a little too blunt,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt you.”

“It is strange what is happening,” my father said. “And it is exciting. Jack is on the Building Committee of his synagogue. Yes, he joined a synagogue. Not for himself, he told me. For his grandchildren. He is helping them put up a new building so his grandchildren can go to a modern synagogue and have a good Jewish education. It is beginning to happen everywhere in America. A religious renaissance, some call it.”

“Why not? You should envy him, Reuven. American Jews have begun to return to the synagogue.” “God help us if synagogues fill up with Jack Roses.” “They will fill up with Jack Roses, and it will be the task of rabbis to educate them. It will be your task if you become a rabbi.” I looked at him. “If you become a rabbi,” my father said, smiling at me warmly. “When I become a rabbi, you mean.” My father nodded, still smiling. “You would have been a fine university professor,” he said. “I would have liked you to become a university professor. But I think you have already decided. Am I right?” “Yes,” I said. “Even with a synagogue full of Jack Roses?” “Even with a synagogue full of Jack Roses,” I said. “God help me.” “America needs rabbis,” my father said.

He said he admired my knowledge of Freud but that in science no one was God, not even Einstein. He said even in religion people differed about what God was, so why shouldn’t scientists take issue with other scientists? I couldn’t argue with that.

“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. Danny cannot think one minute beyond the moment he will have to tell his father he does not wish to take his place. Do you understand me?” “Yes.”

“I have not talked to Danny in so long,” he said quietly. He was silent for a moment. Then he smiled faintly. “It is not so easy to be a friend, is it, Reuven?” “No,” I said.