The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

The test of intellectual excellence, however, had been reduced by tradition and unvoiced unanimity to a single area of study: Talmud. Virtuosity in Talmud was the achievement most sought after by every student of a yeshiva, for it was the automatic guarantee of a reputation for brilliance.

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.

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.

Somehow the yeshiva team had translated this afternoon’s baseball game into a conflict between what they regarded as their righteousness and our sinfulness. I found myself growing more and more angry, and I felt the anger begin to focus itself upon Danny Saunders, and suddenly it was not at all difficult for me to hate him.

“Things are always what they seem to be, Reuven? Since when?”

Anything that brought the world together he called a blessing.

lay still and thought about my eyes. I had always taken them for granted, the way I took for granted all the rest of my body and also my mind. My father had told me many times that health was a gift, but I never really paid much attention to the fact that I was rarely sick or almost never had to go to a doctor.

“What I tried to tell you, Reuven, is that when a person comes to talk to you, you should be patient and listen. Especially if he has hurt you in any way.

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.”

“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. “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.”

He’s got a passage in the book about ants on a burning log. The hero, this American, is watching the ants, and instead of taking the log out of the fire and saving the ants, he throws water into the fire. The water turns into steam and that roasts some of the ants, and the others just burn to death on the log or fall off into the fire. It’s a great passage. It shows how cruel people can be.”

“It’s funny,” he said. “It’s really funny. I have to be a rabbi and don’t want to be one. You don’t have to be a rabbi and do want to be one. It’s a crazy world.”

It was my father who finally broke the silence. He did it gently and with quiet warmth. He said, “I see you play ball as well as you read books, Danny. I hope you are not as violent with a book as you are with a baseball.”

The world jumped into focus and everything looked suddenly bright and fresh and clean, as it does on an early morning with the sun on the trees, and there was newness everywhere, a feeling that I had been away a long time in a dark place and was now returning home to sunlight.

I had lived in it all my life, but I never really saw it until I went through it that Friday afternoon.

Somehow everything had changed. I had spent five days in a hospital and the world around me seemed sharpened now and pulsing with life. I lay back and put the palms of my hands under my head. I thought of the baseball game, and I asked myself, Was it only last Sunday that it happened, only five days ago? I felt I had crossed into another world, that little pieces of my old self had been left behind on the black asphalt floor of the school yard alongside the shattered lens of my glasses.

“And then, Reuven, a great tragedy occurred. It is a tragedy that happens often to anyone who acts as a buffer. The Jews were helping the nobility, but in doing so, in collecting taxes from the serfs and peasants, for example, they were building up against themselves the hatred of these oppressed classes. And the hatred finally exploded into violence.

But in the year 1648, a man named Bogdan Chmielnicki became the leader of the Cossacks, and he led an uprising against Poland. The Jews became the victims of the Polish peasants, who hated them, and of the Cossacks, who also hated them. The revolution lasted ten years, and in that time something like seven hundred Jewish communities were destroyed and about one hundred thousand Jews were slain. When the horror was over, the great Jewish community of Poland had been almost completely destroyed.”

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

The Chmielnicki uprising was a physical disaster; the false Messiah was a spiritual disaster.

“Now, Reuven, if everywhere around you there are forces that wish to harm you, what is it that you can do to help yourself? Of course, you try to destroy those forces. But the masses of Jews did not believe they had the power to do this.

He was kind and saintly and godly, and he seemed to want to help people not for the money they paid him but for the love he had for them.

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.

There are even Hasidic groups that believe their leaders should take upon themselves the sufferings of the Jewish people. You are surprised? But it is true. They believe that their sufferings would be unendurable if their leaders did not somehow absorb these sufferings into themselves. A strange belief, but a very important one, as far as they are concerned.

“Tea is a blessing,” he said, smiling. “Especially to a schoolteacher who must always give long answers to short questions.”

He had a great mind, but it never left him in peace.

“Now, Reuven, listen very carefully to what I am going to tell you. Reb Saunders’s son is a terribly torn and lonely boy. There is literally no one in the world he can talk to. He needs a friend. The accident with the baseball has bound him to you, and he has already sensed in you someone he can talk to without fear. I am very proud of you for that. He would never have told you about his library visits if he believed for a moment you would not keep his words a secret trust. And I want you to let him be your friend and to let yourself be his friend.

“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.”

“I don’t understand it,” I said. “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.”

Someone was playing a piano nearby, and the music drifted slowly in and out of my mind like the ebb and flow of ocean surf. I almost recognized the melody, but I could not be sure; it slipped like a cool and silken wind from my grasp. I heard a door open and close and there were footsteps against wood, and then silence, and I knew someone had come onto the porch, but I would not open my eyes. I did not want to lose that twilight sleep, with its odors and sounds and whispered flow of music. Someone was on the porch, looking at me.

“You’ve been living five blocks away from me all these years, and I never knew who you were,” I said.

The synagogue had been burned to the ground. Its Ark was a gutted mass of charred wood, its four Torah scrolls were seared black, its holy books were piles of gray ash blown about by the wind. Of the one hundred eighteen Jewish families in the community only forty-three survived.

“Something like that. He’s a kind of messenger of God, a bridge between his followers and God.” “I don’t understand it. It almost sounds like Catholicism.” “That’s the way it is,” Danny said, “whether you understand it or not.” “I’m not offending you or anything. I just want to be honest.” “I want you to be honest,” Danny said. We walked on in silence.

The silence that followed had a strange quality to it: expectation, eagerness, love, awe.

Everyone waited, and no one moved, no one coughed, no one even took a deep breath. The silence became unreal and seemed suddenly filled with a noise of its own, the noise of a too-long silence. Even the child was staring now at his father, his eyes like black stones against the naked whiteness of his veined face.

“All men come into the world in the same way. We are born in pain, for it is written, ‘In pain shall ye bring forth children.’ We are born naked and without strength. Like dust are we born. Like dust can the child be blown about, like dust is his life, like dust is his strength. And like dust do many remain all their lives, until they are put away in dust, in a place of worms and maggots. Will the Master of the Universe obey the will of a man whose life is dust?

We must say, the will of men who do not remain dust. But how can we raise ourselves above dust? Listen, listen to me, for this is a mighty thing the rabbis teach us.”

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 World into the world is also to raise oneself up from the dust.

This was almost like the pilpul my father had told me about, except that it wasn’t really pilpul, they weren’t twisting the texts out of shape, they seemed more interested in b’kiut, in straightforward knowledge and simple explanations of the Talmudic passages and commentaries they were discussing. It went on like that for a long time. Then Reb Saunders sat back and was silent.

“You did not hear, you did not hear. You heard the first mistake, and you stopped listening. Of course you did not hear. How could you hear when you were not listening?”

He glanced at me, his face a mixture of surprise and relief, and I realized with astonishment that I, too, had just passed some kind of test.

“You think a friend is an easy thing to be? If you are truly his friend, you will discover otherwise.

You think he’s a tyrant.” I shook my head. “I don’t know what to think. One minute he’s a tyrant, the next minute he’s kind and gentle. I don’t know what to think.”

When Kant became a professor, he had to follow an old tradition and argue in public on a philosophical subject. One day when you are a professor in a university and read a paper before your colleagues, you will also have to answer questions. It is part of Danny’s training.” “But in public like that, abba!” “Yes, Reuven. In public like that. How else would Reb Saunders’s people know that Danny has a head for Talmud?” “It just seemed so cruel to me.” My father nodded. “It is a little cruel, Reuven. But that is the way the world is. If a person has a contribution to make, he must make it in public. If learning is not made public, it is a waste. But the business about the mistakes I never heard before. That is something new. That is Reb Saunders’s innovation. It is clever, but I am not sure I like it very much. No, I do not think I like it at all.”

“Reb Saunders is a very complicated man, abba. I can’t make him out. One minute he’s hard and angry, the next minute he’s soft and gentle. I don’t understand him.” “Reb Saunders is a great man, Reuven. Great men are always difficult to understand. He carries the burden of many people on his shoulders.

do not care for his Hasidism very much, but it is not a simple task to be a leader of people. Reb Saunders is not a fraud. He would be a great man even if he had not inherited his post from his father. It is a pity he occupies his mind only with Talmud.

Probably because I had become so sensitive about eyes the past week, I noticed for the first time that Homer’s eyes seemed glazed, almost without pupils, as if the artist had been trying to show that he had been blind. I had never noticed that before, and it frightened me a little to see it now.

“My father isn’t like that at all.” His voice was sad, and it trembled a little. “He really worries about his people. He worries about them so much he doesn’t even have time to talk to me.”