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“You know,” he brooded, “I read a psychology book last week in which the author said that the most mysterious thing in the universe to man is man himself. We’re blind about the most important thing in our lives, our own selves.
“That’s a pretty sad thing to think about. To be doing things without really knowing why you’re doing them.”
“Graetz was biased, and his sources were not accurate. If I remember correctly, he calls the Hasidim vulgar drunkards, and he calls the tzaddikim priests of Baal. There is enough to dislike about Hasidism without exaggerating its faults.”
Danny left. The silence that now replaced our loud voices was almost uncomfortable. Reb Saunders sat quietly, stroking his beard with his right hand. I heard Danny’s capped shoes in the apartment hallway outside the study.
“You have a good head,” he said softly. The Yiddish phrase he used was, literally translated, “an iron head.” He nodded, seemed to listen for a moment to the silence in the study, then folded his arms across his chest. He sighed loudly, his eyes suddenly sad. “Now we will see about your soul,” he said softly. “Reuven, my son will return soon. We have little time to talk. I want you to listen to me. I know that my Daniel spends hours almost every day in the public library. No, do not say anything. Just listen. I
“My son is my most precious possession. I have nothing in the world compared to my son. I must know what he is reading. And I cannot ask him.” He stopped and looked down at an open Talmud on his desk. “How did he come to meet your father in the library?” he asked, looking down at the Talmud.
The Master of the Universe gave me a brilliant son, a phenomenon. And I cannot speak to him.”
“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?”
“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. “You gave me a brilliant son, and I have thanked...
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“It’s what I told you in the hospital. My father believes in silence. When I was ten or eleven years old, I complained to him about something, and he told me to close my mouth and look into my soul. He told me to stop running to him every time I had a problem. I should look into my own soul for the answer, he said. We just don’t talk, Reuven.”
“Reuven, he has already talked to Danny about it. He has talked to Danny through you.” I stared at him. He sighed softly. “It is never pleasant to be a buffer, Reuven,” he told me quietly. And he would say nothing more about the strange silence between Reb Saunders and his son.
It was a kind of wild, soaring experience to be able to hold a pen again and look into a book or at a piece of paper with writing on it.
My father and I were studying Sanhedrin—slowly, patiently, intensively, not leaving a passage until my father was satisfied that, at least for the present, we understood it fully.
“It is the end of Hitler, may his name and memory be erased,” Reb Saunders said to me that Shabbat afternoon. “Master of the Universe, it has taken so long, but now the end is here.” And he trembled as he said it and was almost in tears.
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
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“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.
It was while my father read to me an account of what had happened at Teresienstadt, where the Germans had imprisoned and incinerated European Jews of culture and learning, that I saw him break down and weep like a child. I didn’t know what to say. I saw him lie back on his pillows and cover his face with his hands.
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.
“How the world drinks our blood,” Reb Saunders said. “How the world makes us suffer. It is the will of God. We must accept the will of God.” He was silent for a long moment. Then he raised his eyes and said softly, “Master of the Universe, how do you permit such a thing to happen?”
The question hung in the air like a sigh of pain.
“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.
“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.”
And Danny’s father was forever silent, withdrawn, his dark eyes turned inward, brooding, as if witnessing a sea of suffering he alone could see. He walked bent forward, as though there were some kind of enormous burden on his shoulders. Dark circles had formed around his eyes, and sometimes at the kitchen table I would see him begin to cry suddenly, and he would get up and walk out of the room, then return a few minutes later and resume eating. No one in the family talked about these sudden moments of weeping. And I didn’t, either, though they frightened and bewildered me.
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.
Freud’s picture of man’s nature was anything but complimentary, it was anything but religious. It tore man from God, as Danny put it, and married him off to Satan.
But Danny was patient, as patient as my father, and slowly I began to understand the system of psychological thought Freud had constructed. And I, too, became upset. Freud contradicted everything I had ever learned. What I found particularly upsetting was the fact that Danny didn’t seem to have rejected what Freud taught. I began to wonder how it was possible for the ideas of the Talmud and the thinking of Freud to live side by side within one person. It seemed to me that one or the other would have to give way. When I told this to Danny, he shrugged, said nothing, and went back to his
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Everyone was sympathetic, but no one was sympathetic enough. The British let some few Jews in, and then closed their doors. America hadn’t cared enough, either. No one had cared enough. The world closed its doors, and six million Jews were slaughtered. What a world! What an insane world!
“When will you tell him? Because I’m going to be out of town that day.” “No,” he said quietly. “I’m going to need you around that day.”
Intellectually, he’s trapped. He was born trapped. I don’t ever want to be trapped the way he’s trapped. I want to be able to breathe, to think what I want to think, to say the things I want to say. I’m trapped now, too. Do you know what it’s like to be trapped?” I shook my head slowly.
“It’s the most hellish, choking, constricting feeling in the world. I scream with every bone in my body to get out of it. My mind cries to get out of it. But I can’t. Not now. One day I will, though. I’ll want you around on that day, friend. I’ll need you around on that day.”
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.
“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.’ ” I stared at him and didn’t say anything. “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
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The gray mist seemed to part. I took a deep breath. I could feel cold sweat running down my back. “Are you angry at me, Reuven?” I shook my head. “I did not want to sound morbid. I only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist—what sense is there to it? A fly also lives.” I didn’t say anything. The mist was gone now. I found the palms of my hands were cold with sweat. “I am sorry,” my father said quietly. “I can see I upset you.”
“You frightened me,” I heard myself say. “I am sorry.” “Will you please go for that checkup?” “Yes,” my father said. “You really frightened me, talking...
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He replied by expressing dismay at my question. Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship, he told me. “Haven’t you learned that yet, Reuven?” Now I was tempted to tell my father that Jack Rose was probably using his money to salve a bad conscience. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, a little scornfully, “I don’t envy his rabbi.” My father shook his head soberly. “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
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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.”
Magic depends on tradition and belief. It does not welcome observation, nor does it profit by experiment. On the other hand, science is based on experience; it is open to correction by observation and experiment.
Poor Danny, I thought. Professor Appleman, with his experimental psychology, is torturing your mind. And your father, with his bizarre silence—which I still couldn’t understand, no matter how often I thought about it—is torturing your soul.
He admitted that Freud was a genius and a cautious scientist, but he said that Freud evolved a theory of behavior based only on the study of abnormal cases. He said that experimental psychology was interested in applying the methodology of the natural sciences to discover how all human beings behaved. It doesn’t generalize about personality behavior only on the basis of a certain segment of people. That makes a lot of sense.”
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. He said experimental psychology would be a healthy balance to my knowledge of Freud. Maybe. I still don’t think it has anything to do with the human mind. It’s more physiology than anything else, I think. Anyway, Appleman told me that if I had any problem with math he was willing to help me as much as he could. But his time is limited, he said, so he
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Hitler had only succeeded in destroying the Jewish body, he shouted in Yiddish, but the Revisionists were trying to destroy the Jewish soul.
“Reuven,” my father said quietly, “the fanaticism of men like Reb Saunders kept us alive for two thousand years of exile. If the Jews of Palestine have an ounce of that same fanaticism and use it wisely, we will soon have a Jewish state.”
I couldn’t say anything else. I was afraid my anger would bring me to say the wrong words.
He would listen somberly, sigh, and repeat that he had no intention of quarreling with Reb Saunders, he respected his position in spite of its fanaticism.
I hated the silence between us and thought it unimaginable that Danny and his father never really talked. Silence was ugly, it was black, it leered, it was cancerous, it was death. I hated it, and I hated Reb Saunders for forcing it upon me and his son.
And my father only added to it, for whenever I began to talk to him of my feelings toward Reb Saunders he invariably countered by defending him and by asserting that the faith of Jews like Reb Saunders had kept us alive through two thousand years of violent persecution. He disagreed with Reb Saunders, yes, but he would countenance no slander against his name or his position. Ideas should be fought with ideas, my father said, not with blind passion. If Reb Saunders was fighting him with passion, that did not mean that my father had to fight Reb Saunders with passion. And Reb Saunders was
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To hell with you, Danny Saunders, I thought. You could at least show you know I’m alive. To hell with you and your fanatic father. I became so completely absorbed in my anger that I stopped listening to the instructions. I
