More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
And now it was also I and not only Reb Saunders who was able to listen to Danny’s voice only through a Talmudic disputation.
Then he looked away, and a warm smile played on his lips. My anger at him melted away at the sight of that smile, and the agony of not being able to communicate with him returned. But it was a subdued agony now, a sore I was somehow able to control and keep within limits. It was no longer affecting my schoolwork. By
He seemed so huge behind the microphones, his voice giving his body the stature of a giant.
“Again Jewish blood is being spilled,” they whispered to one another. “Hitler wasn’t enough. Now more Jewish blood, more slaughter. What does the world want from us? Six million isn’t enough? More Jews have to die?” Their pain over this new outbreak of violence against the Jews of Palestine outweighed their hatred of Zionism. They did not become Zionists; they merely became silent. I was glad during those weeks that I had restrained my anger.
“A teacher can also sometimes not know,” he said softly.
We had begun to communicate with our eyes, with nods of our heads, with gestures of our hands.
Reb Saunders’s anti-Zionist league died that day as far as the students in Hirsch College were concerned. It remained alive outside the school, but I never again saw an anti-Zionist leaflet inside the school building.
“Welcome back to the land of the living,” I said, staring up at him and feeling my heart turn over. It had been over two years now that we hadn’t talked to each other.
“You and your crazy way of hitting a baseball,” I said. “You and your father with his crazy silences and explosions.”
His face was sad. “A father can bring up a child any way he wishes,” he said softly. “What a price to pay for a soul.” When I asked him what he meant, he wouldn’t say anything more about it. But his eyes were dark.
“I always thought that logic and theology were like David and Saul,” Danny said. “They are. But I might help them get better acquainted.” He shook his head. “I can’t get over your becoming a rabbi.” “I can’t get over your becoming a psychologist.” And we looked at each other in quiet wonder.
“The tzaddik sits in absolute silence, saying nothing, and all his followers listen attentively,” and the laughter left his lips as suddenly as if he had been slapped, and his face froze.
He smiled faintly. “There’s more truth to that than you realize,” he murmured. “You can listen to silence, Reuven. I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it.”
“What do you mean, it talks to you?” “You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes—sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to.”
Yet at the same time his dark eyes burned with a kind of inner fire that told of the tenacity with which he clung to life and of his growing awareness of the truth that for the rest of his days his every breath would depend upon the pills he put into his mouth at regular intervals. The eyes told you that he had every intention of holding on to his life, no matter what the pain. As
Then he smiled faintly. “It is not so easy to be a friend, is it, Reuven?”
“Hasidim!” I heard him mutter, almost contemptuously. “Why must they feel the burden of the world is only on their shoulders?”
“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?”
His brow was crisscrossed with wrinkles, his dark eyes brooded and burned with some kind of invisible suffering, and the fingers of his right hand played aimlessly with a long, gray earlock.
Then he sighed, a deep, trembling sigh that filled the silence of the room like a wind.
“Nu,” he said, speaking softly, so softly I could barely hear him, “in June my Daniel and his good friend begin to go different ways. They are men, not children, and men go different ways. You will go one way, Reuven. And my son, my Daniel, he will—he will go another way.”
“A 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. It was a story in a Yiddish book about a poor Jew and his struggles to get to Eretz Yisroel before he died. Ah, how that man suffered! And my Daniel enjoyed the story, he enjoyed the last terrible page, because when he finished it he realized for the first time what a memory he had. He looked at me proudly and told me back the story from memory, and I cried inside my heart. I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, ‘What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a
...more
But it was a cold mind, Reuven, almost cruel, untouched by his soul. It was proud, haughty, impatient with less brilliant minds, grasping in its search for knowledge the way a conqueror grasps for power. It could not understand pain, it was indifferent to and impatient with suffering. It was even impatient with the illness of its own body. I never saw my brother again after he left for the yeshiva. He came under the influence of a Maskil in Odessa and went away to France where he became a great mathematician and taught in a university. He died in a gas chamber in Auschwitz. I learned of it
...more
“Reuven, listen to what I am going to tell you now and remember it. You are a man, but it will be years before you understand my words. Perhaps you will never understand them. But hear me out, and have patience.
He taught me to look into myself, to find my own strength, to walk around inside myself in company with my soul. When his people would ask him why he was so silent with his son, he would say to them that he did not like to talk, words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence.
One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own 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.
And when I was old enough to understand, he told me that of all people a tzaddik especially must know of pain. A tzaddik must know how to suffer for his people, he said. He must take their pain from them and carry it on his own shoulders. He must carry it always. He must grow old before his years. He must cry, in his heart he must always cry. Even when he dances and sings, he must cry for the sufferings of his people.
he learned to find answers for himself. He suffered and learned to listen to the suffering of others. In the silence between us, he began to hear the world crying.”
Let my Daniel become a psychologist. I know he wishes to become a psychologist. I do not see his books? I did not see the letters from the universities? I do not see his eyes? I do not hear his soul crying? Of course I know. For a long time I have known. 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.”
“Daniel,” he said brokenly. “Forgive me . . . for everything . . . I have done. A—a wiser father . . . may have done differently. I am not . . . wise.”
“It is, perhaps, the only way to raise a tzaddik.” “I’m glad I wasn’t raised that way.” “Reuven,” my father said softly, “I did not have to raise you that way. I am not a tzaddik.”
