Listening to the Other

The Chosen a novel by Chaim Potok.  Ballantine Books.  299 pp. $7.99.

The Promise a novel by Chaim Potok.  Anchor Books.  368 pp. $7.48.

I sometimes think there is some kind of spirit around—because of these two books, let’s call it a dybbuk—who directs me to this or that book at the appropriate moment of my life.  For years I’ve heard the name Chaim Potok (actually I just saw the name.  I didn’t hear it because I had no idea how to pronounce it.  I now know.  You can look it up on your smart phone) with no wish whatsoever to read his books.  I’d read Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud; I had the Jewish-American thing covered, though none of these men was especially religious.  But in recent years I read Jesus the Jew, which sparked a new interested in Judaism.  More recently I read Karen Armstrong’s marvelous book about scripture, in which she gave some idea about the place of scripture in Judaism (spoiler alert: it’s major).  The name Chaim Potok came to mind and I discovered that, before he became a renowned novelist, he was a rabbi.  I decided to check out his work.  Before I was halfway through The Chosen I knew I would read the sequel, if only to know what happened to these people.  I have now read both books.

Some odd and characteristic things about the world of Chaim Potok: There is a slight air of sentimentality.[1]  It’s slight, and it’s a fine line, but it’s there.  Reuven Malter, the protagonist of both novels, lives with his father into his twenties (the time frame of the second book), and these two males are very close.  They always spend Shabbat together, for instance (and honestly, though there are seven days in a week, Shabbat keeps turning up.  It’s as if it’s every other day), and often end even ordinary days together, talking, while the older man drinks tea.  I have not in my lifetime known a father and son as close as that.

Reuven becomes best friends with a guy named Danny, but they never open up to each other, or get crazy, or act adolescent; it’s an odd kind of friendship.  Both of them are serious and studious.  When Reuven, for instance, has free time, he either studies the Torah (!), or does problems in logic (his second strongest interest is in philosophy); one night he really gets wild and reads a novel in Hebrew.  Both guys, in the second novel, date the same young woman, when they’re in their twenties, and Danny eventually marries her, but there is never a hint of passion; dates end with a kiss on the cheek.  There’s one public kiss on the lips and the male recipient nearly dissolves if a fit of blushing.  Danny, in his spare time in The Chosen, actually learns German so he can read Freud, and he proceeds to do just that, because his second interest (after the Torah) is psychology.  Nobody gets drunk, or sneaks off and buys a porn magazine.  Nobody masturbates with a piece of liver, like Alexander Portnoy.

The drama of The Chosen is essentially ideological.  Danny is the son of a Hasidic Reb, who is worshiped by his followers; Reuven is the son of an orthodox Rabbi and Biblical scholar who teaches at a yeshiva.  The boys encounter each other first in a softball game, which to the Hasidic team is more or less a holy war; Danny, the best athlete on his team, nearly takes Reuben’s head off with a line drive, and almost causes him to lose an eye.  It is because of that dramatic moment that they eventually become friends.[2]

The ideological divide is profound.  To the Hasidic Jews, the orthodox are more or less heretics, not even real Jews.  The Hasids want to win the ball game because they’re playing infidels.  When Reuven accompanies Danny to his synagogue, where his father is the rabbi, he might as well be radioactive to most of the people; if he’s not Hasidic he’s the scum of the earth.

Danny is being groomed as the successor to his father and is a scholar of mammoth abilities; he has large parts of the Torah, and the commentaries, literally memorized, and can dispute on theology with the best of them, including his father.  And yet disputing the Torah is the only father-son time that Danny gets; he otherwise has no contact with his father, not even verbal; his father greets his presence with silence.  Reuven, on the other hand, talks over everything with his father, who is warm and loving, probably the most admirable character in both books.  He not only helps his own son, but also helps Danny discover books in the library to explore his other interests; he more or less becomes the father to both boys.  Danny’s father knows that, and allows it to continue.

All of that is eventually explained in the end, in a way that is emotionally, if not quite intellectually satisfying (I still think the silence was a form of child abuse).  In his own way the Reb is trying as hard to be a good father as the Rabbi is.  And the explosion about Danny becoming a psychologist that I kept expecting does not happen.  The whole transition is much easier than I thought it would be.  This is a dark strange serious world, a very odd sub-culture, though at the heart of it, at least according to Chaim Potok, is love.

The situation is The Promise is more complicated.  Reuven and Danny have both become young men, Reuven still training to become a rabbi, Danny to become a practicing therapist.  Danny is dating a woman named Rachel Gordon.  Rachel’s adolescent cousin Michael is living with her and her parents because Michael’s father is a famous author and is off with his wife publicizing a book or giving lectures, something like that.  It immediately becomes apparent that Michael is a psychologically troubled young man who can’t deal with the exigencies of ordinary life.  Reuven tries to help him out—though again, I wasn’t sure why; he has no real ties to the family—and eventually enlists his friend Danny.  It’s obvious that Michael needs the help of a professional.

Danny is still, strictly speaking, a Hasid, though he has shaved his beard and forelocks and lives by himself, apart from the community.  Reuven is still Orthodox, though it becomes apparent at his yeshiva that there are degrees of orthodoxy.  He had studied the Torah previously with a gentle pious man named Rav Gershenson, who had taught for years but had never published a word.  But toward the end of his schooling Reuven begins studying with a man named Rav Kalman.  And he is a different kettle of (gefilte) fish.

For one thing, he survived the holocaust in Europe, and saw horrible things happen to members of his family.  He apparently actively waged war against the Germans (there are many rumors about all that, but no real facts).  As a scholar you might call him a fundamentalist; he more or less thinks the Torah was dictated by God with a Dictaphone, and it contains no errors.  Reuven’s father—the true mensch of both novels—is a renowned scholar who believes that there can be errors in the text, transcription errors for instance, which might result in an incorrect reading.  The true meaning becomes simple when you get the correct text.  Reuven agrees with his father, though he isn’t sure how much he wants to rock the boat with his professor.  And Rav Kalman as a professor is brutal, sarcastic, difficult, tyrannical, a constant cigarette smoker who actually seems deeply unhappy.  But he does believe, rightly or wrongly, that in his struggle to preserve the sanctity of scripture, he is literally waging a battle of good versus evil.  He must preserve the spark of truth at all costs.  And if he doesn’t pass on Reuven, Reuven doesn’t receive full qualification as a rabbi.

Complicating matters is that Michael’s father is a wildly successful religious writer who stands at the opposite end of the spectrum from Rav Kalman.  For him—and especially for his beautiful and intelligent wife, who helps him with his manuscripts—the literal truth of scripture is utter nonsense; it’s superstition and fairy tales that no modern person could believe.  Yet he sees a deep truth in scripture and in a religious life that is worth preserving, if you can see beneath all the hocus pocus.  The orthodox congregation considers this man, Abraham Gordon, to be excommunicated from Judaism, someone whom a believer should never associate with.  Reuven, though he doesn’t agree with a lot of what Abraham Gordon says, does appreciate the spirit of his work (he likes his questions but not his answers), and admires the man.  He also has to deal with Gordon because he becomes involved in the effort to rescue Michael from mental illness.  He’s in close contact with the whole Gordon family.

If all this sounds dry and musty, it is anything but that in the telling.  For me it was more exciting than most thrillers.  Reuven is facing any number of moral choices: if he is loyal to his father’s way of seeing things, basically to his own way, he will lose his opportunity to be sanctioned as a rabbi.  If he continues to associate with the excommunicated Gordon family—to do the compassionate thing, in trying to address Michael’s mental illness—that may also disqualify him.  To complicate matters further, Reuven’s love interest Rachel, whom I guess I would describe as a secular Jew, actually falls in love with Danny, Reuven’s best friend, who is still—though he works as a psychologist—a Hasid.  This is like a worldly English professor falling for a Pentecostals.  Imagine the wedding.

Somehow Potok holds this whole situation together and brings it to an emotionally satisfying conclusion.  Even Michael’s mental illness—which turns out to be quite severe, as is the treatment that Reuven uses for it—is at least in the process of being treated by the end, if he hasn’t been cured.  And if all this sounds very Williamsburg Brooklyn and scholarly and weird and unrelated to the world we live in today, I have to say it doesn’t seem much different emotionally from the issues of The Two Popes, or for that matter the political arguments that we continue to face as we face a Presidential election.  Everybody is screaming at one another, believing that only they are right and that any conclusion other than their own will be a catastrophe for the world.  In the meantime, nobody really talks to each other.  They shout things that will appeal to those who agree with them, not trying to find common ground with their opponents at all.

Chaim Potok finds common ground.  Not everybody’s happy (picture Abraham Gordon’s beautiful, sophisticated wife at a Hasidic wedding, where among other things, the genders are separated, so that if the groom goes off to dance, he’s dancing with another guy.  Danny asks Reuven to dance), but they are together.  As we all are in this world where all of these things seem terribly important.  But nobody’s talking to the other side at all.

[1] Sentiment, according to my teacher Reynolds Price, is a synonym for feeling; sentiment is an appropriate thing in a novel.  Sentimentality, however, is sentiment carried too far, as when somebody’s pet canary dies and they go into mourning for a year.  Something like that.

[2] Please excuse me, Chaim Potok, but I’m not sure how much you knew about the game of baseball, or softball; this is a quibble, but it involves the opening scene in the book, and the reader either finds you believable or he doesn’t.  Danny is a great scholar and a big guy, but he doesn’t spend much time on sports, yet in this first scene he has an uncanny knack of being able to hit the ball directly back at the pitcher’s head.  He does it three times.  Ty Cobb could maybe have done that, or Wee Willie Keeler, but I don’t believe a Hasidic kid from Brooklyn could have.  I’m just saying.