The Chosen

  “No you wouldn’t,” he said softly. “You’d learn to live with it.”

  “Why does he do it?”

  The hand pulling at the earlock dropped down to the table. He shook his head slowly. “I don’t know. We still don’t talk.”

  “Except when you study Talmud or he explodes.”

  He nodded soberly.

  “I hate to tell you what I think of your father.”

  “He’s a great man,” Danny said evenly. “He must have a reason.”

  “I think it’s crazy and sadistic,” I said bitterly. “And I don’t like your father at all.”

  “You’re entitled to your opinion,” Danny said softly. “And I’m entitled to mine.”

  We were silent for a moment.

  “You’ve lost weight,” I told him.

  He nodded but remained silent. He sat there slumped over, looking small and uncomfortable, like a bird in pain.

  “How are your eyes?” I asked.

  He shrugged. “They bother me sometimes. The doctor says it’s nervous tension.”

  There was another silence.

  “It’s good to have you back,” I said. And I grinned.

  He smiled hesitantly, his blue eyes bright and shining.

  “You and your crazy way of hitting a baseball,” I said. “You and your father with his crazy silences and explosions.”

  He smiled again, deeply now, and straightened up in the chair. “Will you help me with this graph?” he asked.

  I told him it was about time he helped himself with graphs, and then showed him what to do.

  When I told my father about it that night, he nodded soberly. He had expected it, he said. The Jewish state was not an issue anymore but a fact. How long would Reb Saunders have continued his ban over a dead issue?

  “How is Danny feeling?” he wanted to know.

  I told him Danny didn’t look well and had lost a lot of weight.

  He was thoughtful for a moment. Then he said, “Reuven, the silence between Danny and Reb Saunders. It is continuing?”

  “Yes.”

  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.

  • • •

  So Danny and I resumed our old habits of meeting in front of my synagogue, of riding to school together, eating lunch together, and going home together. Rav Gershenson’s class became a particular joy, because the ease between Danny and myself now permitted us to engage in a constant flow of competitive discussion that virtually monopolized the hours of the shiur. We dominated the class to such an extent that one day, after a particularly heated Talmudic battle between Danny and me that had gone on uninterrupted for almost a quarter of an hour, Rav Gershenson stopped us and pointed out that this wasn’t a private lesson he was giving; there were twelve other students in the class—didn’t anyone else have something to say? But he said it with a warm smile, and Danny and I were delighted by his oblique compliment.

  A few days after we had resumed talking, Danny told me that he had resigned himself to experimental psychology and was even beginning to enjoy it. When he talked about psychology now, he invariably used the technical language of the experimentalist: variables, constants, manipulation, observation, recording of data, testing hypotheses, and the advantages of attempting to refute hypotheses as against confirming them. Mathematics no longer seemed to be much of a problem to him. Only rarely now did he need my help.

  We were sitting in the lunchroom one day when he told me of a conversation he had had with Professor Appleman. “He said if I ever wanted to make any kind of valuable contribution to psychology I would have to use scientific method. The Freudian approach doesn’t really provide a method of accepting or rejecting hypotheses, and that’s no way to acquire knowledge.”

  “Well, well.” I grinned. “Goodbye Freud.”

  He shook his head. “No. It’s not goodbye Freud. Freud was a genius. But he was too circumspect in his findings. I want to know a lot more than just the things Freud dealt with. Freud never really did anything with perception, for example. Or with learning. How people see, hear, touch, smell, taste, and learn is a fascinating subject. Freud never went into any of that. But he was a genius, all right, in what he did go into.”

  “You’re going to become an experimentalist?”

  “I don’t think so. I want to work with people, not with rats and mazes. I talked to Appleman about it. He suggested I go into clinical psychology.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Well, it’s the same as the difference between theoretical and applied physics, say. The experimental psychologist is more or less the theoretician; the clinical psychologist applies what the experimentalist learns. He gets to work with people. He examines them, tests them, diagnoses them, even treats them.”

  “What do you mean, treats them?”

  “He does therapy.”

  “You’re going to become an analyst?”

  “Maybe. But psychoanalysis is only one form of therapy. There are many other kinds.”

  “What kinds?”

  “Oh, many kinds,” he said vaguely. “A lot of it is still very experimental.”

  “You’re planning to experiment on people?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe. I really don’t know too much about it yet.”

  “Are you going on for a doctorate?”

  “Sure. You can’t move in this field without a doctorate.”

  “Where are you planning to go?”

  “I don’t know yet. Appleman suggested Columbia. That’s where he got his doctorate.”

  “Does your father know yet?”

  Danny gave me a tight, strained look. “No,” he said quietly.

  “When will you tell him?”

  “The day I receive my smicha.”

  “Smicha” is the Hebrew term for rabbinic ordination.

  “That’s next year,” I said.

  Danny nodded grimly. Then he looked at his watch. “We’d better move or we’ll be late for the shiur,” he said.

  We raced up the stairs to Rav Gershenson’s class and made it just a moment before he called on someone to read and explain.

  • • •

  During another one of our lunchroom conversations, Danny asked me what good symbolic logic was going to be for me when I entered the rabbinate. I told him I didn’t know, but I was doing a lot of reading in philosophy and theology, and some good might come of that.

  “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.

  • • •

  In June, Danny’s sister was married. I was invited to the wedding and was the only one there who wasn’t a Hasid. It was a traditionally Hasidic wedding, with the men and women sitting separately and with a lot of dancing and singing. I was shocked when I saw Reb Saunders. His black beard had begun to go gray, and he seemed to have aged a great deal since I had seen him last. I went over to congratulate him, and he shook my hand warmly, his eyes dark and piercing. He was surrounded by people, and we didn’t have a chance to talk. I didn’t care. I wasn’t particularly eager to talk to him. Levi had grown up a little, but he still looked white-skinned, and his eyes seemed large behind his shell-rimmed glasses. Danny’s sister had becomes beautiful girl. The boy she married was a Hasid, with a black beard, long earlocks, and dark eyes. He looked rather severe, and I quickly decided that I didn’t like him. When I congratulated him after the wedding and shook his hand, his fingers were limp and moist.

  When the school year ended and July came around, I went over to Danny’s house one morning. Except for the
wedding, I hadn’t seen Reb Saunders at all since Danny and I had begun talking again, because my father was teaching me Talmud on Shabbat afternoons. So I decided it would be the polite thing to do to go over one morning after the school year. Danny took me up to his father’s study. The third-floor hallway was crowded with dark-caftaned men, waiting around in silence to see his father. They nodded and murmured respectful greetings to Danny, and one of them, an incredibly old man with a white beard and a bent body, reached out and touched his arm as we passed. I found the gesture distasteful. I was beginning to find everything connected with Reb Saunders and Hasidism distasteful. We waited until the person who was with his father came out, then we went in.

  Reb Saunders sat in his straight-backed red leather chair surrounded by books and the musty odor of old bindings. His face seemed lined with pain, but his voice was soft when he greeted me. He was, he said quietly, very happy to see me. He hesitated, looked at me, then at Danny. His eyes were dark and brooding. Where was I keeping myself, he asked, and why wasn’t I coming over anymore on Shabbos afternoons? I told him my father and I were studying Talmud together on Shabbat. His eyes brooded, and he sighed. He nodded vaguely. He wished he could spend more time talking to me now, he said, but there were so many people who needed to see him. Couldn’t I come over some Shabbos afternoon? I told him I would try, and Danny and I went out.

  That was all he said. Not a word about Zionism. Not a word about the silence he had imposed upon Danny and me. Nothing. I found I disliked him more when I left than when I had entered. I did not see him again that July.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  OUR LAST YEAR of college began that September. Over lunch one day I told Danny a mild anti-Hasidic story I had heard, and he laughed loudly. Then, without thinking, I mentioned a remark one of the students had made a few days back: “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.

  I realized immediately what I had said, and felt myself go cold. I muttered a helpless apology.

  For a long moment, he said nothing. His eyes seemed glazed, turned inward. Then his face slowly relaxed. 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.”

  The words came out in a soft singsong. He sounded exactly like his father.

  “You don’t understand that, do you?” he asked.

  “No.”

  He nodded. “I didn’t think you would.”

  “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.”

  I felt myself go cold again, hearing him talk that way. “I don’t understand that at all.”

  He smiled faintly.

  “Are you and your father talking these days?”

  He shook his head.

  I didn’t understand any of it, but he seemed so somber and strange that I didn’t want to talk about it anymore. I changed the subject. “You ought to get yourself a girl,” I told him. I was dating regularly now on Saturday nights. “It’s a wonderful tonic for a suffering soul.”

  He looked at me, his eyes sad. “My wife has been chosen for me,” he said quietly.

  I gaped at him.

  “It’s an old Hasidic custom, remember?”

  “It never occurred to me,” I said, shocked.

  He nodded soberly. “That’s another reason it won’t be so easy to break out of the trap. It doesn’t only involve my own family.”

  I didn’t know what to say. There was a long, uncomfortable silence. And we walked together in that silence to Rav Gershenson’s shiur.

  • • •

  Danny’s brother’s bar mitzvah celebration, which I attended on a Monday morning during the third week in October, was a simple and unpretentious affair. The Morning Service began at seven-thirty— early enough to enable Danny and me to attend and not come late to school-—and Levi was called to recite the blessing over the Torah. After the service there was a kiddush, consisting of schnapps and some cakes and cookies. Everyone drank l’chaim, to life, then left. Reb Saunders asked me quietly why I wasn’t coming over to see him anymore, and I explained that my father and I were studying Talmud together on Shabbat aftenoons. He nodded vaguely and walked slowly away, his tall frame somewhat stooped.

  Levi Saunders was now tall and thin. He seemed a ghostly imitation of Danny, except that his hair was black and his eyes were dark. The skin on his hands and face was milky white, almost translucent, showing the branching veins/There was something helplessly fragile about him; he looked as if a wind would blow him down. 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 if to emphasize the tenuousness of Levi Saunders’ existence, he became violently ill the day following his bar mitzvah and was taken by ambulance to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital. Danny called me during supper as soon as the ambulance pulled away from in front of his house, and I could tell from his voice that he was in a panic. There wasn’t much I could say to him over the phone, and when I asked him if he wanted me to come over, he said no, his mother was almost hysterical, he would have to stay with her, he had only wanted to let me know. And he hung up.

  My father apparently had heard my troubled voice, because he was standing now outside the kitchen, asking me what was wrong.

  I told him.

  We resumed our supper. I wasn’t very hungry now, but I ate anyway to keep Manya happy. My father noticed how disturbed I was, but he said nothing. After the meal, he followed me into my room, sat on my bed while I sat at my desk, and asked me what was wrong, why was I so upset by Levi Saunders’ illness, he had been ill before.

  It was at that point that I told my father of Danny’s plans to go on for a doctorate in psychology and abandon the position of tzaddik he was to inherit one day from Reb Saunders. I also added, feeling that I ought to be completely honest about it now, that Danny was in a panic over his brother’s illness because without his brother it might not be possible for him to break away from his father; he did not really want to destroy the dynasty.

  My father’s face became more and more grim as he listened. When I was done, he sat for a long time in silence, his eyes grave.

  “When did Danny tell you this?” he asked finally.

  “The summer I lived in their house.”

  “That long ago? He knew already that long ago?”

  “Yes.”

  “And all this time you did not tell me?”

  “It was a secret between us, abba.”

  He looked at me grimly. “Does Danny know what pain this will cause his father?”

  “He dreads the day he’ll have to tell him. He dreads it for both of them.”

  “I knew it would happen,” my father said. “How could it not happen?” Then he looked at me sharply. “Reuven, let me understand this. Exactly what is Danny planning to tell Reb Saunders?”

  “That he’s going on for a doctorate in psychology and doesn’t intend to take his place.”

  “Is Danny thinking to abandon his Judaism?”

  I stared at him. “I never thought to ask him,” I said faintly.

  “His beard, his earlocks, his clothes, his fringes—all this he will retain in graduate school?”

  “I don’t know, ab
ba. We never talked about it.”

  “Reuven, how will Danny become a psychologist while looking like a Hasid?”

  I didn’t know what to say.

  “It is important that Danny know exactly what he will tell his father. He must anticipate what questions will be on Reb Saunders’ mind. Talk to Danny. Let him think through exactly what he will tell his father.”

  “All this time I never thought to ask him.”

  “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.”

  “You will talk to him?”

  “Of course.”

  My father nodded grimly, his face troubled. “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.

  “Tell me, Danny and Reb Saunders still do not talk?”

  I shook my head. Then I told him what Danny had said about silence. “What does it mean to hear silence, abba?”

  That seemed to upset him more than the news about Danny’s not becoming a tzaddik. He sat up straight on the bed, his body quivering. “Hasidim!” I heard him mutter, almost contemptuously. “Why must they feel the burden of the world is only on their shoulders?”

  I looked at him, puzzled. I had never heard that tone of contempt in his voice before.

  “It is a way of bringing up children,” he said.

  “What is?”

  “Silence.”

  “I don’t understand—”

  “I cannot explain it. I do not understand it completely myself. But what I know of it, I dislike. It was practiced in Europe by some few Hasidic families.” Then his voice went hard. “There are better ways to teach a child compassion.”

  “I don’t—”

  He cut me short. “Reuven, I cannot explain what I do not understand. Danny is being raised by Reb Saunders in a certain way. I do not want to talk about it anymore. It upsets me. You will speak to Danny, yes?”