The Promise

  Reb Saunders sat in his chair, swaying faintly back and forth, his right hand playing with an earlock. I noticed Abraham Gordon staring at him intently, his face expressionless. Then Reb Saunders began to speak. His voice was thin and frail, a shadow of what it had once been. It quivered and trembled and he had to stop from time to time to gain control of himself. He spoke for only a few minutes on a passage of Talmud in the tractate Nedarim. Then Danny rose and spoke for half an hour on a very difficult passage of Talmud which he explained brilliantly, moving briskly and with flawless ease through a dozen tractates and a host of medieval commentaries as he spoke. The crowd sat enraptured. Levi gazed up at him in awe. My father smiled with pleasure. Abraham Gordon stared in disbelief. And Joseph Gordon continued to look dazed.

  Then Danny was done. He sat down. I saw Reb Saunders bend over to him and whisper something in his ear. Danny’s face broke into a joyous smile and he nodded at his father. Levi was saying something to him. He seemed to be talking loudly but I could hear nothing. For the crowd inside the synagogue had exploded. That is the only way to describe what happened. It exploded. Chairs were picked up, tables were moved away from the walls, food was brought in. The young Hasid who had led us into the synagogue suddenly materialized by my side and took us to a table; there was the ritual washing of the hands, the blessing over the bread, and we were eating and singing, and then I was dancing, wildly, ecstatically, the hand of an old Hasid on my right shoulder and of a young boy in his teens on my left, whirling and dancing and singing, and there was Danny and I grabbed a chair and pushed it under him and others helped me and I took hold of the legs of the chair and we raised Danny over our shoulders and danced with him on the chair, Danny high on the chair, and the songs loud and the hands clapping and the feet stamping and the joy like a wildness all inside me and around me. I was exhausted and sweating when we were done, and Danny came off the chair and looked at me and said nothing and suddenly I felt his arms around me and my arms went around him and the satin of his caftan was smooth against my fingers and then we separated and he smiled, his blue eyes moist and brilliant, and someone grabbed him for another dance and he was gone.

  I started back to the table and saw that the chair in which my father had sat was empty. I looked around. He was standing against a wall of the synagogue, talking quietly with Abraham Gordon. I sat down and had something to eat. When I turned around again I saw that both my father and Abraham Gordon were gone. A few minutes later my father came back into the synagogue and was on his way to the table when an elderly Hasid in a long gray beard stopped him. My father nodded and accompanied the Hasid to the table where Reb Saunders sat together with the other rebbes. He sat down in Danny’s empty seat. Reb Saunders leaned forward. The other rebbes moved their chairs closer to Reb Saunders. Levi and Joseph Gordon were in the crowd somewhere. The rebbes and my father sat around the table. Reb Saunders was talking. The others listened, nodding their heads. My father was there a very long time before I saw him get to his feet. There was a smile on his face. He made his way slowly through the crowd to the table and sat down.

  “What did you talk about?” I asked.

  “Torah,” he said.

  “You didn’t produce that Yerushalmi.” The Yerushalmi is the Palestinian Talmud.

  He looked at me, puzzled.

  “The passage in the Yerushalmi that would have solved Danny’s problem.”

  He laughed loudly. “No, Reuven. I did not mention the passage in the Yerushalmi.” He laughed again. “You are more of a scholar than I am. In the midst of a celebration like this you can remember a Yerushalmi!”

  “That Yerushalmi could have saved Danny a lot of trouble.”

  “Why do you consider it trouble? The people who listened to Danny considered it trouble? Can you see them listening with joy to the critical method?”

  “No,” I said. “I can’t see that at all.” A moment later I said, “Did Abraham Gordon leave?”

  “Yes. He has to fly to Chicago early tomorrow morning.”

  “He doesn’t look well.”

  “He has reason not to look well. Michael has not moved in days.”

  Levi came over and asked me to join him in a dance. I got up and entered a circle of Hasidim with Levi at my side, and danced. We danced around Danny, who stood clapping his hands and singing, and I looked at Danny and felt a part of myself slide out of the dance and look coldly at what I was doing and heard it telling me how strange it was to be dancing with Hasidim, whose way of life I disliked, whose ideas were so different from mine, whose presence was destroying my world. I continued dancing, but for the rest of that night that part of me remained outside it all, watching.

  Sometime later, the dancing and singing ceased and we all returned to our chairs for the Grace. It was almost midnight when my father and I said good-bye to Reb Saunders and Danny, and left. The crowd inside the synagogue had resumed dancing. We could hear the singing and the stamping of feet as we walked carefully through the snow beneath the dark sycamores, and could still hear it, coming faintly through the night, when we turned into Lee Avenue. The wind and the cold had crusted the surface of the snow into a thin, hard film, and I could feel it breaking beneath my feet. Lee Avenue was dark and deserted, the lights of the lamp posts faintly smoky in the powdery snow blown through the air by the wind. I held my father’s arm as we walked. We went along in silence for a while, the singing and dancing still echoing in my ears.

  “He told the others how I had influenced you to become Danny’s friend,” my father said. “He told them how I had guided his son’s reading and prevented him from leaving Yiddishkeit. He thanked me before the others for helping him to raise Danny.”

  We walked on a while longer.

  “He is a remarkable man,” my father murmured. “They are remarkable people. There is so much about them that is distasteful to me. But they are remarkable people.”

  “I wish they weren’t so afraid of new ideas.”

  “You want a great deal, Reuven. The Messiah has not yet come. Will new ideas enable them to go on singing and dancing?”

  “We can’t ignore the truth, abba.”

  “No,” he said. “We cannot ignore the truth. At the same time, we cannot quite sing and dance as they do.” He was silent a moment. “That is the dilemma of our time, Reuven. I do not know what the answer is.”

  We turned into our block. The wind was loud in the winter branches of the sycamores. I turned to my father.

  “Is Abraham Gordon talking to you about teaching in the Frankel Seminary?”

  He stopped and looked at me in astonishment. Then he laughed and shook his head. “How—?” He broke off and shook his head again. “You are remarkable,” he said, smiling broadly. I could see his eyes very bright in the lights of the lamp posts.

  “Is he?” I asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Will you do it?”

  “I do not know.”

  “What happened to the offer from Hirsch?”

  “I have told them I want a little time to consider it.”

  I did not say anything.

  “Will you be upset if I accept a position at the seminary?”

  “I don’t know.”

  We went up the stone stairs and into our brownstone. As we were putting away our hats and coats, he said, “Will you take your smicha examinations?”

  “Yes.”

  “How will you take them?”

  “Exactly the way you taught me.”

  He nodded soberly. We stood in the hall of the apartment. I looked at the phone. For some strange reason I almost expected it to ring. I saw my father smiling at me.

  “It has been a long and happy night, Reuven. But I am still cold from the walk. Would you like to have some tea? Come, let us drink tea and take the cold from our bones before we go to sleep.”

  It was after one o’clock when we finally went to bed. I lay awake a long time with the sounds of the singing and dancing in my ears before I was able to fall as
leep.

  “You are still seeing Gordon?” Rav Kalman asked me the next day after class.

  “Yes.”

  “How is the boy?”

  “There’s no change.”

  “You are going to take your smicha examinations?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have informed the Dean?”

  “I’m going to do that now.”

  “So,” he said. “You have made your choice.”

  “Yes.”

  “Where do you stand now, Reuven?”

  “I’ll have to show you.”

  His eyes narrowed.

  “At the examinations,” I said.

  His face darkened. “What do you mean?” he said.

  “I can’t tell you my choice. I’ll have to show it to you.”

  His lips grew thin and he tugged at his dark beard. “I will not give smicha examinations to someone—” He stopped. “I will not give you smicha examinations until I know with certainty where you stand.”

  “Then I can’t take the examinations,” I said very quietly.

  He stared at me from across the desk. The hand with the misshapen fingers trembled quite visibly on the closed Talmud. There was a long silence.

  “What will you do at the examinations?” he asked softly. “You will use your father’s method?”

  “Yes.”

  “I know the method. I do not need you to show me that method.”

  I did not say anything. There was another long silence.

  Then he said, “What will you do if I refuse to give you smicha?” He spoke softly. “I don’t know.”

  “You will go to the seminary of Gordon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You are very clever, Reuven. You are forcing me to make the choice, yes? That is what you are doing.”

  I was quiet.

  He tugged at his beard. He seemed to be controlling himself with enormous difficulty. There was anger on his face. But it remained on his face, soundless this time. “I do not know what to do with you,” he muttered. “I have never had such a problem.” I remembered him using those same words weeks ago. But there was quiet pain in them now. He closed his eyes. His fingers drummed noiselessly on the Talmud. He opened his eyes.

  “When will you take the examinations?” he asked softly.

  I told him.

  He nodded his head once. “Tell the Dean I will give you the examinations.” His face was weary, expressionless. He dismissed me. At the door of the room I turned and saw him sitting behind the desk, staring fixedly at the Talmud, looking small and lonely and forlorn.

  I arranged to take the examinations in the first week of April.

  I saw Abraham and Ruth Gordon the following Sunday in their apartment. We spent some time together in the study, and I helped him read the galleys of his new book. Then we sat by the fire in the living room and drank hot, spiced wine and talked about the engagement celebration. Ruth Gordon had been with the women, together with Rachel and her mother. There had been singing and dancing, and the women, all of them in wigs and long-sleeved, high-necked dresses, had been sweet and kind and Old-Worldly, and Ruth Gordon had found it all very quaint and primitive and crude. She did not like the medieval subservience of Hasidic women. She did not like the meekness with which they accepted their secondary roles. She did not like the patriarchal aura of the Hasidic family. She despised their blind unwillingness to accept twentieth-century reality. She could understand someone objecting to opinions and half-formed ideas. But facts—how could anyone born in this century reject facts! She had grown up in Canada in the midst of blind Orthodoxy—this was the first time I was hearing that she had not been born in America—and had despised it and broken with it and now found herself incapable of comprehending it. What difference was there between Jewish Orthodoxy and Catholicism? she asked. What difference was there between the blind belief of Hasidism and that of the Catholic women who climbed the stone steps of the new church in Montreal that was being built where someone claimed to have seen a vision of Joseph—climbed those steps on their knees, saying a prayer on each step? There was no difference, she said. None at all. It was the same blindness, the same absurd rejection of facts. She could not understand Rachel marrying a Hasid, even a Hasid like Daniel Saunders. She grew quite heated and her eyes became bright with anger and her voice filled the room with her scorn.

  Abraham Gordon pulled at an ear lobe and sat listening to her patiently. “The attraction of opposites,” he said finally with a smile.

  “That is nonsense!” she snapped. She was really angry. I had the feeling Rachel’s coming marriage to Danny was presenting her with some kind of bewildering challenge.

  “I would wager,” Abraham Gordon said quietly, “that Rachel is attracted to Daniel’s God, and Daniel is attracted to Rachel’s twentieth century. Is that nonsense, Ruth?”

  “It is inconceivable to me that Rachel finds anything sensible in Daniel’s God.”

  “There is a great deal of beauty in that sort of faith,” Abraham Gordon murmured.

  “I find no beauty in nonsense,” she said coldly.

  “Only because you don’t believe in it. Nonsense is often that in which a person cannot believe. But you once believed in literature, Ruth. You found beauty in literature. You said so yourself. You believed in and loved the esthetic quality of French literature.” He was silent a moment. “Is it impossible for two people to fuse two separate commitments into a single purpose?” He spoke softly, gazing at his wife. “I seem to recall talking to someone about that once.”

  She looked at him, her blue eyes suddenly narrow.

  “I have a vague recollection of a conversation along those lines,” he said.

  She was very quiet.

  “A boat in the middle of the Atlantic and a long walk and talk on the deck. A man and a woman suddenly in love. The man wanted to write about certain ideas and was rather clumsy with words, and the woman was excellent with words and wanted to know about those ideas. Where could I have heard that?”

  I saw a crimson flush spread slowly across her features.

  “Where could I have heard that?” Abraham Gordon murmured, looking at his wife.

  She smiled then. It was a hesitant smile at first. Then it broadened, and she laughed softly. For the first time since I had met her, I saw the cool, regal composure in which she clothed herself melt away, and I caught a glimpse of what she was really like when she no longer felt it necessary to show she was all mind, all molded and formed by the century in which she had been born and in which, during a passage across the dark waters of an ocean, she had given away her freedom and joined herself to the destiny of a man whose deepest dreams she would help bring to life.

  I did not see Abraham and Ruth Gordon again until the last week in April.

  Fourteen

  The twilight winter ended for me that second week in March. I began to study for my smicha examinations. And much of the time I was able not to think about Michael.

  I locked myself into the world of the Talmud, lived in it even during the hours when the texts were not open in front of me, saw the shapes of its printed pages everywhere, on bus rides to and from school when I closed my eyes and silently recited whole sections of it by heart, on walks beneath the sycamores when I juggled complicated commentaries in my mind, on shopping expeditions to the stores on Lee Avenue when, surrounded by dark-clothed, bustling Hasidim, I would gleefully but soundlessly emend texts and go on mental safaris for parallel passages and search out contradictions within the Babylonian Talmud, a forbidden pleasure because such contradictions, according to very Orthodox Talmudists, could not exist since the Babylonian Talmud was regarded by them as a coherent unit. But they existed, all right, and I found them and would recite them to myself while waiting to be served by the red-bearded Hasid from whom we bought our meat, or the black-bearded Hasid from whom we bought our vegetables, or the pale, gray-bearded, wizened old Hasid from whom we bought our bread and rolls. Going home from t
he stores, I would sometimes review passages out loud, and once I passed a group of Hasidic boys playing stoopball two houses away from mine and barely noticed them and went on talking to myself, and I heard one of them say in Yiddish, “Who is that?” and heard another answer, also in Yiddish, “The son of Malter,” and heard the first one respond, “Malter, the goyische Talmudist?” to which the other said, “Yuh.” I thought to stop and go back to them and tell them—tell them what? I did not know what I could tell them. They were boys and were mouthing things they heard in their homes. I continued walking, but it was a while before I was able to return to the Talmud. I had borrowed from my father some of the scholarly Talmudic works he had in his study library, books by Solomon Luria and Yerucham Fishel Perlow and H. M. Pineles and J. N. Epstein, and also the writings of Joshua Krokovsky on Maimonides, and often I would read as I walked—and one day I bumped heavily into a sycamore and bruised my knee. But the book I was reading remained undamaged and I walked more carefully from then on, but continued reading. I lived in a world two thousand years in the past, in a time when sages had been remarkably unafraid of new ideas, and I sat on the earthen floors of ancient academies, listening to lectures on the Mishnah, listening to the discussions that followed, and sometimes a sage would take my arm and we would go into a silent grove of trees, and walk and talk.

  Twice during those weeks I traveled to the Zechariah Frankel Seminary and sat in the library and spent hours checking variant readings in medieval manuscripts of the Talmud. The second time I was there I went up to the fifth floor and knocked on Abraham Gordon’s door. But he was not in and I went home.