Chaim Potok - The Chosen

'Baer's idea, however, was not meant to remain idle and unfruitful, but to bring him honor and revenue. While the tzaddik cared for the conduct of the world, for the obtaining of heavenly grace, and especially for Israel's preservation and glorification, his adherents had to cultivate three kinds of virtues. It was their duty to draw nigh to him, to enjoy the sight of him, and from time to time to make pilgrimages to him. Further, they were to confess their sins to him. By these means alone could they hope for pardon from their iniquities." That means sins,' he told me.

'I know what it means,' I said.

He went on. '

'Finally, they had to bring him presents, rich gifts, which he knew how to employ to the best advantage. It was also incumbent upon them to attend to his personal wants. It seems like a return to the days of the priests of Baal, so vulgar and disgusting do these perversities appear."

He looked up from the book. 'That's pretty strong language, "vulgar and disgusting".' His eyes were dark and brooding. 'It feels terrible to have a great scholar like Graetz call Hasidism vulgar and disgusting. I never thought of my father as a priest of Baal.'

I didn't say anything.

'Listen to what else he says about Dov Baer.' He turned a page. 'He says here that Dov Baer used to crack vulgar jokes to make his people happy, and that he used to encourage his followers to drink alcohol, so they would pray fervently. He says that Rabbi Elijah of Vilna was a great opponent of the Hasidim, and that when he died – let me read it to you.' He shuffled pages. 'Here it is. Listen. "After his death, the Hasidim took vengeance upon him by dancing upon his grave, and celebrating the day of his decease as a holiday, with shouting and drunkenness.'" He looked at me. 'I never knew about any of these things. You were in our shul yesterday. Did anyone look drunk to you during the service? '

'No,' I said.

'My father isn't like that at all.' His voice was sad, and it trembled a little. 'He really worries about his people. He worries about them so much he doesn't even have time to talk to me.'

'Maybe Graetz is only talking about the Hasidim of his own day,' I offered.

'Maybe,' he said, not convinced. 'It's awful to have someone give you an image like that of yourself. He says that Dov Baer had expert spies worthy of serving in the secret service. Those are his words, "worthy of serving in the secret service". He says they would go around discovering people's secrets and tell them to Dov Baer. People who came to see him about their personal problems would have to wait around until the Saturday after they came, and in the meantime these spies would investigate them and report back to him, so that when the person finally got to see him, Dov Baer would know everything, and the person would be impressed and think that Dov Baer had some sort of magical ability to look into his heart.' He shuffled some more pages. 'Listen to this. "In the first interview Baer, in a seemingly casual manner, was able, in a skillfully arranged discourse, to bring in allusions to these strangers, whereby they would be convinced that he had looked into their hearts and knew their past." He shook his head sadly. 'I never knew about anything like that. When my father talks about Dov Baer, he almost makes him out to be a saint.'

'Did my father give you that book to read?'

'Your father said I should read Jewish history. He said the first important step in anyone's education is to know your own people. So I found this work by Graetz. It's a lot of volumes. I'm almost done with it. This is the last volume.' He shook his head again, and the earlocks danced and brushed against the ridge of his jaw and the hollow of his cheeks. 'What an image it gives me of myself.'

'You ought to discuss it with my father first,' I told him, 'before you go believing any of that. He told me a lot about Hasidism on Friday night. He wasn't very complimentary, but he didn't say anything about drunkenness.'

Danny nodded slowly. 'I'll talk to him,' he said. 'But Graetz was a great scholar. I read up on him before I started reading his history. He was one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the last century.'

'You ought to discuss it with my father,' I repeated.

Danny nodded again, then slowly closed the book. His fingers played idly with the spine of the binding.

'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. How could a man like Dov Baer have the gall to fool other people into thinking that he could look into their hearts and tell them what they were really like inside?'

'You don't know that he did. You only know Graetz's 'Version of it.'

He ignored me. I had the feeling he was talking more to himself than to me.

'We're so complicated inside,' he went on quietly. "There's something in us called the unconscious that we're completely unaware of. It practically dominates our lives, and we don't even know it.' He paused, hesitating, his hand moving from the book and playing now with an earlock. I was reminded of the evening in the hospital when he had stared out the window at the people on the street below and had talked of God and ants and the reading he did in this library. 'There's so much to read,' he said. 'I've only really been reading for a few months. Did you know about the subconscious?' he asked me, and when I somewhat hesitantly nodded, he said, 'You see? You're not even interested in psychology, and you know about it. I have so much catching up to do.' He was suddenly conscious of the way his fingers were playing with the earlock, and he let his hand drop to the table. 'Did you know that very often the subconscious expresses itself in dreams? "The dream is the product of a transaction between conscious and unconscious wishes,'" he quoted, '

'and the results during sleep are naturally very different from those during waking hours."

'What's this about dreams?' I asked.

'It's true,' he said. 'Dreams are full of unexpressed fears and hopes, things that we never even think of consciously. We think of them unconsciously deep down inside ourselves, and they come out in dreams. They don't always come out straight, though. Sometimes they come out in symbols. You have to learn to interpret the symbols.'

'Where did you find out about that?'

'In my reading. There's a lot of work been done on dreams. It's one of the ways they have of getting to a person's unconscious.'

I must have had a strange expression on my face, because he asked me what was the matter.

'I dream all the time,' I told him.

'Everyone does,' he said. 'We just don't remember a lot of them. We repress them. We sort of push them away and forget them, because sometimes they're too painful.'

'I'm trying to remember mine,' I said. 'Some of them weren't very pleasant.'

'A lot of times they're not pleasant. Our unconscious isn't a nice place – I call it a place; it isn't a place, really; the book I read says it's more like a process – it isn't a nice place at all. It's full of repressed fears and hatreds, things that we're afraid to bring out into the open.'

'And these things rule our lives?'

'According to some psychologists they do.'

'You mean these things go on and we don't know anything about them?'

'That's right. That's what I said before. What's inside us is the greatest mystery of all.'

'That's a pretty sad thing to think about. To be doing things without really knowing why you're doing them.'

Danny nodded. 'You can find out about it, though. About your unconscious, I mean. That's what psychoanalysis is all about. I haven't read too much about it yet, but it's a long process.' Freud started it. You've heard about Freud. He started psychoanalysis. I'm teaching myself German, so I can read him in the original. He discovered the unconscious, too.'