Chaim Potok - The Chosen

'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.

'Thats 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 Ray 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 become a 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 Shahbos 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.

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 it's own. It talks to me somtimes. 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 afternoons. He nodded vaguely and walked slowly away, his tall frame somewhat stooped.