The Chosen

by Chaim Potok

  “Very funny,” Danny said bitterly. “I’m getting a lot of sympathy from you tonight.”

  “I think you ought to have a heart-to-heart talk with Appleman.”

  “And tell him what? That Freud was a genius? That I hate experimental psychology? You know what he once said in class?” He assumed the professorial air again. “ ‘Gentlemen, psychology may be regarded as a science only to the degree to which its hypotheses are subjected to laboratory testing and to subsequent mathematization.’ Mathematization yet! What should I tell him, that I hate mathematics? I’m taking the wrong course. You should be taking that course, not me!”

  “He’s right, you know,” I said quietly.

  “Who?”

  “Appleman. If the Freudians aren’t willing to try testing their theories under laboratory conditions, then they are being dogmatic.”

  Danny looked at me, his face rigid. “What makes you so wise about Freudians all of a sudden?” he asked angrily.

  “I don’t know a thing about the Freudians,” I told him quietly. “But I know a lot about inductive logic. One of these days remind me to give you a lecture on inductive logic. If the Freudians—”

  “Damn it!” Danny exploded. “I never even mentioned the followers of Freud in class! I was talking about Freud himself! Freud was a scientist. Psychoanalysis is a scientific tool for exploring the mind. What do rats have to do with the human mind?”

  “Why don’t you ask Appleman?” I said quietly.

  “I think I will,” Danny said. “I think I’ll do just that. Why not? What have I got to lose? It can’t make me any more miserable than I am now.”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  There was a brief silence, during which Danny sat on my bed and stared gloomily down at the floor.

  “How are your eyes these days?” I asked quietly.

  He sat back on the bed, leaning against the wall. “They still bother me. These glasses don’t help much.”

  “Have you seen a doctor?”

  He shrugged. “He said the glasses should do it. I just have to get used to them. I don’t know. Anyway, I’ll talk to Appleman next week. The worst that could happen is I drop the course.” He shook his head grimly. “What a miserable business. Two years of reading Freud, and I have to end up doing experimental psychology.”

  “You never know,” I said. “Experimental psychology might come in handy some day.”

  “Oh, sure. All I need to do is get to love mathematics and rats. Are you coming over this Saturday?”

  “I’m studying with my father Shabbat afternoon,” I told him.

  “Every Saturday afternoon?”

  “Yes.”

  “My father asked me last week if you were still my friend. He hasn’t seen you in two months.”

  “I’m studying Talmud with my father,” I said.

  “You review?”

  “No. He’s teaching me scientific method.”

  Danny looked at me in surprise, then grinned. “You’re planning to try scientific method on Rav Schwartz?”

  “No,” I said. Rav Schwartz was my Talmud teacher. He was an old man with a long, gray beard who wore a black coat and was constantly smoking cigarettes. He was a great Talmudist, but he had been trained in a European yeshiva, and I didn’t think he would take kindly to the scientific method of studying Talmud. I had once suggested a textual emendation in class, and he had given me a queer look. I didn’t think he even understood what I had said.

  “Well, good luck with your scientific method,” Danny told me, getting to his feet. “Just don’t try it on Rav Gershenson. He knows all about it and hates it. When will my father get to see you?”

  “I don’t know,” I said.

  “I’ve got to go home. What’s your father doing in there?” The sound of my father’s typewriter had been clearly heard throughout the time we had been talking.

  “He’s finishing another article.”

  “Tell him my father sends his regards.”

  “Thanks. Are you and your father talking to each other these days?”

  Danny hesitated a moment before answering. “Not really. Only now and then. It’s not really talking.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “I think I had really better go home,” Danny said. “It’s late. I’ll meet you in front of your shul Sunday morning.”

  “Okay.”

  I walked him to the door, then stood there listening to the tapping of his metal-capped shoes on the hallway floor. He went out the double door and was gone.

  • • •

  I came back to my room and found my father standing in the doorway that led to his study. He had a bad cold and was wearing a woolen sweater and a scarf around his throat. This was his third cold in five months. It was also the first time in weeks that he had been home at night. He had become involved in Zionist activities and was always attending meetings where he spoke about the importance of Palestine as a Jewish homeland and raised money for the Jewish National Fund. He was also teaching an adult studies course in the history of political Zionism at our synagogue on Monday nights and another adult course in the history of American Jewry at his yeshiva on Wednesday nights. He rarely got home before eleven. I would always hear his tired steps in the hallway as he came in the door. He would have a glass of tea, come into my room and chat with me for a few minutes, telling me where he had been and what he had done that night, then he would remind me I didn’t have to do four years of college all at once, I should go to bed soon, and he would go into his study to prepare for the classes he would be teaching the next day. He had begun taking his teaching with almost ominous seriousness these past months. He had always prepared for his classes, but there was a kind of heaviness to the way he went about preparing now, writing everything down, rehearsing his notes aloud—as if he were trying to make certain that nothing of significance would remain unsaid, as if he felt the future hung on every idea he taught. I never knew when he went to sleep; no matter what time I got to bed he was still in his study. He had never regained the weight he had lost during the weeks he had spent in the hospital after his heart attack, and he was always tired, his face pale and gaunt, his eyes watery.

  He stood now in the doorway to his study, wearing the woolen sweater, the scarf, and the round, black skullcap. His feet were in bedroom slippers and his trousers were creased from all the sitting over the typewriter. He was visibly tired, and his voice cracked a few times as he asked me what Danny had been so excited about. He had heard him through the door, he said.

  I told him about Danny’s misery over Professor Appleman and experimental psychology.

  He listened intently, then came into my room and sat down on my bed with a sigh. “So,” he said, “Danny is discovering that Freud is not God.”

  “I told him at least to talk it over with Professor Appleman.”

  “And?”

  “He’ll talk to him next week.”

  “Experimental psychology,” my father mused. “I know nothing about it.”

  “He said there was a lot of math in it.”

  “Ah. And Danny does not like mathematics.”

  “He hates it, he says. He’s feeling pretty low. He feels he wasted two years reading Freud.”

  My father smiled and shook his head but remained silent.

  “Professor Appleman sounds a lot like Professor Flesser,” I said. Professor Abraham Flesser was my logic teacher, an avowed empiricist and an enemy of what he called “obscurantist Continental philosophies,” which, he explained, included everything that had happened in German philosophy from Fichte to Heidegger, with the exception of Vaihinger and one or two others.

  My father wanted to know what it was the two professors had in common, and I told him what Professor Appleman had said about psychology being a science only to the extent to which its hypotheses can be mathematized. “Professor Flesser made the same remark once about biology,” I said.

  “You talk about biology in a symbolic logic cl
ass?” my father asked.

  “We were discussing inductive logic.”

  “Ah. Of course. The point about mathematizing hypotheses was made by Kant. It is one of the programs of the Vienna Circle logical positivists.”

  “Who?”

  “Not now, Reuven. It is too late, and I am tired. You should go to sleep soon. Take advantage of the nights when you have no school-work.”

  “You’ll be working late tonight, abba?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’re not taking care of yourself, you know. Your voice sounds awful.”

  He sighed again. “It is a bad cold,” he said.

  “Does Dr. Grossman know you’re working so hard?”

  “Dr. Grossman worries a little bit too much about me,” he said, smiling.

  “Are you going for another checkup soon?”

  “Soon,” he said. “I am feeling fine, Reuven. You worry like Dr. Grossman. Worry better about your schoolwork. I am fine.”

  “How many fathers do I have?” I asked.

  He didn’t say anything, but he blinked his eyes a few times.

  “I wish you’d take it a little easy,” I said.

  “This is not a time to take things easy, Reuven. You read what is happening in Palestine.”

  I nodded slowly.

  “This is a time to take things easy?” my father asked, his hoarse voice rising. “The Haganah and Irgun boys who die are taking it easy?”

  He was talking about what was now going on in Palestine. Two Englishmen, an army major and a judge, had been kidnaped recently by the Irgun, the Jewish terrorist group in Palestine, and were being held as hostages. A captured member of the Irgun, Dov Gruner, had been sentenced to hanging by the British, and the Irgun had announced instant retaliation against these hostages should the sentence be carried out. This was the latest of a growing list of terrorist activities against the British Army in Palestine. While the Irgun engaged in terror—blowing up trains, attacking police stations, cutting communications lines—the Haganah continued smuggling Jews through the British naval blockade in defiance of the British Colonial Office, which had sealed Palestine off to further Jewish immigration. Rarely did a week go by now without a new act of terror against the British. My father would read the newspaper accounts of these activities, and I could see the anguish in his eyes. He hated violence and bloodshed and had an intense distaste for the terrorist policy of the Irgun, but he hated the British non-immigration policy even more: Irgun blood was being shed for the sake of a future Jewish state, and he found it difficult to give voice to his feelings of opposition to the acts of terror that were regularly making front-page headlines now. Invariably, the headlines spurred him on to new bursts of Zionist activity and to loud, excited justification of the way he was driving himself in his fund-raising and speechmaking efforts in behalf of a Jewish state.

  I could see he was beginning to get excited now, too, so to change the subject quickly, I told him Reb Saunders had sent his regards. “He wonders why he doesn’t see me,” I said.

  But my father didn’t seem to have heard me. He sat on the bed, lost in thought. We were quiet for a long time. Then he stirred and said softly, “Reuven, do you know what the rabbis tell us God said to Moses when he was about to die?”

  I stared at him. “No,” I heard myself say.

  “He said to Moses, ‘You have toiled and labored, now you are worthy of rest.’ ”

  I stared at him and didn’t say anything.

  “You are no longer a child, Reuven,” my father went on. “It is almost possible to see the way your mind is growing. And your heart, too. Inductive logic, Freud, experimental psychology, mathe-matizing hypotheses, scientific study of the Talmud. Three years ago, you were still a child. You have become a small giant since the day Danny’s ball struck your eye. You do not see it. But I see it. And it is a beautiful thing to see. So listen to what I am going to tell you.” He paused for a moment, as if considering his next words carefully, then continued. “Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye?” He paused again, his eyes misty now, then went on. “I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here. Do you understand what I am saying?”

  I nodded, feeling myself cold with dread. That was the first time my father had ever talked to me of his death, and his words seemed to have filled the room with a gray mist that blurred my vision and stung as I breathed.

  My father looked at me, then sighed quietly. “I was a little too blunt,” he said. “I am sorry. I did not mean to hurt you.”

  I couldn’t say anything.

  “I will live for many more years, with God’s help,” my father said, trying a smile. “Between my son and my doctor, I will probably live to be a very old man.”

  The gray mist seemed to part. I took a deep breath. I could feel cold sweat running down my back.

  “Are you angry at me, Reuven?”

  I shook my head.

  “I did not want to sound morbid. I only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist—what sense is there to it? A fly also lives.”

  I didn’t say anything. The mist was gone now. I found the palms of my hands were cold with sweat.

  “I am sorry,” my father said quietly. “I can see I upset you.”

  “You frightened me,” I heard myself say.

  “I am sorry.”

  “Will you please go for that checkup?”

  “Yes,” my father said.

  “You really frightened me, talking that way. Are you sure you’re all right?”

  “I have a bad cold,” my father said. “But I am fine otherwise.”

  “You’ll go for that checkup?”

  “I will call Dr. Grossman tomorrow and make an appointment for next week. All right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fine. My young logician is satisfied. Good. Let us talk of happier things. I did not tell you that I saw Jack Rose yesterday. He gave me a thousand-dollar check for the Jewish National Fund.”

  “Another thousand dollars?” Jack Rose and my father had been boyhood friends in Russia and had come to America on the same boat. He was now a wealthy furrier and a thoroughly nonobservant Jew. Yet, six months ago, he had given my father a thousand-dollar contribution to our synagogue.

  “It is strange what is happening,” my father said. “And it is exciting. Jack is on the Building Committee of his synagogue. Yes, he joined a synagogue. Not for himself, he told me. For his grandchildren. He is helping them put up a new building so his grandchildren can go to a modern synagogue and have a good Jewish education. It is beginning to happen everywhere in America. A religious renaissance, some call it.”

  “I can’t see Jack Rose in a synagogue,” I said. On the few occasions when he had been over to our apartment, I had found his open disregard for Jewish tradition distasteful. He was a short man, with round, pink features, always immaculately dressed, always smoking long, expensive cigars. Once I asked my father why they had remained friends, their views about almost everything of importance were so different. He replied by expressing dismay at my question. Honest differences of opinion should never be permitted to destroy a friendship,
he told me. “Haven’t you learned that yet, Reuven?” Now I was tempted to tell my father that Jack Rose was probably using his money to salve a bad conscience. But I didn’t. Instead, I said, a little scornfully, “I don’t envy his rabbi.”

  My father shook his head soberly. “Why not? You should envy him, Reuven. American Jews have begun to return to the synagogue.”

  “God help us if synagogues fill up with Jack Roses.”

  “They will fill up with Jack Roses, and it will be the task of rabbis to educate them. It will be your task if you become a rabbi.”

  I looked at him.

  “If you become a rabbi,” my father said, smiling at me warmly.

  “When I become a rabbi, you mean.”

  My father nodded, still smiling. “You would have been a fine university professor,” he said. “I would have liked you to become a university professor. But I think you have already decided. Am I right?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Even with a synagogue full of Jack Roses?”

  “Even with a synagogue full of Jack Roses,” I said. “God help me.

  “America needs rabbis,” my father said.

  “Well, it’s better than being a boxer,” I told him.

  My father looked puzzled.

  “A bad joke,” I said.

  “Will you have some tea with me?”

  I said I would.

  “Come. Let us have some tea and continue to talk about happy things.”

  So we drank tea and talked some more. My father told me about the Zionist activities he was engaged in, the speeches he was making, the funds he was raising. He said that in a year or two the crisis in Palestine would come to a head. There would be terrible bloodshed, he predicted, unless the British would give over the problem to the United Nations. Many American Jews were not yet aware of what was going on, he said. The English papers did not tell the entire story. A Jew had to read the Yiddish press now if he wished to know everything that was happening in Palestine. American Jews had to be awakened to the problem of a Jewish state. His Zionist group was planning a mass rally in Madison Square Garden, he told me. The publicity would be going out this week, and there would be a large ad soon in the New York Times, announcing the rally. It was scheduled for late February.