by Chaim Potok
By the middle of October everyone in the class, except me, had been called on at least twice. I prepared feverishly, expecting to hear my name called any day. But it wasn’t. By the end of October, I began to feel uneasy. By the middle of November I still hadn’t been called on again. I took part in the class discussions, asked questions, argued, raised my hand almost as frequently as Danny raised his in response to Rav Gershenson’s “Who does know?” —but I was not called on to read. I couldn’t understand it, and it began to upset me. I wondered if this was his way of participating in Reb Saunders’ ban against me and my father.
There were other things, too, that were upsetting me at the time. My father had begun to look almost skeletal as a result of his activities, and I dreaded the nights he came wearily home, drank his glass of tea, spent some minutes with me in my room, looking hollow-eyed and not really listening to what I told him, and then went into his study. Instead of studying Talmud with him on the Shabbat, I studied alone while he slept. The Palestine issue was being debated now by the United Nations, and the Partition Plan would soon be voted upon. Every day there were headlines announcing new acts of terror and bloodshed; every week, it seemed, there was another massive rally in Madison Square Garden. I was able to attend two of those rallies. The second time I went I made sure to arrive early enough to get a seat inside. The speeches were electrifying, and I joined in the applause and the cheering until my hands were sore and my voice was hoarse. My father spoke at that rally, his voice booming out clearly through the public address system. He seemed so huge behind the microphones, his voice giving his body the stature of a giant. When he was done, I sat and listened to the wild applause of the crowd, and my eyes filled with tears of pride.
In the midst of all this, Reb Saunders’ League for a Religious Eretz Yisroel continued putting out its anti-Zionist leaflets. Everywhere I went I found those leaflets—on the streets, in the trolley cars, in my classroom desks, on my lunch table, even in the school bathrooms.
It became clear as November went by that the United Nations vote on the Partition Plan would take place sometime at the end of the month. My father was at a meeting on Sunday evening, November 29, when the vote was finally held, and I listened to it over the kitchen radio. I cried like a baby when the result was announced, and later, when my father came home, we embraced and wept and kissed, and our tears mingled on our cheeks. He was almost incoherent with joy. The death of the six million Jews had finally been given meaning, he kept saying over and over again. It had happened. After two thousand years, it had finally happened. We were a people again, with our own land. We were a blessed generation. We had been given the opportunity to see the creation of the Jewish state. “Thank God!” he said. “Thank God! Thank God!” We alternately wept and talked until after three in the morning when we finally went to bed.
I woke groggy from lack of sleep but still feeling the sense of exhilaration, and was eager to get to school to share the joy with my friends. My exhilaration was dampened somewhat during breakfast when my father and I heard over the radio that a few hours after the United Nations vote a bus on its way from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem had been attacked by Arabs and seven Jews had been killed. And my exhilaration was snuffed out and transformed into an almost uncontrollable rage when I got to school and found it strewn with the leaflets of Reb Saunders’ anti-Zionist league.
The leaflets denounced the United Nations vote, ordered Jews to ignore it, called the state a desecration of the name of God, and announced that the league planned to fight its recognition by the government of the United States.
Only the Dean’s threat of immediate expulsion prevented me from engaging in a fistfight that day. I was tempted more than once to scream at the groups of anti-Zionist students huddling together in the halls and classrooms that they ought to go join the Arabs and the British if they were so opposed to the Jewish state. But I managed somehow to control myself and remain silent.
In subsequent weeks, I was grateful for that silence. For as Arab forces began to attack the Jewish communities of Palestine, as an Arab mob surged through Princess Mary Avenue in Jerusalem, wrecking and gutting shops and leaving the old Jewish commercial center looted and burned, and as the toll of Jewish dead increased daily, Reb Saunders’ league grew strangely silent. The faces of the anti-Zionist Hasidic students in the school became tense and pained, and all anti-Zionist talk ceased. I watched them every day at lunch as they read to each other the accounts of the bloodshed reported in the Jewish press and then talked about it among themselves. I could hear sighs, see heads shaking and eyes filling with sadness. “Again Jewish blood is being spilled,” they whispered to one another. “Hitler wasn’t enough. Now more Jewish blood, more slaughter. What does the world want from us? Six million isn’t enough? More Jews have to die?” Their pain over this new outbreak of violence against the Jews of Palestine outweighed their hatred of Zionism. They did not become Zionists; they merely became silent. I was glad during those weeks that I had restrained my anger.
I received straight A’s in my college courses at the end of that semester. I also received an A in Talmud, despite the fact that Rav Gershenson had only called on me once during the entire four-month period I had spent in his class. I planned to talk to him about it during the inter-semester break, but my father suffered a second heart attack on the first day of that break.
He collapsed at a Jewish National Fund meeting and was rushed to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital by ambulance. He hovered tenuously between life and death for three days. I lived in a nightmare of hallucinatory dread, and if it hadn’t been for Manya constantly reminding me with gentle kindness that I had to eat or I would get sick, I might well have starved.
My father was beginning to recover when the second semester began, but he was a shell of a man. Dr. Grossman told me that he would be in the hospital at least six weeks, and that it would take from four to six more months of complete rest before he would be able to return to his work.
My classmates had all heard the news by the time the semester began, but their words of consolation didn’t help very much. The look on Danny’s face, though, when I saw him for the first time, helped a little. He passed me in the hallway, his face a suffering mask of pain and compassion. I thought for a moment he would speak to me, but he didn’t. Instead, he brushed against me and managed to touch my hand for a second. His touch and his eyes spoke the words that his lips couldn’t. I told myself it was bitter and ironic that my father needed to have a heart attack in order for some contact to be established once again between myself and Danny.
• • •
I lived alone. Manya came in the mornings and left after supper, and during the long winter nights of January and February I was all alone in the house. I had been alone before, but the knowledge that my father would return from his meetings and spend a few minutes with me had made the loneliness endurable. Now he wasn’t attending meetings and wasn’t coming into my room, and for the first few days the total silence inside the apartment was impossible for me to take, and I would go out of the house and take long walks in the bitter, cold winter nights. But my schoolwork began to suffer, and I finally took hold of myself. I spent as much of the early parts of every evening as I could visiting my father in the hospital. He was weak and could barely talk and kept asking me if I was taking care of myself. Dr. Grossman had warned me not to tire him, so I left as soon as I could, went home, ate, then spent the night studying.
By the time my father had been in the hospital three weeks, the evenings had become almost an automatic routine. The dread of his possible death was gone. It was now a matter of waiting out the silence until he came home. And I waited out the silence by studying.
I began especially to study Talmud. In the past, I had done all my Talmud studying on Shabbat and during the morning preparation periods. Now I began to study Talmud in the evenings as well. I tried to finish my college work as quickly as I could, then I would turn to the passage of Talmud we were studying wit
h Rav Gershenson. I would study it carefully, memorize it, find the various commentaries— those which were not printed in the Talmud itself could always be found in my father’s library—and memorize them. I tried to anticipate Rav Gershenson’s tangled questions. And then I began to do something I had never done before with the Talmud I studied in school. After I was done memorizing the text and the commentaries, I began to go over the text again critically. I checked the Talmudic cross-references for parallel texts and memorized whatever differences I found. I took the huge volumes of the Palestinian Talmud from my father’s library—the text we studied in school was the Babylonian Talmud—and checked its parallel discussions just to see how it differed from the discussions in the Babylonian Talmud. I worked carefully and methodically, using everything my father had taught me and a lot of things I now was able to teach myself. I was able to do all of this in real depth because of Rav Gershenson’s slow-paced method of teaching. And by doing all of this, I was able to anticipate most of Rav Gershenson’s questions. I also became more and more certain of when he would call on me again.
He had never called on me since that day in October. And it was now the middle of February. As a result of my night sessions with Talmud, I had pulled ahead of the class by at least five or six days and was tangled in one of the most complicated discussions I had ever encountered. The complication was caused not only by the Talmud text itself, which seemed filled with gaps, but by the commentaries that struggled to explain it. The text consisted of nine lines. One of the commentaries on the text ran to two and a half pages, another ran to four pages. Neither was very clear. A third commentary, however, explained the text in six lines. The explanation was terse, clipped, and simple. The only thing wrong with it was that it seemed not to be based on the text it was explaining. A later commentary tried to reconcile the three commentaries by the method of pilpul, the result being a happy one for someone who enjoyed pilpul but quite strained as far as I was concerned. It looked to be a hopeless situation.
As we came closer and closer to this text, I became more and more convinced that Rav Gershenson was going to call on me to read and explain it. I didn’t quite know why I was convinced of that; I just knew that I was.
I began painfully to unravel the puzzle. I did it in two ways. First, in the traditional way, by memorizing the text and the commentaries, and then inventing all sorts of questions that Rav Gershenson might ask me. I would ride the trolley, walk the streets, or lie in bed—and ask myself questions. Second* in the way my father had taught me, by attempting to find or reconstruct the correct text, the text the commentator who had offered the simple explanation must have had before him. The first way was relatively simple; it was a matter of brute memorization. The second way was tortuous. I searched endlessly through all the cross-references and all the parallel passages in the Palestinian Talmud. When I was done, I had four different versions of the text on my hands. I now had to reconstruct the text upon which the simple commentary had been based. I did it by working backward, using the commentary as a base, then asking myself what passage among the four versions the commentator could have had before him as he wrote the commentary. It was painstaking work, but I finally thought I had it down right. It had taken hours and hours of precious time, but I was satisfied I had the correct text, the only text that really made sense. I had done it this way only to satisfy myself. When Rav Gershenson called on me, I would, of course, only use the first method of explanation. When my father returned from the hospital, I would show him what I had done with the second method. I felt very proud of my accomplishment.
Three days later, we came to that passage in our Talmud class, and for the second time that year Rav Gershenson called out my name and asked me to read and explain.
The class was deathly silent. Some of my friends had told me earlier that they dreaded being called on for that passage; they hadn’t been able to make any sense at all out of it and the commentaries were impossible. I was a little frightened, too, but very eager to show off what I had learned. When I heard my name called, I felt myself tingle with a mixture of fear and excitement, as if a tiny electric shock had gone through my body. Most of the students had been waiting apprehensively to hear who would be asked to read. They had sat staring down at their texts, afraid to meet Rav Gershenson’s eyes. Now they were all looking at me, even Danny was looking at me, and from one of the students at my right came a barely audible sigh of relief. I bent over my Talmud, put the index finger of my right hand below the first word of the passage, and began to read.
Every Talmudic passage is composed of what, for the sake of convenience, might best be called thought units. Each thought unit is a separate stage of the total discussion that makes up the passage. It might consist of a terse statement of law, or a question on the statement, an answer to the question, a brief or lengthy commentary on a Biblical verse, and so on. The Talmud contains no punctuation marks, and it is not always a simple matter to determine where a thought unit begins and ends; occasionally, a passage will have a tight, organic flow to it which makes breaking it up into thought units difficult and somewhat arbitrary. In most instances, however, the thought units are clearly discernible, and the decision on how to break up a passage into such units is a matter of common sense and a feel for the rhythm of the argument. The need to break up a passage into its thought units is simple enough. One has to decide when to stop reading and start explaining, as well as when to appeal to the commentaries for further explanation.
I had broken up the passage into its thought units as I had studied it, so I knew precisely at what points I would stop reading and begin my explanations. I read aloud a thought unit that consisted of a citation from the Mishnah—the Mishnah is the written text of rabbinic oral law; in form and content it is for the most part terse and clipped, a vast collection of laws upon which are based almost all the rabbinic discussions which, together with the Mishnah, compose the Talmud. When I came to the end of the Mishnaic thought unit, I stopped, and reviewed it briefly, together with the commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafists. I tried to be as clear as I could, and acted as if I myself were teaching the class rather than merely acting as a springboard for Rav Gershenson’s comments. I finished the explanation of the Mishnaic text and read the next thought unit, which consisted of another Mishnah found in a different tractate from the one we were now studying. This second Mishnah flatly contradicted the first. I explained the Mishnah carefully, showed why there was a contradiction, then read from the commentaries of Rashi and the Tosafists, both of which are printed on the same page as the Talmud text. I expected to be stopped at any moment by Rav Gershenson, but nothing happened. I continued reading and explaining, my eyes fixed on the text as I read and looking at Rav Gershenson as I explained. He let me continue without interruption. By the time I was four lines into the passage, the discussion had become so involved that I had already begun to appeal to one of the medieval commentaries that were not printed on the same page as the text but were rather placed separately at the end of the tractate. I kept a finger of my right hand on the appropriate place in the text, flipped the Talmud to where the commentary had been printed, and read from it. I then indicated that other commentaries had offered different explanations, and I cited them by heart because they were not found in the Talmud edition the class used. Having said that, I returned to the passage and continued to read. When I raised my eyes to explain the thought unit I had just read, I saw that Rav Gershenson had sat down—the first time since I had come into the class that he was sitting during a shiur. He was holding his head in the palms of his hands, the elbows on the open Talmud in front of him, and listening intently. As I continued with my explanation of the thought unit I had just read, I glanced at my wristwatch and discovered to my amazement that I had been talking for almost an hour and a half without interruption. I had to utilize all the commentaries this time and was able to finish explaining the thought unit a moment before the three o’clock bell sounded. Rav Gershenson said nothin
g. He just sat there and dismissed the class with a wave of his hand.
The next day he called on me again, and I continued to read and explain. I spent two hours on seven words, and again sometime during the session he sat down, with his head in the palms of his hands. He said not a single word. The bell caught me in the middle of a lengthy explanation of the four-page commentary, and when he called on me again the third day I read the seven words quickly, briefly went through my explanations of the day before, then continued where I had stopped.
Between the third and fourth day, my mood jumped back and forth erratically from wild exhilaration to gloomy apprehension. I knew I was doing well, otherwise Rav Gershenson would have stopped me, but I kept wishing he would say something and not just stand or sit in complete silence.
Some of the Hasidic students in the class were giving me mixed looks of awe and jealousy, as if they couldn’t restrain their feelings of admiration over how well I was doing but at the same time were asking themselves how someone like me, a Zionist and the son of a man who wrote apikorsische articles, could possibly know Talmud so well. Danny, though, seemed absolutely delighted over what was happening. He never looked at me while I read and explained, but I could see him nodding his head and smiling as I went through my explanations. And Rav Gershenson remained silent and impassive, listening intently, his face expressionless, except for an occasional upward curving along the corners of his lips whenever I clarified a particularly difficult point. By the end of the third day, it began to be something of a frustrating experience. I wished he would at least say or do something, nod his head, smile, even catch me at a mistake— anything but that awful silence.
