I first read The Chosen, the wonderful novel by Chaim Potok,
in the summer of 1983 after completing my first year of law school. Potok’s novel captured my imagination and
opened my eyes to a particular time, culture and religious tradition – Orthodox
and Hasidic Judaism in 1940’s Brooklyn – that was worlds apart from my upbringing
in the 1960s and 1970s as the son of a Lutheran minister in suburban New
Jersey. In ways that resonate with me still, I was profoundly moved by the
story, its rich and complex characters, and the internal conflicts that
tormented the novel’s main protagonist, Danny Saunders.
Danny was the son of Reb Saunders, the Rebbe and spiritual
leader (tzaddik) of a dynastic Hasidic sect in Brooklyn who had a deeply loyal
following among his people. Danny was in line to someday succeed Reb Saunders
as the Rebbe, but he had secretly developed an interest in psychology and
literature, Freud and Dostoyevsky and Joyce, subjects and books that were
off-limits to the son of a Hasidic tzaddik and serious student of Talmud. Danny
is deeply torn between his devotion and loyalty to his father, whom he greatly
loves and respects, and his desire to break free from the bonds of tradition.
He wants desperately to explore the wider world around him.
Danny develops a close friendship with Reuven Malter, a
fellow student who observed a more liberal form of Orthodox Judaism and whose
father had quietly introduced Danny to books on psychology and literature and
Western secular thought. At one point in the story, Danny explains to Reuven
his torment:
Imagine being locked in a cell where you can see the whole world and everything you want is right outside the window, but you’re not allowed to look or think or move and you are supposed to stay right there, trapped, just like that, your whole life. Do you have any idea what that feels like?
… How can I ask questions, and then ignore the answers? How can I read Freud and then ignore everything I learn? . . . What if there are some points of view so contradictory that they can’t be reconciled? What then?
Danny’s expressed anguish hit home with me, as I had begun
to experience internal discord over my own guilt-ridden spiritual and intellectual
journey. My increasingly dispassionate, rational understanding of faith and
religion was causing me to question deeply embedded assumptions and accepted
truths of the first two decades of my life. I felt myself drifting away from
the comfortable and confined Christianity of my upbringing into a more humanistic
encounter with the world. Like Danny, I was torn between two competing forces –
love for family and respect for the religious roots of my upbringing versus my
compelling need to explore a different path and seek answers to longstanding questions
and doubts.
Despite the teachings and creeds of conventional
Christianity, I had believed for a long time that no one religion possesses
absolute truths. Even at a young age, I did not accept that Christianity offers
the exclusive formula for achieving eternal salvation, if such a thing exists.
I believed then, and believe now, that there are many equally valid paths to an
internal peace with God. Unlike Danny
Saunders in The Chosen, however, I was fortunate to have a father who was open
to conversation, and who possessed a liberal attitude and open mind on such
topics. My dad was much more like David Malter, Reuven’s kind and loving
father. But my psychological anguish was significant to me, for there was only
so much doubt I was willing to reveal to my father. I greatly respected his
life’s work, which was founded on years of theological education, decades of
service to the Lutheran church and to bearing witness to his sincere and
well-studied religious convictions. But I could not dismiss the questions that
Danny asked: How can I ask questions, and then ignore the answers? What if
there are some points of view so contradictory that they can’t be reconciled?
Reading The Chosen did not resolve my internal conflict, but
it helped me place things in perspective and understand that my concerns were not
unique to me. After The Chosen, I was immediately drawn to My Name is Asher Lev,
which became my second favorite Potok novel, and to their respective sequels – The
Promise and The Gift of Asher Lev. I eventually absorbed Davita’s Harp and The
Book of Lights, each of which further sparked my desire to learn of other
cultures, experiences, and time periods, from Communist resistance to fascism
in the 1930s during the Spanish Civil War, to a Jewish Army chaplain’s experiences
in Korea and Japan in the 1950s following the Korean War. I would later enjoy
the film and theatrical productions of some of these works, most recently in The
Collected Plays of Chaim Potok, all of which explore, in a variety of contexts,
the tensions between traditional Jewish values and secular culture.
Potok’s stories are universally appealing because almost all
of us, at some point in our lives, are conflicted by familial expectations and
our individual passions and desires; between the religion of our childhood and
the mind expanding knowledge offered by exposure to other cultures, religions,
and ideas; to science and philosophy, education and travel. Potok’s books and
plays contend persuasively that there exist no absolute truths, but many
co-existing truths.
In the introduction to The Collected Plays of Chaim Potok, daughter
Rena Potok suggests that “we cannot confront the core of another culture if we
believe that the core of our own culture holds the singular truth;” and that “to
encounter the core of another culture from within the heart of our own, we must
believe in the inherent existence of multiple, equally valid ways of being in
the world. Once we let go of the idea of a single ‘Truth’ – once we can see
another culture’s truth as equally valid and rich as our own – then we are
primed for core-to-core culture confrontation.” It is for this reason that Potok’s
characters, however different their backgrounds and experiences from our own, are
so relatable. His stories express an ongoing struggle to understand the
humanity of others and the truths of the world they inhabit.
In The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, Potok’s protagonists
come from insular and strictly confining worlds of rituals and tradition, from
which many expectations are placed on them. And yet, they long to experience
the broader, more expansive world of art and literature, philosophy and
psychology. They are compelled to question and search for meaning beyond the narrowly
defined conventions of their families, to which they are devoutly loyal. They
love their families and do not want to disappoint them. But they see the world
differently than their fathers do, and they are compelled to carve their own
paths in life.
As Rena Potok explained in The Collected Plays, Potok expressed
“the thoughts and feelings of individuals who are trying to come to terms with
two universes of discourse that they love passionately, and that are, at times,
antithetical to one another.” Like Danny Saunders, Potok himself was raised in
a strictly Orthodox Hasidic household and discovered early in life that “the
boundaries of his world could not contain his growing passion for aesthetic and
intellectual knowledge and experience.” Like Asher Lev, Potok was committed to
his religious traditions, while also committed to his artistic and intellectual
pursuits unrelated to the study of Torah and Talmud.
The characters in Potok’s novels and plays are drawn to the
world of Western secular humanism – to critical thinking, creativity and
expression separated from religious dogma – which ignite their passions and
pull them in opposite directions from their expected destinies. Potok’s stories
are deeply Jewish, embedded in the traditions of a narrow segment of Orthodox
Judaism practiced by a small minority of American Jews, a world to which most
of his readers (Jews and non-Jews alike) have not been exposed. But the themes explored
in those stories, expressed through cultures and settings entirely different
from our own, resonate with audiences of all backgrounds.
We connect with Potok’s stories through the compelling portrayals of his characters – we care about them and want to know how their conflicts are resolved. The reader experiences Potok’s longing to reconcile the
conflicts and heal the anguish experienced by his characters. In his play Out
of the Depths, Potok’s protagonist articulates a message that is fundamental to
Potok’s narratives:
I believe we should respect all the expressions of the culture, all the people – the religious, the secular, the intellectual, the factory worker, the shoemaker. I wish to bring the people together. Why is it necessary, this divisiveness? Does it make us stronger, wiser, kinder, healthier? Why not reconciliation? Are we that weak? Are we that frightened? Is there no room among us for all sorts of ideas?
These pearls of wisdom are interspersed throughout Potok’s
stories. He believed that the essence of life is found in acts of kindness,
empathy, and understanding, and in our search for meaning. In the theatrical
version of The Chosen, David Malter (Reuven’s father), explains to his son that
the choices we make in life have profound consequences:
God said: "You have toiled and labored, and now you are worthy of rest." Worthy of rest. We do not live forever. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye. So then why do we live? What value is there to our life if it is nothing more than the blink of an eye? . . . The span of a life is nothing, but the man who lives may be something if he fills his life with meaning. Meaning is not automatically given to life. We must choose. And if we choose to fill our lives with meaning, then perhaps when we die we too will be worthy of rest.
To simply meander through life without thinking, reflecting,
questioning and learning is not worthy of the human endeavor. “Merely to live,
to exist,” Malter says to his son, “what sense is there in that? A fly also
lives.”
The stories of Chaim Potok will always be special to me, for
they helped me better understand the internal conflicts that all of us, on some
level, struggle to reconcile during key moments of our lives – the pull of tradition
versus the forces of modernity; loyalty to family and convention versus the freedom
to think and act on one’s own terms; the incongruity between religious dogma and
contemporary liberalism. Potok allowed us to respect our surface differences on
equal terms while recognizing how alike we all are at our core, how our dreams
and aspirations overlap, and how the search for a meaningful life transcends
religion, backgrounds, and the origins of our birth.
As I continue to search for answers and reconcile my own
internal conflicts, I will be forever grateful to Chaim Potok for expressing in
words and stories that I am not alone.