I discovered The Chosen when I was 14. This must have been around the time the lovely 1981 film adaptation came out, but I know I read the book first. I was visiting my grandparents in Los Angeles, and I curled up on their couch to read Chaim Potok’s 1967 tale of two Jewish boys living in 1940s Williamsburg. My own neighborhood in Honolulu, with its plumeria trees and mynah birds, was a far cry from Potok’s yeshivas and city playgrounds, so the Brooklyn setting seemed exotic to me. Within pages, I was swept away by this Jewish novel beginning with a ferocious softball game.
Perhaps you read The Chosen years ago as well. Perhaps you read it as a child. As you may recall, narrator Reuven Malter is an Orthodox boy playing second base and pitcher for his day school softball team. Literally opposing Reuven is Danny Saunders, a Hasidic youth who bats for “the small yeshiva established by his father.” Both Reuven and Danny wear “skullcaps,” both learn Talmud and pray daily. However, Reuven’s father, David, is raising him in what we’d now call Modern or even Open Orthodoxy. David Malter is a scholar who writes biblical criticism and advocates the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. In contrast, Danny’s father, Reb Saunders, is raising his son to take his place as unquestioned spiritual leader of a small Hasidic sect. Reb Saunders and his followers are mystical, separatist, and anti-Zionist. Saunders believes that redemption requires prayer not politics; a secular Jewish state is sacrilege. He declares, “When the Messiah comes, we will have Eretz Yisroel, a Holy Land, not a land contaminated by Jewish goyim.”
While Reuven and his teammates wear ordinary American clothes, Danny and his team take the field in black trousers and white shirts. Their hair is cropped short except for their peyyes,and they play hard. Reuven’s friend calls the Hasidic boys murderers. Danny calls the boys on Reuven’s team heretics, apikorsim. With a killer swing of the bat, Danny hits a line drive right back at Reuven, breaking his glasses and nearly blinding him. But in the aftermath of this dangerous game, the boys become close friends. I recognized this friendship as remarkable when I read The Chosen years ago. Rereading the novel in these fraught times, the bond seems miraculous.
In today’s America, many Hasidic Jews live in siloed communities. The thought of a yeshiva like Danny’s playing softball against a Modern Orthodox day school like Reuven’s — literally being in the same league — is even stranger today than it might have been 80 years ago. So is the thought of the two becoming classmates, as they do, at Hirsch College, a stand-in for Yeshiva University. For the scion of a Hasidic dynasty to attend such an institution would be a scandal for his community. Yes, Danny is exceptional in his brilliance and curiosity. Yes, he pushes his parents to let him go to college. What marks The Chosen as fiction is that Potok imagines a critical mass of Hasidic boys attending Hirsch College with him.
In a turn that seems even more far-fetched today, Chaim Potok reveals that the boys become friends because their fathers allow it. David Malter encourages Reuven to befriend Danny, and after some initial testing, Reb Saunders supports Danny’s friendship with Reuven. The fathers do not meet in person, but they know each other’s work. They stand opposed when it comes to the future of the Jewish people, the divine status of Scripture, and the role of God in the world. Even so, they respect each other. “Reb Saunders is a great man,” says Reuven’s father. “Your father is a great scholar,” Reb Saunders tells Reuven in turn. What develops is the mediated communication of two men through their sons.
Throughout The Chosen, Potok explores the depth and difficulties inherent in communicating without words. Most dramatically, Reb Saunders refuses to speak to Danny except when they are learning Torah. The rabbi has decided to raise his brilliant son in silence so that he might experience suffering and learn humility. This aspect of The Chosen rang false when I first read the novel. Raising a child in silence seemed like something out of a fairy tale. At 14, I could not imagine a father refusing to speak to his son — especially if he was worried that his child was drifting away.
Critic that I was, and already an aspiring writer, I finished reading The Chosen and told my mother, “Raising your son in silence would never happen. I would never write about a family that way. And then the whole scene with the rabbi explaining that he made his son suffer for his own good and his son accepting his decision — that doesn’t work. If I write a novel about a father who stops speaking to his son, the son won’t forgive his father, ever.”
My mother, who grew up in Flatbush, looked surprised, a little offended, but also bemused as she responded, “Well, we’ll see what you can do.”
When I grew up, I did write a novel in which a rabbi and his estranged son speak for the last time and do not reconcile. In Kaaterskill Falls, published in 1998, I push back against what seemed like an unrealistic premise in The Chosen. Years later, I remain unconvinced by Reb Saunders’s paternal silence. The conceit betrays a sentimentality on Potok’s part, an exoticism of Hasidic Jews and their spirituality. Reb Saunders’s fear for his brilliant son and his almost superstitious desire to humble Danny don’t jibe well with the carefully observed scenes of Jewish life that Potok develops. The reader wonders along with Reuven: How can a father be so cruel? Even Reuven’s father is shocked, identifying Reb Saunders’s behavior with a story from the Old Country. “Once in Russia I heard something,” David Malter says, “but I did not believe it.” Reb Saunders’s silence is extreme, mystical, folkloric, the gooey romantic core of a realist novel.
What I do find compelling is Potok’s notion that silence allows space for a different kind of conversation. That fathers who don’t speak face-to-face might allow their sons to grow up together and learn together. This permission to engage appeals to me, and yet, I wonder, is dialogue across such difference possible? In Israel, religious and political differences threaten to tear the country apart. Haredi Jews live in the Holy Land, but they insist on special status that includes draft exemptions for their sons. While Israel is at war, a tiny number of Haredi Jews have enlisted, but their rabbis oppose any military service. Leaders of the Haredi political party Agudat Yisrael continually leverage their threat to bring down the government if the Knesset drafts their children, while those from religious Zionist and secular families protest that their children are fighting and dying to defend the nation. Perhaps the bond between Reuven and Danny is a romantic notion too.
To his credit, Potok, who was a Conservative rabbi and later received a doctorate in philosophy, explores political, demographic, and spiritual divisions. Danny is Reuven’s best friend, but he won’t eat at Reuven’s house. Reb Saunders admires David Malter’s textual skill but bemoans his methodology. “Ah, what your father writes! Criticism. Scientific criticism.” Strikingly, Potok dramatizes the conflict between religious Zionists and Hasidic anti-Zionists at Hirsch College when Israel declares independence. “In the lunchroom one day, one of the Hasidim accused a member of the Revisionist youth group” — Zionists who supported the Irgun — “of being worse than Hitler. Hitler had only succeeded in destroying the Jewish body, he shouted in Yiddish, but the Revisionists were trying to destroy the Jewish soul.”
Today, Jews on American college campuses continue to fight about Israel. The ground has shifted since the 1940s, but the intra-Jewish conflict remains, as does the weaponization of the Holocaust against the Jewish nation. Some young Jews declare that Israel has a right to exist and to defend itself. Others condemn Israel as racist, imperialist, and genocidal. Beyond college, assimilated Jews are more assimilated than ever, while yeshivish Jews strive to insulate themselves from secular life. Of course, there are secular Jews who seek a connection with Judaism, and there are Haredi Jews who engage with the secular world, but the chasm is vast, and the Jewish community seems more fractured than ever. How poignant to return to the pages of The Chosen. Here we join Reuven and Danny as they enter each other’s worlds. We catch Reuven’s excitement at Reb Saunders’s table as a Talmudic discussion takes flight. We hear a Brooklyn shtiebel humming with prayer. We thrill with Danny as he discovers a portal to science, literature, and history in the public library.
Potok shows how friendship makes this magic possible, how we might learn and grow if we stop shouting long enough to listen. In this way, The Chosen works as a parable. Consider other Jewish American novels of the 1960s. Saul Bellow’s 1964 Herzog crackles with manic energy. Philip Roth’s 1969 Portnoy’s Complaint disgusts and dazzles. These are audacious, formally inventive novels about secular Jews chafing against the world of their fathers. Chaim Potok’s project is quite different. His is an earnest fable about the religiously committed. His story is not meant to scandalize but to instruct. Roth and Bellow write about Jewish neuroses and identity crises. They dramatize performative, explosive, rebellious masculinity. In contrast, Potok writes about Jewish tradition. He explores conscientious masculinity grounded in self-discipline, scholarship, religious ritual, and community. The violence that begins The Chosen on a softball field is startling and scary, but it’s the aftermath that matters to Potok. This is a novel about learning to forgive, overcoming animosity, and the shift from anger to understanding. “Who is a strong man? He who conquers his evil inclination,” says Pirkei Avot (4:1).
At times, Potok the educator hinders Potok the novelist. David Malter becomes the author’s mouthpiece explaining the origins of Hasidism to Reuven in a lecture lasting eight pages. “What a lecture it has been,” David says when he is nearly done, and it’s true. Potok has stopped his novel to lecture the reader. At other times, Potok succeeds in revealing tradition to his readers. His characters pray and we understand the stakes — that the rhythms of prayer direct and shape their lives. His characters observe Shabbat and we experience its music. “I knew the melody and I joined in,” Reuven says of songs at the Shabbat table. “I joined in, hesitantly at first, then strongly, swaying back and forth. At the end of the song, another melody was begun, a light, fast wordless tune.” Potok takes Jewish life seriously, neither mocking believers nor apologizing for their beliefs. As a result, his work is about Judaism as a religion, not just a culture.
Potok lacks the wit and genre-busting artistry of Bellow and Roth. He is no stylist and tends to repeat himself. “I was sad and depressed,” Reuven says, describing his mental state in the hospital. In chapter 8, Reuven meets Danny’s sister and describes her as having “dark, vivacious eyes.” Then in chapter 12, Reuven says, “Danny’s sister, I noticed for the first time, was a very pretty girl with dark eyes and long dark hair combed back into a single braid, and vivacious hands.” This is quick and careless writing. (Where was Potok’s editor?) But if he is not a great writer, Potok is a captivating teacher with a great subject. In his best scenes, Potok draws us into a warm and compelling Jewish world. Perhaps this is why his work continues to appeal to us — especially to children, to students and their teachers.
At its core, The Chosen has less in common with its Jewish-American peers than it does with one of its non-Jewish contemporaries — Harper Lee’s 1960 To Kill a Mockingbird, another gently didactic novel often taught in school. Like Lee, Potok employs a motherless young narrator with an aphoristic father. “You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view,” says Atticus Finch. “A man must fill his life with meaning,” says David Malter. Scout grows up attending church in a small town in the South while Reuven davens in a big city in the North. However, they learn the same lessons. The world is unjust. Even so, there are good people in it. People are cruel, but they can be generous too. We can love instead of hate. Joy, curiosity, and courage combat fear and prejudice. Simple messages, as important now as when they were written. Important to hear, and difficult to practice. How do we fight for justice and for truth? Where do we look for goodness? Perhaps, as Potok and Lee suggest, we must start small. Within our own communities we must learn to love our neighbor.
Many have written about what it means to call the Jews a people chosen, consecrated by God. As a rabbi, Potok wrote extensively about Jewish history and spirituality, but in The Chosen, he uses fiction for what fiction can do. With narrative sympathy, Potok asks us to imagine Jews choosing each other. “The Talmud says that a person should do two things for himself,” Reuven’s father tells him. “One is to acquire a teacher. Do you remember the other?” Reuven answers, “Choose a friend.”
