The Chosen: Chapters 5–7

The hydrangea bush—or snowball bush, as we called it—on our lawn glowed in the sunlight, and I stared at it. I had never really paid any attention to it before. Now it seemed suddenly luminous and alive.

It was strewn with papers now, and my father was working intently over his old Underwood typewriter.

He sat there now, wearing his small, black skullcap and pecking at the typewriter with his index fingers, a thin, frail man in his fifties, with gray hair, gaunt cheeks, and spectacles.

It is a tragedy that happens often to anyone who acts as a buffer.

The Jews were helping the nobility, but in doing so, in collecting taxes from the serfs and peasants, for example, they were building up against themselves the hatred of these oppressed classes.

This community belonged to Poland, and the Polish nobles, who were Catholics, treated the Cossacks who lived there with cruelty and contempt.

When he spoke again, his voice was low, tense, subdued.

They prayed and fasted and did penance—all in an effort to hasten his coming.

But it was not the Talmud that he studied, it was the Kabbalah, the books of Jewish mysticism.

Before the end of that century, about half of eastern European Jewry consisted of Hasidim, as his followers were called, pious ones.

But even his opposition could not stop Hasidism from growing. It flourished and became a great movement in Jewish life.

But even after he learned German he was not satisfied because the reading of secular books was forbidden.

Finally, at the age of twenty-five, he abandoned his wife and child and after many hardships came to Berlin where he joined a group of philosophers, read Aristotle, Maimonides, Spinoza, Leibniz, Hume, and Kant, and began to write philosophical books.

It is astonishing how he was able to gobble up complicated philosophical treatises with such ease.

The prayers went slowly; the man at the podium had a fine voice and waited until each portion of the service had been completed by everyone before he began to chant.

Someone was playing a piano nearby, and the music drifted slowly in and out of my mind like the ebb and flow of ocean surf.

His voice had a strange, almost wistful quality to it.

The second son was ordained at the age of seventeen, and by the time he was twenty had achieved an awesome reputation as a Talmudist.

Two months later, his wife, his son, and his eighteen-month-old daughter were shot to death by a band of marauding Cossacks, one of the many bandit gangs that roamed through Russia during the period of chaos that followed the revolution.

“My father told me about Hasidism last night. He said it was a fine idea until some of the tzaddikim began to take advantage of their followers. He wasn’t very complimentary.”

A long serrated silver knife lay alongside the plate.

“I'm my father’s son, remember? I’m the inheritor of the dynasty. Number one on our catechism: Treat the son as you would the father, because one day the son will be the father.”

The passage was a difficult one, he said, gesticulating with his hands as he spoke, the thumb of his right hand describing wide circles as he emphasized certain key points of interpretation, and both men had been correct; one had unknowingly adopted the interpretation of the Me’iri, the other of the Rashba.

The noise in the synagogue had become very loud, almost a din, and the room seemed to throb and swell with the scraping chairs and the talking men.

I had the feeling for a moment I was in the carnival I had seen recently in a movie, with its pushing, shoving, noisy throng, and its shouting, arm-waving vendors and pitchmen.

Nullify thy will before His will that He may nullify the will of others before thy will.

He walked slowly, his hands clasped behind his back, and as he came closer to me I could see that the part of his face not hidden by the beard looked cut from stone, the nose sharp and pointed, the cheekbones ridged, the lips full, the brow like marble etched with lines, the sockets deep, the eyebrows thick with black hair and separated by a single wedge Iike a furrow plowed into a naked field, the eyes dark, with pinpoints of white light playing in them as they do in black stones in the sun.

Do we not say every day, ‘Are not all the mighty as naught before Thee, the men of renown as though they had not been, the wise as if without knowledge, and the men of understanding as if without discernment’?

Do we not say every day, ‘Are not all the mighty as naught before Thee, the men of renown as though they had not been, the wise as if without knowledge, and the men of understanding as if without discernment’?

Does not the great and holy Rabbi Yochanan son of Zakkai teach us, ‘If thou hast learnt much Torah, ascribe not any merit to thyself, for thereunto wast thou created’?

The world laughs at Torah! And if it does not kill us, it tempts us! It misleads us! It contaminates us! It asks us to join in its ugliness, its impurities, its abominations!

‘This world is like a vestibule before the world-to-come; prepare thyself in the vestibule, that thou mayest enter into the hall.’ The meaning is clear: The vestibule is this world, and the hall is the world-to-come.

Rabbi Joshua son of Levi teaches us, ‘Whoever does not labor in the Torah is said to be under the divine censure.'

He was saying this quietly, almost as if it were a litany.

I felt completely at ease, and I somewhat brazenly smiled and nodded, as if to indicate that I had enjoyed his words, or at least the gematriya part of his words.

Many of the quotes Reb Saunders had used had been from Pirkei Avos—or Avot, as my father had taught me to pronounce it, with the Sephardic rather than the Ashkenazic rendering of the Hebrew letter “tof.”

Pirkei Avot is a collection of Rabbinic maxims, and a chapter of it is studied by many Jews every Shabbat between Passover and the Jewish New Year.

His father asked how could the commentator have offered such an interpretation when in another passage in the Talmud he had said exactly the opposite, and Danny, very quietly, calmly, his fingers still playing with the rim of the paper plate, found a difference between the contradictory statements by quoting two other sources where one of the statements appeared in a somewhat different context, thereby nullifying the contradiction.

The Samson Raphael Hirsch Seminary and College was the only yeshiva in the United States that offered a secular college education.

My father did not particularly care for gematriya. He had once referred to it as nonsense numerology and had said that anything could be proved that way, all that had to be done was to shift letters around adroitly so as to make the values come out any way you wanted.