The Chosen: Chapters 8–12

I closed my eyes and went over the propositional calculus, trying to visualize the truth tables for conjunction, disjunction, equivalence, and material implication.

I tried to do some problems, but after a while it became complicated, I couldn’t remember all the deductive steps, and I stopped.

While the tzaddik cared for the conduct of the world, for the obtaining of heavenly grace, and especially for Israel’s preservation and glorification, his adherents had to cultivate three kinds of virtues.

It was their duty to draw nigh to him, to enjoy the sight of him, and from time to time to make pilgrimages to him.

"'...Further, they were to confess their sins to him. By these means alone could they hope for pardon from their iniquities.’ That means sins,” he told me.

It was also incumbent upon them to attend to his personal wants.

It seems like a return to the days of the priests of Baal, so vulgar and disgusting do these perversities appear.

How could a man like Dov Baer have the gall to fool other people into thinking that he could look inside their hearts and tell them what they were really like inside?

His sister was almost as tall as I, with dark, vivacious eyes and a face almost exactly like Danny’s, except that the sculptured lines were a good deal softer.

Danny’s bedroom was located exactly where my father’s bedroom was, the kitchen had been left intact—to serve the visiting dignitaries tea, Danny said with a grin—the bathroom was next to the kitchen, the study was where my father’s study was—except that one of its walls had been knocked out so that it also included what in our apartment, was my room—and the living room contained a long glass-topped conference table and leather chairs.

Our unconscious isn’t a nice place—I call it a place; it isn’t a place, really; the book I read says it’s more like a process—it isn’t a nice place at all. It’s full of repressed fears and hatreds, things that we’re afraid to bring out into the open.

I knew I could not match him and Danny in the breadth of their knowledge, but I wondered if I might not be able to keep up with them in terms of depth.

Rabbinic literature can be studied in two different ways, in two directions, one might say. It can be studied quantitatively or qualitatively—or, as my father once put it, horizontally or vertically.

The former involves covering as much material as possible, without attempting to wrest from it all its implications and intricacies; the latter involves confining oneself to one single area until it is exhaustively covered, and then going on to new material.

His face glowed with fierce pride and his head nodded wildly—the nod beginning from the waist and including the entire upper portion of his body, with the beard moving back and forth against his chest—each time he was forced to acquiesce to Danny’s rendition of a passage or to Danny’s incisive counter-questioning.

His face glowed with fierce pride and his head nodded wildly—the nod beginning from the waist and including the entire upper portion of his body, with the beard moving back and forth against his chest—each time he was forced to acquiesce to Danny’s rendition of a passage or to Danny’s incisive counter-questioning.

But I insisted, explained, cajoled, raised my voice, gestured with my hands, quoted whatever proof texts I could remember from the grammar book, and finally he accepted my explanations.

Our argument ended in a draw; we agreed that the passage was obscure and that as it stood it could be explained either way.

Danny found his father’s deliberate mistake easily, and I was able to follow the ensuing Talmudic discussion without too much difficulty, though I did not join in.

“I am happy Reb Saunders knows now about his son’s reading,” he said quietly, evading my question. “I was concerned about all this subterfuge.”

When I came home from school early Friday afternoon, Manya asked me if I was hungry, and I said yes, I could eat a horse, a kosher horse, of course, and she quickly put a lunch on the table.

In the beginning of the third week of July, my father’s research for the article he was writing made it necessary for him to travel to the library of the Jewish Theological Seminary in Manhattan.

Not only was the language still a problem but also the terminology and ideas he encountered were strange and bewildering to him.

He wasn’t making any headway at all.

“Angst” was “anxiety,” “Furcht” was “fear,” "Schreck” was “fright.” How was he supposed to know what the difference between “fear” and “fright” was?

He greeted me with a curt nod of his head and muttered something about not really being in the mood for Talmud now but we had to go up anyway.

He had needed something that would explain Freud’s technical terminology, that would clarify the various shades of meaning the German words had—and he had found this dictionary of psychological terms.

It was a cold, bitter winter in New York, bleak with the news of the fighting in the Ardennes, and at night, as I sat working at my desk, I could hear the radio in the kitchen where my father would be sitting with his war maps, following the news.

“Oh, no!” and our faculty advisor stood up and suggested that the meeting be adjourned.

Davey Cantor had said something about a cerebral hemorrhage.

I cried a long time. Then I slept fitfully.

My father, recuperating slowly and looking worn and weary, sat in his bed propped on pillows, and read the newspaper stories of the horrors that had occurred in those camps.

Danny was pale and seemed tense and distraught.

“Six million of our people have been slaughtered,” he went on quietly. “It is inconceivable. It will have meaning only if we give it meaning. We cannot wait for God.”

From the day I entered Reb Saunders’ house to the day I left to go with my father to our cottage near Peekskill where he was to convalesce, I was a warmly accepted member of Danny’s family.

Danny’s father was forever silent, withdrawn, his dark eyes turned inward, brooding, as if witnessing a sea of suffering he alone could see.

But he couldn’t stop reading him, he said, because it had become increasingly obvious to him that Freud had possessed an almost uncanny insight into the nature of man.

Did we know that Mr. Eden, though he had threatened the Nazis with retribution, hadn’t said a word about practical measures to save as many Jews as possible from what he knew would be their inevitable fate?

Did we know that Mr. Eden, though he had threatened the Nazis with retribution, hadn’t said a word about practical measures to save as many Jews as possible from what he knew would be their inevitable fate?

A secular Jewish state in my father’s eyes is a sacrilege, a violation of the Torah.