The Chosen: Chapters 13–14

I didn’t mix much with the Hasidim, but the extent to which they revered Danny was obvious to everyone.

But none of this made him too happy; none of it was able to offset his frustration over Professor Appleman, who, by the time the first semester ended, had him so thoroughly upset that he began to talk about majoring in some other subject.

“Did you ever get to like my father and his planned mistakes?” he asked testily.

Reb Saunders had stopped inserting deliberate errors into his Shabbat evening talks the week we had entered college, but the memory of it still rankled.

The one time I mentioned a Freudian theory in class, all I got out of Appleman was that dogmatic psychoanalysis was related to psychology as magic was related to science.

They are interested solely in confirming highly dubious theoretical hypotheses by the logic of analogy and induction, and make no attempt at refutation or intersubjective testing.

They are interested solely in confirming highly dubious theoretical hypotheses by the logic of analogy and induction, and make no attempt at refutation or intersubjective testing.

Professor Abraham Flesser was my logic teacher, an avowed empiricist and an enemy of what he called “Obscurantist Continental philosophies,” which, he explained, included everything that had happened in German philosophy from Fichte to Heidegger, with the exception of Vaihinger and one or two others.

Invariably, the headlines spurred him on to new bursts of Zionist activity and to loud, excited justification of the way he was driving himself in his fund-raising and speechmaking efforts in behalf of a Jewish state.

“I did not want to sound morbid. I only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist—what sense is there to it? A fly also lives.”

He was a short man, with round, pink features, always immaculately dressed, always smoking long, expensive cigars.

Now I was tempted to tell my father that Jack Rose was probably using his money to salve a bad conscience.

They dealt only with experimental data and were filled with graphs, charts, tables, photographs of devices for the measuring of auditory, visual, and tactile responses, and with mathematical translations of laboratory findings.

He told me that he wasn’t objecting to Freud’s conclusions as much as to his methodology.

“That’s the problem of induction in a nutshell,” I said. “How do you justify jumping from a few instances to a generalization?”

I enjoyed coaching him and learned a lot of experimental psychology. I found it fascinating, a lot more substantial and scientific than Freud had been, and a lot more fruitful in terms of expanding testable knowledge on how human beings thought and learned.

I never knew what time he went to bed, though his tired, stooped body and his haggard face made it clear that he was sleeping very little.

This latter group was composed of severely Orthodox Jews, who, like Reb Saunders, despised all efforts aimed at the establishment of a Jewish state prior to the advent of the Messiah.

A recent influx of Hungarian Jews into our neighborhood had swelled their ranks, and they formed a small but highly vocal element of the school’s student population.

Toward the middle of February, the various factions began to firm up their ranks as the entire spectrum of Zionist youth movements moved into the school in a drive for membership, the second such drive since I had entered the college.

The anti-Zionist students remained aloof, bitter, disdainful of our Zionism.

He remained aloof, however, never participating in the quarrels between the pro-Zionist and anti-Zionist groups.

I forced myself to concentrate on the logic problems, but somehow they seemed inconsequential to me.

I kept seeing my father standing at the rostrum in front of a vast empty hall, speaking to seats made vacant by the snow.

Silence was ugly, it was black, it leered, it was cancerous, it was death.

He disagreed with Reb Saunders, yes, but he would countenance no slander against his name or his position.

By the end of March, however, the leaflets had become inflammatory in tone, threatening excommunication to all in the neighborhood who displayed allegiance to Zionism, even at one point threatening to boycott neighborhood stores owned by Jews who contributed to, participated in, or were sympathetic with Zionist activities.

The answer was accepted and amplified by Rav Gershenson, thereby forestalling Danny’s poised hand.

The answer was accepted and amplified by Rav Gershenson, thereby forestalling Danny’s poised hand.

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.

A third commentary, however, explained the text in six lines. The explanation was terse, clipped, and simple.

The first way was relatively simple; it was a matter of brute memorization. The second way was tortuous.

It was painstaking work, but I finally thought I had it down right.

Most of the students had been waiting apprehensively to hear who would be asked to read.

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.

Between the third and fourth day, my mood jumped back and forth erratically from wild exhilaration to gloomy apprehension.

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.

Then I heard Rav Gershenson ask me whether I was satisfied with the late medieval commentary’s attempt at reconciliation.

I was suddenly a little frightened at the disparaging way I had uttered the word pilpul.

I answered that it was strained, that it attributed nuances to the various conflicting commentaries that were not there, and that, therefore, it really was not a reconciliation at all.