by Chaim Potok
He blinked his eyes and regarded me in silence. Slowly the gentleness seemed to ebb from his face; and then it was indeed my father’s face, with all the hardness I had so often seen in it over the years.
“We will have to break heads after the war,” he said in a low voice. “There will be no way out of it. Weizmann and the others will bow to the British and behave like gentlemen. Let them, the fools. We will have to smash heads.”
I stared out the window at a passing bus.
“It will be a beautiful apartment, Ruth,” came my aunt’s smooth, elegant voice. “You all deserve it after what you’ve been through.”
I looked at my uncle. The gentleness had returned to his face. He smiled. “He would surprise us all. Do you remember I said that?”
I thought I could remember and nodded.
“There will be other surprises,” said my uncle. “He is a clever man, my brother, once he finds an idea. Very clever. Let me help you unpack some of those cartons.”
We worked together for a while on cartons of books and papers. I had not looked for or seen the photograph of the armed men in the forest. I had lost interest in it. The cartons of books given to me by Mrs. Horowitz I shoved into the back of one of the two closets in the room I was to share with Alex.
In a very brief time the apartment was set up and we moved about in it as if we had lived there for years. Quickly, very quickly it seemed, the ash-gray bleakness of Washington Avenue, the dark alleyway, the cement back yards, the grinding noise of the elevated trains, quickly it all began to dim. There was not much in any of it worth remembering as I sat during our first week in that apartment gazing out of my window at the park and thinking of the summer that lay ahead.
There were many little synagogues in the neighborhood and two or three large ones. My father decided we would pray in the same synagogue attended by my uncle and cousin. It was an intimate place in a small detached house on Teller Avenue three blocks from where we lived. I prayed there on two successive Shabbat mornings and could not abide the gross errors that studded the Torah reading and made corpses of dozens of words. The Torah reader was an old white-bearded man. He had been reading for years and Torah reading was his tenured post in that little synagogue. He knew no grammar and had his own mysterious system of notes and tones. After the second Shabbat I told my father I could not stand it and would look around for another synagogue in which to pray.
“Why don’t you study Gemara while he reads the Torah?” Alex asked.
“You’re supposed to follow the Torah reading,” I said heatedly. “You’re not supposed to be doing anything else.”
“Okay, okay,” Alex said. “My religious brother.”
“It says so. You want to see it?”
“No. If you say it says so, then it says so.”
“How can you stand his reading, Papa?”
“I have heard worse Torah readers than that old man. If I am able to read the Torah at eighty-two I might also not care too much how I read it.”
“The people who listen might care.”
“Find another synagogue,” my father said. “I did not know Mr. Bader taught you to be such a fanatic about Torah reading.”
“I’m not a fanatic, Papa. He’s impossible to listen to.”
“All right. Go to another synagogue.”
I began attending other synagogues. In one, the Torah reader was fine but I could barely hear him over the loud conversations of the congregants. Three times during the Torah reading the rabbi, a man in his late twenties or early thirties, rose to appeal for silence and cited the religious requirement that the Torah reading be followed with scrupulous care. The conversations about the war, health, family, business were blithely resumed each time a moment after he returned to his seat. I did not think I would go back.
“I’ve never seen anything like it,” I told my father later during our Shabbat dinner. “It’s a marketplace, not a synagogue.”
“How many synagogues have you seen, David?”
“I’m beginning to miss the yeshiva synagogue. Peace and quiet and a good Torah reader.”
“I do not miss the yeshiva synagogue,” said my father in a hardening tone.
“I wish Mr. Bader were reading the Torah around here somewhere.”
I saw my mother give me an uneasy look from her side of our dining room table.
“For all I know, Mr. Bader may be reading the Torah in Lisbon or Istanbul these days,” said my father a little grimly.
“I’ve never heard such talking during a Torah reading,” I said.
“People work hard all week,” my father said. “They have very little time to see their friends. So they talk in the synagogue during the Torah reading.”
“It was a desecration, Papa.”
“The people who talked committed a wrong. Do not make more of it than it was.”
“Mr. Bader taught me to—”
He cut me short with an abrupt wave of his hand. “I know what Mr. Bader taught you. I asked him to teach it to you. Find yourself another synagogue and do not make such a fuss.”
“The way the rabbi kept pleading with them to be quiet and they just went on talking.”
I saw Alex and my mother exchange an uneasy glance. Before my father could reply, Alex broke into the conversation with an account of the beating a boy in our yeshiva had suffered at the hands of some goyim that week, and we lost the thread of our talk about Torah reading.
The following Shabbat I went to a large synagogue on the other side of the park from where we lived. The Torah reader was fairly good. The rabbi, a balding man in his early forties, preached in a high-voiced frenzy. He juggled Talmudic passages with dazzling ease and exhorted his congregants to ever-increasing devotion to Torah-true Jewish life. Brilliant morning sunlight came through a sliver of window above the Ark. I could see branches of trees with broad green leaves against the blue radiance of a clear sky. I turned away from the window and the gesticulations of the rabbi and gazed down at the volume of Mikraot Gedolot on my lap; the synagogue made the volumes available to its congregants together with the prayer book, and at the end of the service you placed them both in the small rack in front of you. I let my eyes wander idly through the words of Ibn Ezra. I knew them by heart. I knew the page by heart. I knew it all by heart, all the precious pages my fingers now touched. I looked up at the podium in the center of the synagogue where the Torah reader had stood earlier that morning chanting the sacred words of God to Moses at Sinai. I imagined I could see myself at the podium now, thin, short, face very pale from a recent illness, myself as I had stood reading the Torah when I had become a bar mitzvah six years ago. A boy. Dark suit, white shirt, dark tie. Swaying slowly as he chanted the words of the Torah from the scroll that lay open before him. The story of Joseph and his brothers and the dreams and the pit and slavery. And the sense of the hushed congregation all around me, following the words. My father standing beside me and reciting the opening blessing over the Torah. “Amen,” from the congregation. “Amen,” I said, and took up the chant where I had stopped when I was done reading for the second man who had come up to the Torah, an old friend of my father’s from the days when we had lived near the zoo. “And it came to pass, when Joseph was come unto his brethren, that they stripped Joseph of his coat …” I chanted and stopped and listened to my father recite the closing blessing. My father stepped aside. A moment later my uncle stood beside me next to my father. He recited the blessing. I took a deep breath. My knees were a little weak but I felt a strange soaring exultation. I was reading the Torah! I knew it by heart, had known it by heart for weeks; but you are not permitted to read the Torah in the synagogue from memory alone; so I fixed my eyes on the black squarish unpointed hand-lettered words on the parchment and read in my high thin voice. “And it came to pass at that time, that Judah went down from his brethren, and turned in to a certain Adullamite, whose name was Hirah.” I heard my uncle murmuring the text as I read. Out of the corner of my eye I saw my father, his fac
e empty of expression, following the reading in the Chumash he held in his hands. The synagogue was very still. I read on. “And Judah saw there a daughter of a certain Canaanite whose name was Shua …” And I read on to the end of the story of Judah and Tamar, my voice trying to match the rise and fall of the drama of the text. I was perspiring. It seemed to me I had never heard the synagogue so silent. I did not look around as my uncle recited the closing blessing and the fifth man, another of my father’s friends from the Am Kedoshim Society, was called to the Torah. He recited the opening blessing. I chanted the account of Joseph in the house of Potiphar. And still there was that silence in the synagogue, as if I were alone, as if mannequins were crowding the seats all around me. Barely a cough. Only the silence and my voice in the silence chanting of Joseph and the wife of Potiphar. A sixth man was called to the Torah, and I chanted of Joseph in prison; a seventh man, and I chanted of Joseph deciphering dreams, and concluded, exultantly, with the words, “Yet the chief butler did not remember Joseph, but forgot him.” And a stir like the winds in the forest behind the cottage we had once owned moved through the congregation. I saw my father’s face, flushed, proud, slightly incredulous. I scanned the balcony where the women sat and saw my mother. She sat staring at me, her mouth open. All around her women talked to her but she seemed not to be listening. She had upon her face a luminous look that seemed blinding to me, a look that for the briefest of moments washed away the dead years; and I loved her then, loved her so very much, wanted so very much to walk down from the podium and go upstairs to the balcony and embrace her and say to her that all the pain and all the darkness had been worthwhile. Worthwhile, Mama. Wasn’t it worthwhile? I tried to make it worthwhile for all of us, all the nights of fever, all the horror, all the nightmares, made worthwhile in a Torah reading by a boy who was becoming a bar mitzvah. But I remained on the podium and recited my own blessing over the Torah and read my own portion, the Maftir, repeating the last four verses of the portion I had read before. Then I recited the closing blessings and the Torah was lifted from the podium and the congregation rose and proclaimed, “This is the Torah which Moses set before the children of Israel, according to the commandment of the Lord by the hand of Moses.” And then I stood alone at the podium chanting the prophetic reading from Amos. And when I was done a rain of candy poured from the balcony and voices shouted “Mazel tov! Mazel tov!” and I saw my father surrounded by his friends and I came down from the podium and people were shaking my hand and then my father held me to him in a strong embrace; I felt his hard muscular body against mine; and he kissed me; and later my mother held me to her, gently, tenderly, and I felt her tears on my cheek and she stroked my face. Was it worthwhile, Mama? For all the years. Was it worthwhile?
The rabbi raised his voice very suddenly to make a point and I looked away from the podium and closed my eyes. The palms of my hands were cold and sweaty. My head felt damp. I found the strident voice suddenly unendurable. I opened the volume of Mikraot Gedolot, then closed it. I was unable to concentrate on the words. I wished he would finish. I looked around to see if others were as uncomfortable as I was. No. He seemed to have the entire congregation spellbound. It was a very large congregation of about eight hundred people. I turned my eyes back upon the podium. As I did so, I noticed, seated two places away to my left, a dark-haired man in his twenties reading a book. We were separated by an elderly man who was listening avidly to the sermon. I looked at the book and saw that it was in English and its pages were divided into columns, two columns on each page. The man reading it was clearly oblivious to the sermon emanating from the front of the synagogue. I thought it singularly distasteful for a person to be reading an English book during a synagogue service and was about to look away when he began to shuffle the pages of the book and I noticed columns of Hebrew type. He shuffled pages toward what I thought was the end of the book; but when he stopped, I saw him looking at the table of contents. An English book printed as a Hebrew book would be! I had never seen or heard of such a book before, unless it was one of those books where the table of contents appeared in the back. I scanned the upper half of the page swiftly; his hand lay across the lower half. I read:
The Creation Chapter, The Garden of Eden, The Flood, The Tower of Babel and the Diversity of Language. The Deluge and its Babylonian Parallel, Are There Two Conflicting Accounts of the Creation and the Deluge in Genesis?, Abraham, The Binding of Isaac (Akedah), Alleged Christological References in Scripture.
His hand concealed the rest of the page. I glanced at the right-hand page and read very quickly:
AUTHORITIES. Jewish and non-Jewish commentators—ancient, medieval and modem—have been freely drawn upon. “Accept the true from whatever source it comes,” is sound Rabbinic doctrine—even if it be from the pages of a devout Christian expositor or of an iconoclastic Bible scholar, Jewish or non-Jewish. This does not affect the Jewish Traditional character of the work. My conviction that the criticism of the Pentateuch associated with the name of Wellhausen is a perversion of history and a desecration of religion, is unshaken; likewise, my refusal to eliminate the Divine either from history or from human life.
I began to read the next paragraph, but he had found what he was looking for in the table of contents and was shuffling pages again.
I turned away. The rabbi was concluding the sermon. His voice and arms flayed the air around the pulpit. Then he was done and we rose for the Kaddish preceding the Silent Devotion. The man two seats away from me put his English book into the rack before him and prayed quietly from his prayer book.
During the repetition of the Silent Devotion, he picked up the English book and continued reading it. Each time he concluded a section he went back to the table of contents. I watched carefully as he flipped the pages. Once he turned too far and I saw the title page:
He continued to read off and on until the conclusion of the service. I lost sight of him for a moment in the crowd that moved toward the rear doors of the synagogue at the end of the service. Then I saw him leave the synagogue, go down the long flight of stone stairs to the sidewalk, and go up the street, carrying the book under his arm. A block away he removed the black skullcap from his head, put it into his pocket, turned into the side street, and was gone.
I wondered who he was. Not an Orthodox Jew, certainly. Tall, dark-haired, well groomed, strong tanned features. Possibly a student in a non-Orthodox rabbinical school. Otherwise he would be in the army. Or the navy. He looked like someone who belonged in the navy. I would probably never see him again. Unless I came back to this synagogue. But I did not think I would be back. My head still ached from the sermon.
I went down the stone stairs and walked slowly through the park. The trees and grass were green with life. It was the end of May. I walked along the curving paths and heard the call of birds in the branches over my head.
That afternoon I lay on my bed. The sunlight entered the window and shone upon my shelves of books and my desk and the wall next to Alex’s bed with its New York Times maps of the war and upon the ceiling above the maps. The window was open. I could hear the traffic on the wide street and the noise of children playing. The Germans were consuming the world. Arrows showed their new advances in Africa. I did not follow the war in the Pacific as closely as I did the one in Europe. The Germans were swallowing everything, and killing, killing. I could not understand such a people. What pleasure was there in killing? I lay on my bed looking at the maps on the wall and the sunlight on the ceiling and thinking of the summer and the surgery and of how helpless I really was, small and always ill and helpless before the oncoming rush of darkness. Only a single breath ago, it seemed, the surgery had been eight months away. Now—four weeks? Five weeks? I did not know. I would be seeing the surgeon in a few days for the first time. “Are you sure?” I had asked Dr. Weidman again this past week. “I am absolutely sure, David.” And his pink face had been chillingly sober.
I felt all through me the coldness of vague dread. Laughter floated into the room
from the street outside. I got to my feet and stood by the window and looked down at the street. Neighbors sat on chairs in the sunlight or stood around talking; children played. I turned away and a moment later found myself wandering through the sun-filled apartment. Had we really lived in darkness all those years? But now that we were in sunlight I had a new darkness approaching. I could not turn from it; there were no streets or alleyways down which I could run. I wandered aimlessly through the rooms of the apartment, and the sunlight seemed strangely cold to me now. I came back into my room and sat at my desk and opened a book. And suddenly I remembered where I had seen the name of Wellhausen before this morning.
From the closet near my desk I pulled out the cartons of books left to me by Mrs. Horowitz. I could not remember which carton the book was in. I went through all the cartons very quickly and could not find it. But I was certain it was in one of those three cartons. I had a picture of the book inside my eyes. I began to go through the cartons once more, slowly this time. I found the book near the bottom of the second carton. I replaced the cartons in the closet and sat at my desk and looked at the book. It was a slim volume titled Die wichtigsten Instanzen gegen die Graf-Wellhausensche Hypothese. It had been written by a Rabbi David Hoffmann and published in 1904 in Germany. I looked at the table of contents, then turned to the Preface and read the following words in the first paragraph:
Virtually all the new scholars of the Bible have come to the single conclusion that the Five Books of the Torah are composed of four sources. The source which these scholars regard as the major and fundamental one, which starts with “In the beginning God created” and to which they link the laws of sacrifice, priesthood, and purity and impurity—this source is signified by these scholars with the letters P or PC (priestly code); the Deuteronomy source is given the letter D, and the other two sources—E and I; in E, God is, according to their words, referred to always as Elohim, and in I, God is most frequently referred to by the name Yahweh. The letters IE indicate a book that is made up of both these sources.