by Chaim Potok
“David,” she murmured. “How late it is.”
“Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”
“I was awake.” She and my father had had friends over and they had left late and she was unable to sleep. She had been awake in her bed and had heard me come in. She sat down wearily on the edge of my bed and gathered to herself the broad spread of the housecoat. “You are going to make yourself sick again staying up so late,” she said.
“No I won’t,” I said. “I’ll be all right, Mama.”
“David.”
I looked at her and waited.
“The books you are reading on the Torah are making your father very upset.”
“I’m not reading them near him. Not the ones in German.”
“Your father came into your room tonight and looked at the books. The ones in English. Then he brought out one of the German books and asked me to read some pages to him.”
I did not say anything.
“He was angry,” she said. Then she said quietly, “I am upset too, David, that you are reading such books.”
“I’m reading them to fight them, Mama. They’re destroying our Torah.”
She sighed and was silent a long time. Alex’s soft snoring breaths rasped irritatingly against my ears. “Let others fight them,” she said finally.
“Which others? Goyim? Or Jews who don’t know a thing about Yiddishkeit? It’s our Torah they’re destroying. Why shouldn’t Jews defend it? Papa fought goyim when they attacked Jews.”
“It’s not the same thing, David.”
“Why?”
“He did not have to read their books month after month.”
“No,” I said. “He only had to kill them. That saved him from contamination.”
“David,” she said, her voice trembling. “I will make believe I am not listening to you talk about your father this way. What I am saying to you is that no one can read such books without being affected by them. In this I agree with your father.”
“What did David read?” I asked suddenly. I had not wanted to ask that. I did not even know where the question came from.
Her mouth fell open. “What?” she said almost inaudibly.
“Uncle David. What did Uncle David read?”
She was deathly still.
“Were there fights between Uncle David and Papa’s father? Were there fights between Uncle David and Papa?”
“David,” she murmured, and her eyes glazed.
“Please, Mama. Please. I don’t want ghosts. All my life I’ve had ghosts.”
“David,” she said pleadingly, her eyes glazed and not looking at me. “I do not want fights.”
“Mama, I’m going to read what I want to read. No one will stop me from reading. I don’t want to know about the fights Papa had with his brother.”
She shuddered visibly and drew the housecoat tightly around her. Her face was a pale moving blur of dim whiteness in the shadows beyond the light. “David,” I heard her say softly, wearily, “You are brilliant. Are you going to use your mind to be cruel?”
I did not respond.
She rose to her feet. “Good night,” she murmured, and went slowly from the room.
I sat at my desk and listened to the pounding of my heart. The palms of my hands, sweaty and cold, itched as if insects were crawling upon them. I rubbed them against my pajamas. My mother seemed still to be in the room. I closed my eyes to ward off her pale thin face.
It hurt that no one believed me. It hurt that they thought me close to or already beyond the borderline of orthodoxy because I was reading scholarly books about the Bible. It hurt that no one understood I had entered a war zone, that the battlefield was the Torah, that the casualties were ideas, and that without the danger of serious exposure the field of combat could not be scouted, the nature of the enemy could not be learned, the weapons and strategy of counterattack could not be developed. It hurt that no one around me seemed to understand any of that. I felt myself a lone combatant on a torn field of battle advancing fearfully and without support against a dark and powerful foe.
When my heart grew still I opened my eyes and found myself looking at the book on my desk. After a moment my eyes focused upon the words and I continued reading. I was in the section in the book by Driver where he compares the story of the Flood in Genesis to the story of Utnapishtim in the Babylonian Gilgamesh Epic, I opened the first volume of my Mikraot Gedolot to the portion on Noah. I read slowly and carefully.
In the course of the next morning, Yaakov Bader said to me, “You’re making a lot of people angry at you, Davey.”
“What do you mean?”
“They don’t like to see you with those goyishe books on the Torah. They asked me to talk to you.”
“What is this, a new reign of terror? Now it’s the books in English?”
“I can’t blame them, Davey.”
He looked deeply unhappy. It angered and upset me to see him that way. Sadness was an unnatural state of being for him; he could not conceal it and it drained the light from his always cheerful face. I told him I would think about it.
During my classes that afternoon I began to notice classmates giving me furtive glances. As I entered the class in Roman history, Irving Besser, tall, stoop-shouldered, and gallant defender of the Talmud against the menace of Bible, brushed against me in the doorway. Some of my books dropped to the floor. He neither apologized nor helped me pick them up. During the surprise quiz thrown at us by the teacher at the start of the lecture, Irving Besser sat in the desk to my right, copying furtively from my paper.
The next afternoon I was sitting on a bench in the little park overlooking the river when Saul came over to me. It was a warm day and I sat with my face to the sun. He sat down on the bench, looking mournful.
“I didn’t get a chance to talk to you this morning,” he said.
“Tough class with Rav Sharfman?”
“Like the splitting of the Red Sea. Listen.”
“Your friends want me to stop reading books on Bible criticism.”
“In my class that’s already an old story. The girl you dated Saturday night called me.”
“Yes?”
“For God’s sake, Davey. I told you she’s a very religious girl.”
“I didn’t touch her, Saul. I didn’t even hold her hand.”
“Why do you have to talk with a girl like that about the—what is it called?—the Gilgamesh Epic? You got her upset.”
I stared at him.
“She was really angry,” Saul said.
I did not know whether to rage or laugh. I felt a cold falling sensation inside myself.
“She didn’t tell me I was upsetting her.”
“She was afraid to.”
I looked at him. “Afraid?”
“My God, Davey, no one wants to come up against your brains. They all talk to me and Yaakov and ask us to talk to you. They’re all afraid of you. Every time someone opens his mouth, you have ten quotations from ten different books to show him how wrong he is.”
I was quiet.
“You want me to give you phone numbers, you have to stop talking about things that make you sound like an apikoros.”
“All right,” I said.
“Don’t you have an English lit class now?”
“I can live without Tintern Abbey. I’ll memorize it for the exam.”
He raised his eyes and hands heavenward in a gesture of exasperation and went away. I sat on the bench for a while longer, reading. Then I went over to the stone parapet and looked down the clifflike slope to the road and river below. A barge moved slowly along the river in the direction of the Hudson, pushed by a tugboat. Wide-winged birds circled overhead.
That Friday afternoon I took the subway to the 42d Street library and talked for a while with one of the staff members of the Jewish Division. I returned home with four Hebrew books, two by someone called Yehezkel Kaufmann and two by two medieval Spanish Jewish Bible scholars. I sat in the living room on Shabbat, reading in Hebrew A
History of Israelite Religion by Yehezkel Kaufmann. Three volumes of that work had already been published and the author was still writing, so it did not seem I would run out of Shabbat reading material for a while. The author was opposed to classic European Biblical criticism and offered his own theory as to the human origins of the Torah.
In the weeks that followed, I sat at home, rode the bus, sat in the park or in dull classes, reading books on the Torah in Hebrew by Yehezkel Kaufmann and by some of the great Spanish Jewish Bible scholars of the early medieval period, whose works Mr. Bader had never told me about when I had studied with him. I read the tirade of Jonah ibn Janach, the greatest of the Jewish Bible scholars of tenth- and eleventh-century Spain, against Talmudists who, he said, trifled with the laws of the Hebrew language and did not read the Bible accurately. I learned his concept of Biblical ellipsis by which he explained omissions of letters and words; for example, the meaning of the word sharshot in Exodus 28:22 is unclear; Ibn Janach explained it as being an elliptical form of the word sharsharot, “chains”—which fits perfectly the meaning of the verse. I learned his concept of substitution, which assumes that the biblical writer intended one thing but wrote another; for example, in Exodus 19:23, Moses is told to “set bounds about the mountain and sanctify it.” But verses ten and twelve indicate clearly that it is not the mountain but the people that constitute the object to be restricted. Therefore, concluded Jonah ibn Janach in his Sefer Ha-Riqmah, the text wrote “mountain” but intended “people.” I read a work in Hebrew that informed me of the singular fact that Jonah ibn Janach produced what in effect were over two hundred emendations of the text of the Bible. I read that Isaac ibn Yashush, another eleventh-century Jewish Spanish Bible scholar, appeared actually to have emended the text of Genesis 36:33 and had read “Job” in place of “Jobab,” and I remembered Ibn Ezra’s attack on that emendation. I also remembered how, in a comment to Exodus 25:29, Ibn Ezra himself argued that there is an error in I Chronicles 28:17 and how the Ramban sharply attacked Ibn Ezra for that remark. I went back to my Mikraot Gedolot, reread Ibn Ezra on Genesis 12:6, 22:14, Deuteronomy 1:2, 31:9, 3:11, and began to think that he really had attributed post-Mosaic origins to a number of verses in the Torah, something I had never seriously considered when I had first studied those verses with Mr. Bader or by myself after Mr. Bader had left for Europe. Then I read Yehuda Halevi, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, who asserted that even the vowels, syllable divisions, and accents in the Torah went back to the times of Moses. I read the view of Abraham, son of Maimonides, who maintained that the peculiarities in the Torah text were impenetrable mysteries handed down by tradition. I read others who seemed to my Orthodox eyes on the borderline of heresy, though nowhere in the writings of the Spanish Jewish scholars did I find an explicit statement that cast doubt on the integrity of the biblical text.
I was having a strange time with my Hebrew reading. All through my junior and senior years in college I read Hebrew books on the Bible. My parents and friends stopped bothering me. But I was reading Hebrew works by classical scholars who probably would not have been permitted to teach in my yeshiva. On the day before the Allied invasion of Normandy I discovered that Judah ben Barzillai, a tenth- to eleventh-century Jewish Bible scholar who lived in Barcelona, had reported that many of the Biblical scholars of his day came perilously close to being heretics. Then I stopped reading for a while and stayed close to the radio in our kitchen, listening to the news of the war.
Two weeks later, on a Sunday afternoon, I was graduated from college. I have retained no memories of that graduation other than vague images of a crowded auditorium, speeches, awards, and hot weather.
I remember Irving Besser saying to me afterward on the street, “Nice of you to leave one or two awards for some of the other guys, Lurie.”
Yaakov Bader said, “Cut it out, Irving. You graduated because of Davey’s small shoulders and your big eyes. Don’t complain.”
Irving Besser glared at him and walked away.
I returned to my reading. On Shabbat I read the Hebrew books. Inside my room or outside alone on a bench in the park I read books in English and German. I found that there were English and German books without an echo of proselytizing or anti-Semitism. I spoke to no one of what I was reading and no one seemed interested enough to ask me: my parents were busy with the store, Alex was reading and writing stories, Saul was studying in panicky fashion for his ordination exams in the fall.
In the early summer my father asked me if I would help him with the store and I readily agreed. Three times a week he sent me downtown to the jewelry district in and around Third Avenue and Canal Street. There were watchmakers with whom he now subcontracted, for he could no longer handle by himself the watch repair volume of the store. There were diamond merchants whom he phoned in advance of my coming and who had ready for me gleaming rings and watchbands and necklaces. There were distributors of watch parts who read my father’s instructions on the small yellow envelopes I handed them and skillfully fitted into the watches contained in the envelopes stems and crowns, mainsprings and balance wheels, and other parts whose names I never bothered to learn. I was surprised to discover that many of the people my father did business with in the Canal Street area were his old friends from the Am Kedoshim Society. Some of them greeted me with astonishment. “My God, this is little David?” one of them said loudly. He ran a store off Canal Street that replaced crystals in watches. “Hey, Jack, this is Max Lurie’s boy! You used to be such a skinny kid we thought the wind would carry you away.” It was later while walking toward the East Broadway station of the subway that I remembered he was the man who had wrestled with my father during that picnic in the pine wood years ago. How many years? I went down the subway steps into the dank coolness of the station, holding tightly to the black leather bag containing watches and diamonds.
Back and forth I journeyed that summer between my father’s store and the stores on and around Canal Street. I would wait in the cramped odorous little closet of a store run by one of the best watchmakers in the city, an old white-haired Jew to whom my father sent repair work he would entrust to no one else. Overhead ran the Third Avenue elevated train; a block away was the Canal Street station. All around me were the derelicts of the Bowery, sleeping in the doorways of stores, on the streets, wandering, drinking, staggering about. I saw the flophouses in which they slept, the places where they ate, the gutters where on occasion one of them died. I would go from store to store and wherever I went I saw clocks and watches. Time stared at me from a thousand shelves. For the derelicts of the Bowery time seemed to have ceased; but I was learning about time and about history and memory.
That summer I began to read Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I remember I finished reading the final volume late one morning while I sat on a blanket on the shore of the lake outside the bungalow where we lived during the last two weeks of August. I put the book down on my blanket and covered it with a towel to protect its binding from the sun. I sat on the blanket for a long time, looking up at the sky. I could not remember ever having felt that way after finishing a book. I wanted to embrace Mr. Gibbon, to thank him, for I understood now, finally, the texture and dimension of history. I felt warm and excited and was deeply grateful to that industrious, scribbling Englishman. The lake was very still. After a while I went in for a swim. When I came out I sat alone on the beach and let the sun dry me. Saul was inside his bungalow studying Talmud; the sun had begun to bother his eyes, he had said. My uncle had returned to the city for the day on business. I heard my mother and aunt talking gaily beneath the tree near our bungalow. Overhead birds wheeled slowly in a cloudless sky. As I gazed across the lake I saw my father and brother gallop on fast horses through the tall grass of a distant field. I lay back and closed my eyes and felt the hot sun on my face. I let my head fall beyond the edge of the blanket onto the hot sand of the beach. I dug into the sand and felt it crumbling beneath my hand. I scooped up a handful of sand and let it si
ft between my fingers. I lay on the blanket in the sun and felt the sand sifting slowly between my fingers onto the beach. After a while I went into the bungalow for another book.
We returned home on a cloudy day in the last week of August. In September I entered the class of Rav Tuvya Sharfman and began my studies for rabbinic ordination.
I remember the night in the second week of October when we danced with the Torah scrolls in our little synagogue. It was the night of Simchat Torah, the festival that celebrates the completion of the annual cycle of Torah readings. The last portion of the Five Books of Moses would be read the next morning.
The little synagogue was crowded and tumultuous with joy. I remember the white-bearded Torah reader dancing with one of the heavy scrolls as if he had miraculously shed his years. My father and uncle danced for what seemed to me to be an interminable length of time, circling about one another with their Torah scrolls, advancing upon one another, backing off, singing. Saul and Alex and I danced too. I relinquished my Torah to someone in the crowd, then stood around watching the dancing. It grew warm inside the small room and I went through the crowd and out the rear door to the back porch. I stood in the darkness and let the air cool my face. I could feel the floor of the porch vibrating to the dancing inside the synagogue. It was a winy fall night, the air clean, the sky vast and filled with stars. The noise of the singing and dancing came clearly through the open windows of the synagogue. An old cycle ending; a new cycle beginning. Tomorrow morning Moses would die, and the old man would read the words recounting his death; a few minutes later he would read the first chapter and the beginning three verses of the second chapter of Genesis. Death and birth without separation. Endings leading to beginnings. And then, on Shabbat, he would read all of the first portion of the Book of Genesis: the Creation, Adam and Eve, the Garden of Eden, Cain and Abel. And the following Shabbat he would read the story of Noah and the Flood. And then Abraham and Sarah and the Covenant and Isaac and the sacrifice and Rebecca and Jacob and Esau and Joseph and …