The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  I walked down a silent corridor to Abraham Gordon’s office and knocked on his door. I heard quick footsteps and the door was opened and Abraham Gordon shook my hand warmly and told me he was grateful I had come. The office was long and narrow and lined with floor-to-ceiling bookcases. A single window took up almost the entire wall opposite the door. There was a small wooden desk near the window and a long table perpendicular to the back of the desk. The desk and the table and the chairs and the bookcases took up most of the space of the office.

  Abraham Gordon was quite visibly fatigued. His huge frame seemed somewhat bowed and his fleshy face sagged. He thought it would be best if we had lunch first and then came back to the office and talked. I agreed. We rode the elevator downstairs to the floor below the lobby. The dining room was brightly lighted and quite crowded. We went through a cafeteria-style line and then brought our trays over to a corner table. There was a small sink against a wall and a metal cup on a shelf alongside it. We washed our hands and pronounced the blessings and sat alone at the table and ate. Students kept coming in and out of the dining room. A loud hum of conversation filled the room. I heard a heated discussion about the relevance of traditional Jewish law to the modern world, another discussion about the way a professor had rearranged a chapter of Hosea earlier that morning, a third discussion about the advantages and disadvantages of small-town pulpits—all of it going on at the tables near us. I noticed some people eating without skullcaps and wondered whether they were students or outsiders. An elderly man came over to our table and he and Abraham Gordon talked briefly about a law committee meeting that was scheduled for next week. Abraham Gordon couldn’t attend; he would be out of town next week. Then he introduced me to the man as Reuven Malter, David Malter’s son. The man’s face lit up and he shook my hand effusively. He had read my father’s book; he had received an advance copy and had read it; a magnificent book; a great contribution. They talked some more, and then he went off to get something to eat.

  “He’s one of the greatest Talmudists in the world,” Abraham Gordon said, watching him walk away.

  Students kept passing by and greeting him, and occasionally one would stop to talk or simply to wish him Shabbat shalom. In the lulls between these encounters he talked to me about his trip to Washington, which he said had been very depressing because the city was under a pall of terror as a result of McCarthy, and about the book he was now writing in which he dealt with the problem of prayer, and about Rav Kalman’s attack against my father. He kept referring to the attack as vicious and slanderous, and that surprised me a little—I had been upset enough by the directness of the attack but I hadn’t thought of it as being vicious and slanderous—until I realized that he was talking about the second part of the article, which had been published in today’s issue of the newspaper and which I had not yet seen. He was surprised at how carefully Rav Kalman had read my father’s book and at how well he had understood its intricacies; he had not thought a man with an Eastern European yeshiva background could have understood so much about the technical aspects of Talmudic source criticism; but the attack was vicious and slanderous. I did not tell him how Rav Kalman had come by his understanding of my father’s book.

  We finished the meal and chanted the Grace and then went back up to his office. He sat alongside me at the table, his tall body curving forward in the chair. He asked me to tell him exactly what had happened on Sunday. I told him. He listened and was silent, his face grim. He had removed his skullcap immediately after we had chanted the Grace. His thinning hair lay combed straight back on his head.

  “You know Daniel Saunders quite well,” he said finally. “You probably know him better than anyone. Dr. Altman tells me he is an excellent student. You know, of course, that Dr. Altman is adjunct professor of clinical psychology at Columbia and that Daniel is in his class. You didn’t know that? It was Altman who suggested that Daniel do his fieldwork at the treatment center. He is of the opinion that your friend is capable of doing original work in psychology.” He paused for a moment. “Dr. Altman feels we ought to go ahead with Daniel’s idea. My brother and his wife agree with him. But Ruth is absolutely opposed to it. How do you feel about it, Reuven?”

  I told him I didn’t know a thing about the process of therapy and had no way of evaluating the idea.

  “I understand,” he said quietly. “But how does one make a decision in such a situation? How does a person decide, for example, to accept a doctor’s judgment that he requires surgery?”

  I told him that the most important thing was to feel you trusted the doctor.

  His gray eyes fixed on me intently. “Yes,” he said. “I cannot think of anything more important than that.”

  I asked him what he thought of Danny’s idea. He was silent a moment. Then he said he didn’t know, he had not yet been able to make up his mind. “The notion of someone experimenting with my own son—” He shook his head. His huge body sagged against the back of the chair and he shook his head again. “It’s strange,” he murmured. “You raise a boy and you give him all the love you can, you play with him, you talk with him, you teach him to play ball and to swim, and he’s healthy, and you know he loves you and you love him—and suddenly he’s sick, and everything falls to pieces. I can understand a child being sick if his parents neglect him or bring him up with resentment or hate. But there was nothing of that.” He shook his head again. “I don’t begin to understand it.” His eyes filled, and he looked away and was silent a long time. I could see his shoulders trembling. Then I heard him take a deep breath and he looked back at me.

  “I trust Daniel Saunders,” he said quietly. “I trust him totally and without reservation.”

  I did not say anything.

  “That is the only reason I am even considering his idea. I trust him. That is why I wanted him in the first place. The genius son of a great rebbe who abandons the tzaddikate to go into psychology but doesn’t abandon the tradition—that is a rare thing. It takes a remarkable young man to do that. And when you meet him and discover his sensitivity, his soul, you really begin to understand how remarkable he is. I needed someone I could trust. After the debacle with those three therapists, I needed someone I could trust absolutely and without the slightest reservation. I trust Daniel Saunders. I think I am going to let him go ahead. If I can convince my wife. It is going to be very difficult to convince Ruth. I don’t know what else we can do. I’m afraid—I’m afraid Michael may hurt himself one day.”

  He fell silent then and sat rigidly, staring down at the table.

  “I know how you feel about Michael,” he said, still staring down at the table. “What does your instinct tell you we ought to do?”

  I told him I didn’t know what to say. I was really an outsider and didn’t feel competent enough to decide one way or the other.

  “An outsider?” He seemed quietly astonished. “You’re less of an outsider than my brother. You brought us to Daniel Saunders. You’re the only one Michael talks to without having to be prodded. No one considers you an outsider.”

  I was quiet for a moment. Then I asked him what Rachel thought of Danny’s idea.

  He waved the question away. “Rachel is in no position to judge anything of that sort now. The two of them are so crazy in love they see nothing but perfection in each other.” He said it as if it were a piece of information he took for granted I had known about all along.

  I sat very quietly on my chair and was silent a long time. Then I said, speaking softly and trying hard to keep my voice under control, that I trusted Danny, that Dr. Altman apparently also trusted Danny, that there did not seem to be much point in going on and on with Michael getting nowhere with normal therapy, that there really was no alternative, and that I had talked about Danny’s idea with my father and he also felt that a person ought to gamble when the alternative was disaster.

  He gave me a sudden sharp look and his broad shoulders stiffened. “Gamble,” he muttered softly, his voice shading into quiet bitterness. “Yes
… Gamble.” He seemed to think of something then and a peculiarly bright look came into his eyes. He sat there, nodding slowly, as if he were engaged in some kind of interior dialogue with himself. Then I saw him smile sadly and he looked at me and said, “Almost everything of importance that a person does is a gamble, isn’t it? Every crucial decision is a gamble.” He smiled wryly and was silent again, his gray eyes turned inward. Then he shook his head slowly and came back from wherever he had been. “All right. I am going to gamble on Daniel Saunders. I will let him experiment on Michael. I will have to convince my wife that we have no other choice.” Then he lapsed again into silence, his eyes staring at me but not really seeing me.

  We sat still for a moment, and then he got slowly to his feet and thanked me for coming. “We’ll have you over for dinner yet,” he said with a smile. “I’ll have to show you the scrapbook I keep of attacks on me over the years. You won’t feel so bad about Rav Kalman and your father.” We were at the door to the office. He shook my hand, gripping it firmly and warmly. “Give your father my very best regards. And tell him that the introduction to his book will be required reading in my courses here from now on.”

  I took the elevator downstairs and stood outside a long time, staring up at the sunlight on the building. Then I walked to the bus stop. There was a newsstand on the corner and I bought a copy of The Jewish Guardian. The bus came and I got on and sat down and read the second part of Rav Kalman’s article. I sat there, thinking of Abraham Gordon’s last words and reading Rav Kalman’s article and feeling the anger rising up in me again.

  It was vicious, all right. Last week he had questioned my father’s right to offer interpretations of the Talmud that ran counter to the accepted interpretations of the medieval commentaries; by what authority did my father dare emend the text; did he consider himself as great as the Rishonim or the Vilna Gaon; how could he dare give an interpretation to a Mishnah—the Mishnah is the vast written compendium of rabbinic oral law; the Mishnah and the Gemara together comprise the Talmud—how dare my father give an interpretation to a Mishnah that contradicted the interpretation given in the Gemara? He had used examples from my father’s book, and in some of those examples I had recognized words that I had used as I had explained various parts of the book to him during our after-class sessions together. But now he had broadened his attack considerably. He was writing about the implications of my father’s method, and he had turned vicious and sarcastic. What were some of the insidious implications of this method of study? he wrote. If one accepted the possibility of changing the text of the Talmud, then what might happen to the laws that were based on these texts? Did one change the halachah—“halachah” is the word for Jewish law—every time one discovered a law based on a text that was thought to be incorrect? And where would such a system of study end? If one permitted oneself the right to emend the Talmud, then why not go on and emend the Five Books of Moses as well? Why not change the text of the Ten Commandments or the various other legal passages? What then would happen to the sanctity of the Bible? How was one to regard the Master of the Universe if one could simply go ahead and rewrite the Bible? How was one to regard the Revelation at Sinai? The entire fabric of the tradition would come apart as a result of this kind of method. It was a dangerous method, an insidious method; it could destroy the very heart of Yiddishkeit. And it was dangerous not only to Jews but to all religion. The gentile world also had sacred texts. What would happen to the religion of the gentiles if they used such a method upon their texts?—I was amazed that Rav Kalman should feel it necessary to use the sacred texts of the gentiles in order to point up the dangers of my father’s method of study; then it occurred to me that he was probably trying to add a note of sophistication and universalism to his argument. I continued reading. A method of this kind made man superior to God because it made the sacred texts subject to man’s tiny understanding; what he did not understand, he changed. A scholar who used such a method was committing heresy; he was destroying not only Yiddishkeit but also the very essence of religion—the belief that the sacred texts were given by God to be studied by man, not to be rewritten by him. Those who feared God were forbidden to study such works of scholarship; they were forbidden to let their children study them. Had Jews suffered two thousand years for a tradition based on texts that were filled with scribal errors? What kind of scholarship could promulgate such an idea? Dangerous scholarship! Malicious scholarship!—His hysteria was reminiscent of Reb Saunders’s attitude toward modern political Zionism, which he regarded as the spawn of Jewish secularists; there is a numbing sameness to the way religious zealots express themselves. Such scholarship should have no place in a yeshiva, he wrote. Our children must never be exposed to this kind of heretical handling of texts that were the very heart and soul of the tradition!

  I was sick with cold rage by the time I was done reading it. I came off the bus. A middle-aged Hasid in a long dark beard and a dark overcoat bumped into me heavily as I walked beneath the sycamores. The brown paper bags he held in his hands tumbled to the sidewalk, spilling out oranges and apples and cans of fruit and vegetables. He apologized loudly in Yiddish and I barely heard him as I helped gather everything up off the ground. He thanked me and went rushing off, holding tightly to the bags. I went up the front steps of the brownstone and into the apartment.

  My father was not home. Manya was in the kitchen over the stove. I could smell the Shabbat food all through the apartment. I went into my room and sat behind my desk for a while, then lay down on my bed, then went back to my desk and tried doing some logic problems. I played with the problems for a few minutes, then went into the hall and called Danny. Levi answered. Danny was not home yet. I could feel the phone trembling against my ear. I wished him Shabbat shalom and hung up. I went back into my room and stared out the window at the sunlight on the ailanthus in our back yard. Then I lay down again on my bed. A moment later I heard a key in the front door and I went quickly into the hall and saw my father come into the apartment. He said nothing to me as he put his hat and coat into the hall closet, but I knew by the look on his face that he had read the article. I told him I had read the article and began talking about how I felt. He stopped me with an abrupt and angry gesture of his hand. He did not want to discuss it now, he said. His voice was husky and he sounded as if he was coming down with another of his colds. He went into his study and closed the door.

  I came back into my room and sat at my desk and did some more logic problems. The newspaper lay on top of a pile of books on my desk. I read the article again, then put the newspaper into a drawer. I sat there, working on the logic problems. Through the door that connected my room to my father’s study I could hear my father shuffling papers and coughing, a hoarse, dry, rasping cough which with him could mean anything from a minor cold to a serious bronchitis or congestion of the lungs. This is going to be some Shabbat, I thought bitterly.

  Danny returned my call later that afternoon and I told him what I had said to Abraham Gordon. He had had Michael in therapy that morning, and Michael had spent most of the hour talking disconnectedly about Rachel and giving Danny angry, knowing glances. In her visits with Michael, Rachel had been urging him to trust Danny and to talk to him, and Michael had apparently begun to realize why her voice was always charged with excitement each time she talked about Danny. Now he wanted to know how well Danny knew his cousin. Danny had been afraid of this all along. He was beginning to think he ought not to be doing any more therapy with Michael. He would discuss it with Altman on Monday. He kept saying over and over again that he should not have become involved with Rachel, that it would be a mess, that he had botched the whole thing, that the experiment was really a wild idea and who was he to try something like that, he was still only a student, he had no right to take a chance like that with someone else’s life—and it occurred to me as I listened to him that Michael had always been more than merely a patient to him: Michael was his first attempt at self-vindication, the first in a long series of efforts
he would be making to prove to himself that the pain he had caused his father at refusing to take on the tzaddikate, and the years the tzaddikate would ultimately take from his brother’s frail life, was all worthwhile. He was frightened of making a mistake, frightened of failure—as much because of what it might mean to him as what it might do to Michael. I told him to calm down and stop being hysterical; I had had enough hysteria for one day from Rav Kalman’s article, I said. He hadn’t read the article yet, he said. He had just returned home. Well, it was a beauty, I said, and sitting across the desk from Rav Kalman next Sunday morning promised to be an interesting experience. Calm down, I said again. He had been trying to get Michael to talk by giving him Rav Kalman’s article against my father. Maybe Michael would really talk if he found out about him and Rachel. I was trying to get him out of his black mood and was simply using whatever came into my head without really knowing what I was saying. There was a long silence on the phone during which I thought of what I had said and realized that it sounded rather ridiculous and waited for Danny to tell me to stick to Talmud and logic and let him do the planning about how to get Michael to talk. Instead, the silence continued. I asked him if he was still there. He said yes, he was still there, but it was getting late, he wanted to take a shower and get dressed. His voice was strangely calm. He wished me a good Shabbos and hung up.