The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  “Nothing I can’t use and still stay inside.”

  “As long as you take some of the good things.”

  “I’ll see to that,” Rachel said softly.

  I left them there quietly together in the private world they were creating with their new dreams.

  I sat down on an easy chair and was alone for a moment and found myself thinking of my father and his book and Rav Kalman and felt suddenly drained and hollow with the realization that the months of seesawing between the two worlds had finally ended for me this night with nothing but an awareness of how deep the separating chasm really was and how impossible it seemed to bridge it—unless you were a Danny Saunders and were rooted deeply enough in one world to enable you to be concerned only about the people of the other and not about their ideas. I was in between somewhere on a tenuous and still invisible connecting span, and I did not know how to make that span tangible to myself and to the inhabitants of both those other worlds. Maybe it could not be done. Maybe Rav Kalman was right. Maybe one had to take a stand and abandon one or the other entirely. I would enter Abraham Gordon’s world if I was forced into taking a stand. The world of Rav Kalman was too musty now with the odors of old books and dead ideas and Eastern European zealousness. But it would be an unhappy choice. I did not think I could ever be comfortable with Abraham Gordon’s answers. I found myself envious of Danny’s solid-rootedness in his world—and discovered at that moment to my utter astonishment how angry I was at my father for his book and his method of study and the tiny, twilight, in-between life he had carved out for us. That awareness left me so frightened and shaken that it was a moment before I realized that Abraham and Ruth Gordon were standing in front of me and trying to get my attention. I got quickly to my feet. They were inviting me and my father over to dinner a week from tomorrow night. I accepted gratefully for myself and told them I would talk to my father and call them tomorrow.

  “We’ll want to see more of you from now on,” Abraham Gordon said quietly.

  “We’re very grateful to you, Reuven,” Ruth Gordon said. “Michael feels he knows you so well. We would like to know you too.” She said it without any trace of hesitation or embarrassment. I did not know what to say to that, and so I said nothing.

  “Perhaps we’ll have an opportunity to talk about those answers of mine you say you don’t care for,” Abraham Gordon said with a smile.

  “I’d like that,” I heard myself say.

  “We would all like that,” Ruth Gordon said.

  A few minutes later, Danny and I were putting on our coats and hats. Rachel and her parents were staying on awhile. There were some plans and things they still had to discuss, Rachel said. I noticed that Danny neither kissed her nor touched her when we left.

  The night was bitter cold and I felt the wind through my coat. We hailed a cab and rode for a while in silence. Danny sat slouched against the back of the seat, his coat looking bulky around him, his face faintly luminous in the night light of the streets.

  “Can a son hate a father and not know it?” I asked.

  He was so startled by the question that I thought he would cry out. He became rigid on the seat and gaped at me. It was a moment or two before I felt him begin to relax.

  “Yes,” he said in a very tight voice.

  “What would it do to him?”

  “That depends,” he said softly.

  “Suppose he were all mixed up about a lot of other things. What would it do to him?”

  “That still depends,” he said, very quietly, looking at me, his eyes glittering behind his horn-rimmed glasses.

  “Suppose he had just become an adolescent with all that that implies and had absolutely no one his age he felt he could trust and talk to and was afraid to talk to adults. What would it do to him?”

  “Exactly what it’s doing to Michael,” he said.

  We were silent the rest of the way home. I found my father asleep.

  The church bells rang, and Rav Kalman entered the room. I sat in my seat, watching wisps of cigarette smoke spiraling slowly in the sunlight that fell across my Talmud—and thought about Michael. Rav Kalman did not call on me. But a moment before the end of the class he asked me to remain behind.

  We were alone. He stood behind his desk, smoking and gazing down at me, a small chunky man, all of him dark, his clothes, his face, his eyes.

  He said bluntly, “You are angry at me, Malter. Yes?”

  The question took me by surprise and I did not respond.

  “Tell me, Malter, who else should I have gone to in order to have your father’s book explained to me? I did not want to attack your father for things he did not say. I wanted to understand clearly what he wrote. I went to his son because the son of David Malter understands his father’s writings, and I know the son.”

  I stared at him and did not say anything. I wanted to get out of there. I was finding it almost impossible to be physically close to him. I had never in my life come across a man who was so zealous a guardian of Torah that he did not care whom or how he destroyed in its defense. I had never thought Torah could create so grotesque a human being.

  “You have thought of what we talked about, Malter?”

  I nodded.

  “And?”

  I told him I would prefer to discuss it another time.

  “Another time,” he said. “When?”

  I told him soon.

  “We have a lot to talk about, Malter. It should be very soon.”

  He dismissed me. At the doorway, I glanced over my shoulder and saw him sitting behind his desk, his head in his hands. I went out of there utterly despising him and took a bus home.

  The following Sunday morning Danny and two child-care workers brought Michael into the small room below the foyer of the residential treatment center. Danny had told Michael only that they were going to let him stay alone for a while in a special room because they felt it would help him get well. Michael screamed that he hated to be alone in a room and fought them. They locked him in. Danny stayed outside the door for a while, listening to Michael’s curses and screams, then went upstairs to his office.

  Rachel was there with her parents and her aunt and uncle. Danny sat behind his desk and spoke to them reassuringly. Ruth Gordon wept quietly, making no sound, the tears flowing down her face. Abraham Gordon sat alongside her, his tall body bowed and his face ashen. Danny grew silent. Then—as Rachel described it to me later—a strange thing happened. As if suddenly taking on a life of its own, Danny’s right hand rose slowly to the side of his face, and with his thumb and forefinger he began to caress an imaginary earlock. His eyes were closed and he sat behind his desk, swaying faintly back and forth, and the thumb and forefinger moved against each other and then the forefinger lifted and made small circular motions in the air and then lowered and met the thumb again, moving across it, caressing the invisible hairs, softly, gently. Ruth Gordon stopped crying. The five of them sat there, staring as if hypnotized at the slow movements of Danny’s fingers. Then Danny opened his eyes and became aware of his hand alongside his face and drew his fingers away and let his hand fall slowly to the pile of monographs on top of his desk.

  BOOK THREE

  All beginnings are difficult.

  THE MIDRASH

  Thirteen

  And again there were the twilight weeks, a length of dark winter between January and March when I was unable to see Michael but could not stop thinking of him alone in a bare room on a mattress with only hate and rage for companions. The leaves were all gone from the streets now, blown away by the winds or reduced to dust beneath trampling feet, and there was the cold sun or the gray skies and only an occasional ghostly memory of the lake and the Sailfish and the water against the shoreline and the dock.

  Michael haunted my dreams. They were dreams of horror, filled with distorted visions of him screaming his fears to the unheeding walls, and I would wake in the night trembling, with the sound of his thin voice still echoing in the darkness of my room. To convince m
yself of the scientific feasibility of the experiment, I spent most of January reading the literature I had seen in Danny’s possession and a great deal of other material I had not seen earlier but which he felt I might want to read. I understood enough to realize that the experiment had a sound theoretical base. But it made no difference. Michael continued to scream in the dark nights of my room.

  Others were screaming too in those twilight months of waiting.

  Rav Kalman wrote nothing else about my father’s book. After his second attack there were days when the synagogue where we prepared for our Talmud classes seethed with noisy arguments as students debated the various points he had raised. To my surprise and anger most of the students agreed with much of what he had written: the method of study used by my father was dangerous to all religions; it was a threat to the sanctity of the Talmudic text; it did endanger the structure of religious law; it did make possible the specter of biblical emendation. There were students who sought to defend the method: it was intended to better our understanding of the text; it was not a threat to religious law because once this or that law had been decided upon it became independent of any specific text; a clear and logical line could be drawn between the Talmud, which had not been revealed and therefore could be altered by scholars, and the Pentateuch, which had been revealed and therefore must remain untouched. But those students were few in number and were invariably shouted down by the others. After a few days I was no longer surprised and angry. This was a yeshiva. I could not expect anything else from the student body of a yeshiva.

  On the Tuesday morning following the second attack there was a sudden raging argument between Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson in the corridor outside the synagogue. We heard their voices as we sat at the tables and we came away from our studies and crowded the doorways of the synagogue and listened in stunned amazement to what was going on. They stood in the middle of the corridor, their faces pale with rage. I had never seen Rav Gershenson angry; I had never heard him raise his voice. But he was angry that morning. His long, pointed gray beard quivered; his voice, which in class was often barely audible, was now loud and rasping. And Rav Kalman, looking quite small next to Rav Gershenson’s tall frame, stood his ground and shouted back, his eyes glittering with almost uncontrollable fury.

  “You want too much!” Rav Gershenson was shouting. “You want to make them all into saints! You are destroying the Torah!”

  “What do you say?” Rav Kalman almost screamed. “I am destroying the Torah? I?” He stood on the tips of his toes, his head tilted back, his dark beard jutting outward almost level with the floor, and I saw his hands clench into fists. He shook a fist in Rav Gershenson’s face. “It is you who are destroying the Torah!” he shouted. “You!”

  “It is a different world here! You cannot—”

  “It is a corrupt world! I will not be changed by it!”

  “You are destroying people with your religiosity!” He used the Yiddish word “frumkeit,” hurling it at Rav Kalman as though it were an epithet. “Know that you are destroying people!”

  The argument raged on a moment longer, and then as suddenly as it had begun it came to an end, and the two of them stormed away from each other, going in opposite directions along the corridor. None of us knew what had caused it, but it was the subject of awed conversation for weeks. The talk about my father’s book died quickly in the wake of that argument.

  On a Monday morning in the middle of January, the Dean called me into his office and asked if I intended taking the smicha examinations that spring. I told him yes, I intended to take them. He was a short, roundish, pink-faced man in his fifties, clean-shaven, double-chinned, a scholar turned administrator, with a reputation for fairness in his dealings with the students. We called him “The Peacemaker.” He spent much of his time placating the various religious factions in the school. I knew, of course, that the examinations would be given by Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson, he said; he would also be present, but merely as an onlooker, a representative of the school administration. I knew, I said. He had not had any negative reports about me from Rav Kalman, so he assumed there were no difficulties. Were there any difficulties? he wanted to know. I was quiet a moment.

  “Ah,” he said softly. “There are difficulties.” He smiled in a kind and gentle way. “That is why I have these preliminary discussions. If there are difficulties, now is the time to discuss them.”

  I decided to tell him what had been going on in the class the past year and a half. He listened, a paternal smile on his face. Then he shrugged.

  “I know all this. It is his style of teaching. A student must accustom himself to all kinds of teachers. You are upset that he attacked your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “It was his right. He is defending Torah. He was not of those who believed in going willingly to the crematoria. He was with the partisans and killed German soldiers for Torah. Now he defends it with words. I do not agree with everything he says. But it is his right.” He brought the tips of his fingers together, forming an arc over his vest. “Reuven, that is all that is troubling you?”

  I hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then said, “Yes.”

  He smiled and nodded. “You see? It is good that we discuss our difficulties. We expect that you will do very well in your examinations. You are one of the best students we have here.”

  That was the week my father’s book was published. We thought at first that it had suffered the fate of Hume’s first work and had fallen stillborn from the press. But by the end of the month we began to hear that reviews of the book were being written for many important scholarly journals, and that the reviews would be quite laudatory. My father was happy when he learned of that—but not as happy as he might have been. The publication of the book had intensified the quarrel in his school.

  My father’s school had always been one of the finest yeshivoth in Brooklyn, a model of enlightened teaching, both of Jewish and secular subjects. And so it did not take long before the quarrel spilled out beyond the walls of the school and I began to hear of it from different people—from students in my class who had younger brothers in that yeshiva; from Rav Gershenson, who stopped me in the corridor one day as I was leaving Rav Kalman’s shiur and asked me if what he had heard about my father’s yeshiva was true, and when I told him yes, it was true, went away, looking angry and shaking his head and muttering darkly about frumkeit; and, one day in the last week of January, from Abraham Gordon, whom I had begun to see regularly now, in his office, in his home, in the dining room of his school, and once in Prospect Park where he had asked me to meet him just so we could walk and talk; he just wanted to walk and talk and thought I might not mind being the other half of his conversation. We walked and talked for three hours on the afternoon of the last Sunday in January. And then he took me to his apartment, and Ruth Gordon served up a magnificent meal—after which we all sat and talked for another three hours, and Abraham Gordon kept coming back to the subject of my father’s quarrel with his school. How serious was it? He had only heard what he had to assume were wild rumors. Were they really threatening to revoke his tenure? How could they possibly do that? He could take them to court. My father wouldn’t take his own school to court, I said. No he wouldn’t, Abraham Gordon said quietly. Not your father.

  I double-dated with Danny and Rachel on the first Saturday night in February, and we went to a movie theater in Manhattan and saw Death of a Salesman. My date was the Brooklyn College friend who had first told me about Rachel last spring. Her name was Eileen Farber. She was a dark-haired, vivacious girl, and I had gone out with her a few times in December and January. She and Rachel had been friends for years.

  Rachel came out of the theater with her eyes red and her face pale. She had put on her glasses for the movie and had forgotten to take them off, and, walking along the street, I reminded her she was still wearing them but she did not hear me. Danny walked silently beside her, his hat tilted on the top of his head. A few minutes later, as we sat
around a table in a crowded dairy restaurant on a side street off Broadway, Rachel began to talk about the structure of the plot, the development of the characters, and the way Arthur Miller had gone about proving his argument that it was possible to write tragedies for the contemporary stage and that the proper hero of such tragedies was the common man. I asked her what she had thought about the way this particular common man had cheated on his wife and his sons, and she said that’s what life was all about, the way we cheat and hurt each other and still try to live together somehow. Danny went into a lengthy psychological analysis of Willy Loman’s delusions and talked about how crucial it was to be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The two of them sat there, discussing the movie, and I drank my coffee and ate my pie and listened and saw Eileen looking fascinatedly at Danny. She had known about Danny, of course, from Rachel, but she had met him for the first time earlier that night, and now she seemed a little awed by him. Then Danny stopped his psychological analysis of Willy Loman and began to talk about what it must mean for a man to see everything he worked for cracking apart, his life suddenly rubble, his dreams suddenly smoke—and I stopped drinking my coffee and eating my pie and stared at him. He was looking down at the table but I saw Rachel glance at me, then glance quickly away. “I can’t think of anything more agonizing than that,” Danny said softly, “except a long dying. A person can do one of two things in that kind of situation, assuming that he isn’t a Willy Loman but is capable of making a decision. He can stay inside his world and try to reshape it somehow, or he can leave it and make his life over again elsewhere. Either choice involves further suffering, but it would be a creative suffering that might ultimately give rise to something worthwhile. It would not be Willy Loman’s delusional wallowing. He could, of course, try to destroy his world and then attempt to build a new world out of the rubble. But it probably wouldn’t work. No modern revolution ever really succeeded. They all substituted one tyranny for another.”