by Chaim Potok
They shook hands. Rav Kalman nodded and smiled and seemed a little tense as he asked Danny to sit down.
“Excuse me for being late,” Danny said to him in Yiddish. “A teacher kept us longer than usual.”
Rav Kalman glanced at me, then looked back at Danny and asked him again, in a respectful tone of voice, to have a seat. Danny nodded, but waited. Rav Kalman sat down behind his desk. Then Danny sat down alongside me. His coat was still cold from the outside air. I could feel the cold coming off it and moving against my face and hands.
“How is your father?” Rav Kalman asked quietly.
“My father is well, thank you.”
“And your mother and brother?”
“They are as well as one can expect,” Danny said.
They were talking as if I were not in the room.
Rav Kalman’s cigarette had been reduced almost entirely to a smoldering stub of gray ash. He put it out in the ashtray and lit another cigarette immediately. I could see Danny watching him closely. Rav Kalman put the match into the ashtray. His voice was soft and respectful when he spoke.
“Nu, Rav Saunders. You said on the telephone you wanted to speak to me about the son of Gordon and your friend Malter.”
I stared at Danny. But he did not look at me. He was sitting on the chair, still wearing the coat and hat, his eyes looking very calm but alert. Rav Kalman had addressed him as Rav Saunders because a year and a half ago Danny had received his smicha from the Hirsch Yeshiva. But I had never heard him called by his title before, and I had an uncomfortable sensation for a moment, because I thought he had been called by his father’s name—Reb Saunders.
“The son of Gordon is very sick,” Danny said quietly.
“It is permitted to ask what is the matter with him?”
“I am only able to tell you it is not a physical sickness.”
Rav Kalman’s eyes opened very wide and his face paled. “How do you know this?” he asked, his voice quavering.
“I know because I am treating him.”
Rav Kalman stared. “You are treating the son of Gordon?”
“Yes.”
“He is very sick?”
“We have failed with everything we have tried until now. We are now experimenting with a new way to help him.”
Rav Kalman stiffened. The fingers holding the cigarette went rigid, pinching the cigarette flat between them. “Experimenting?” he said in a loud, hoarse voice. “Experimenting?”
“Yes.”
“You are experimenting with the son of Gordon?”
I stared at him. His face was ashen and his body was quivering.
“He is very sick,” Danny said. “There is no choice but to try this new way.”
“Master of the Universe,” Rav Kalman breathed. “Master of the Universe.” His eyes closed. I thought he had fainted. But he opened his eyes immediately and put the cigarette into the ashtray with an abrupt gesture of his trembling hand.
“Reuven Malter knows this boy,” Danny went on softly. “It is important for the health of the boy that he continue to see the father.”
“You know this?”
“Yes.”
“You are sure of this?”
“Yes.”
“You are telling me this as a doctor?”
“Yes.”
“Experiment,” Rav Kalman breathed. “Master of the Universe, what do you want from us?” He was staring down at the closed Talmud on his desk.
There was a momentary silence. Outside a bus went by, its tires loud on the asphalt-paved street.
Then Danny said, speaking gently, that in his judgment the cherem could not apply in my case and therefore he had not attempted to dissuade me when he had learned I was planning to see Abraham Gordon. He cited a passage of Talmud from the tractate Moed Katan, quoting it by heart. Rav Kalman nodded and said hollowly, “I know, I know.” Then Danny cited a passage in Sanhedrin about one of the Rabbis of the Talmud who had been excommunicated and had become seriously ill, and Rav Kalman nodded again. Then Danny quoted some passages from Maimonides about the laws of excommunication, and Rav Kalman quoted a passage from the code of laws written by Joseph Karo—and then the two of them became involved in a lengthy and involved discussion about the laws of excommunication and under what circumstances they could be abrogated, and at one point Rav Kalman said that a law Danny had referred to had been used elsewhere in the Talmud to make a point in an altogether different situation, and they went on from there to something else, and soon they were moving all through the vast span of Talmudic and post-Talmudic literature, discussing, debating, arguing about a complex variety of subjects that had nothing to do with excommunication or anything even remotely related to it. I sat and listened and remembered another time and other Talmudic discussions between Danny and his father, and it seemed the years had vanished and it was Reb Saunders sitting behind the desk, and then Rav Kalman was quoting from a passage of Talmud and I saw Danny smile and shake his head and say no, he had not quoted the passage accurately, and Rav Kalman stared at him as Danny repeated the passage and indicated Rav Kalman had given the version found in one of the early medieval commentaries, and Rav Kalman smiled and nodded, looking very happy to have been caught in an error, and I stared at him and found myself strangely and deeply relieved to see the grief and the sadness gone from his face. I listened to the seesawing dialogue between them, and realized that the excommunication issue was over with now, they were no longer bothering with it at all, it had been resolved, and I felt a weight of darkness fall from me, and sat watching them, hearing their voices fill the room. They went on like that for a long time, and then I saw Danny lean forward and give me a glance and nod, as if to say, “Now, listen!” and he waited until Rav Kalman finished giving his explanation of a very difficult passage in a Mishnah and then said quietly that the explanation seemed to him a little difficult because there was another Mishnah that appeared to contradict it, but he thought the following explanation was something worth considering. I knew that Mishnah and its difficulties and I also knew how tortuously—and, it seemed to me, unsuccessfully—the Gemara had attempted to resolve them, but Danny’s explanation was simple and brilliant, and ran absolutely counter to the words of the Gemara. In a traditional Talmudic disputation you never offered an explanation of a Mishnah that contradicted the Gemara. Nothing could contradict the Gemara. Rav Kalman looked astonished. But before he could say anything, Danny added that he had offered the explanation given by the Vilna Gaon. Rav Kalman’s mouth fell open. He smiled. Yes, yes, he knew of that explanation. Now that the son of the Dubrover—he was referring to Reb Saunders by the name of the Russian town Dubrov where he had once served as rebbe before bringing his people to America—now that the son of the Dubrover mentioned it, he remembered the words of the Gaon; but he did not really think the Gaon’s explanation went against the Gemara—and he launched into an involved and hopeless attempt to reconcile the two explanations. Danny listened and nodded and smiled and said nothing. With that, the discussion came to an end.
Rav Kalman sat behind his desk. In the year and a half that I had been in his class I had never seen him so happy. I was astonished by the look on his face; he seemed suddenly alive.
Rav Kalman got to his feet. Danny rose quickly. And I rose too.
“Nu,” Rav Kalman was saying, “it was good to sit and talk Torah with the Dubrover ilui.” “Ilui” is the term attributed to one who is young and has a phenomenal knowledge of Talmud. “It was a joy. I thank you for coming.” He was holding Danny’s hand, shaking it, seeming to be reluctant to part from him. Danny was tall, a little taller than I. Rav Kalman looked quite short next to him. He stood with his head tilted upward, and he was smiling and beaming and seemed not to know how to express his happiness to Danny. “In Vilna,” he was saying, “in Vilna, with my students, with one student especially, there were hours, days, when we sat and studied Torah, and—” He stopped, his face darkening. He lowered his eyes. “Nu,” he said quietly.
“That was a dream …” He was silent a moment. Then he looked at me. “I give you my permission to see Gordon.” Then he said, softly, “But, Reuven, do not become a goy.”
He dismissed me with a barely perceptible nod of his head.
I got my coat and hat and came out of the school with Danny. The two of us stood on the street in the winter sunlight.
“Thanks,” I said.
“Thank Professor Gordon,” he said. “He told me to call Rav Kalman.”
I looked at him. The lines of his face stood out sharply in the bright sunlight. We started along the street.
“How did you know he would respond like that?” I asked.
“I’m not a threat. He knows who I am.”
“He would have gone up the walls if I had used that explanation by the Vilna Gaon.”
“You think so?”
“I know so.”
“Only because you would have used it against him as a weapon.”
I said nothing. We walked in silence.
“How do I show him I’m not a threat?” I asked.
“Aren’t you?” he said.
I was quiet.
“If you’re not, you’ll know how to show him.”
“Psychology is also a weapon,” I said.
“It’s not a weapon. It’s tool to heal people with. When it’s used as a weapon it’s ugly, and the people who use it are ugly.”
“Where are you going now?” I asked after a moment.
“To the treatment center.”
“How is Michael?”
“Nightmares and hallucinations. Yesterday morning his mother came through the walls to kill him.”
I stared.
“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s beginning to surface.” Then he said, very quietly, “Thanks.”
“For what?”
“For talking to Rachel.” He looked at me and his eyes blinked. “Thanks,” he said again. Then he turned and went toward the subway, walking quickly, tall and lean even in his coat, with the hat still tilted back on top of his head.
I told my father all about it that night, and he said, “When your world is destroyed and only a remnant is saved, then whatever is seen as a threat to that remnant becomes a hated enemy. I can understand Rav Kalman. I can understand his colleagues in my yeshiva.”
“That’s why he attacked Abraham Gordon.”
“Yes.”
“That’s why he attacked you.”
“Yes. And he is right. We are both threats to his way of life.”
“That doesn’t mean you should both stop writing.”
“No, of course not. But it is different when you understand it. There is less of the—hatred.”
“How do I convince him that the way we study Talmud is not a threat?”
“But it is a threat, Reuven. I just told you it is a threat. In the hands of those who do not love the tradition it is a dangerous weapon.”
“Everything is dangerous in the wrong hands. How do I convince him that we’re not a threat?”
“I understand what you are asking. Let me think about it, Reuven. We will spend Shabbat talking about it.”
Later, I went into my room and took a book from a shelf of my bookcase and sat at my desk. It was a book about the concentration camps. I read the section that described what had gone on in Maidanek. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf and sat at my desk, staring out at the ailanthus in the back yard, and thinking of Rav Kalman’s reaction to the word “experiment.”
That Thursday he asked me to stay behind after class and we sat alone in the room and talked.
“Tell me,” he said. “You have seen Gordon since Tuesday?”
“No.”
“You will see him again soon?”
“On Sunday.”
He shook his head slowly. “I do not understand it. How can a man not believe in the Master of the Universe and write books asking Jews to remain good Jews? I do not understand it.”
“He loves his people,” I said.
He looked at me, bewildered. “And the Master of the Universe? He has no love for the Master of the Universe?”
“He can’t love what he doesn’t believe in.”
“I do not understand it.”
“He tried to find something else.”
“I know what he found.” His voice edged into contempt. “He found an idea. When we went to our deaths to sanctify the Name of God, we died for an idea? How can such a thing be, Reuven? My students died for an idea? You can pray to an idea? I do not understand it.”
I was quiet.
“Tell me,” he said. “How is his son?”
“Very sick.”
“There is no improvement?”
“No.”
He sat hunched forward on his chair, staring down at the closed Talmud and stroking his dark beard.
“Do not let him make you into a goy, Reuven,” he said. Then he dismissed me.
That Shabbat my father and I sat in his study. Piled high on the desk were half a dozen different tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, as well as the huge volumes of the Palestinian Talmud and a variety of critical editions of other ancient rabbinic texts. In careful detail, using texts as examples, we reviewed together the various techniques of the critical method and spent a great deal of time on the pioneering work done in this field by the nineteenth-century Eastern European Talmudist H. M. Pineles. We talked about the theoretical base that underlay each step of the method. I had grown up with this method of study, had always taken it for granted, and had never bothered to justify its use. We studied together all Shabbat afternoon and, because I had made no date for after Shabbat, we continued to study far into the night.
The next day I met Abraham Gordon at the lake in Prospect Park. We walked and talked.
It was cold and there were very few people in the park. The trees stood stiff and silent in the windless air, black-barked against the dead, brown earth. Overhead the sun shone like a white disk through a film of high clouds. The lake was silvery, its rim frozen to thin ice. We could see horses trotting along the bridle paths, the riders leaning forward in the saddles. A group of horses passed close to us, going very fast, the steel hooves sending up sprays of earth. Abraham Gordon ignored them.
“I did not want your choice affected by your relationship to Michael,” he said. “I am very glad we’ve cleared that matter up with your Rav Kalman.” He was hatless, his coat collar up around his neck, his face ruddy with cold. His breath vaporized in the air as he spoke. “It was rather tactless of Ruth to ask you to have dinner with us in front of Michael. I understand that you could not refuse.” He looked at me, smiling. “I would like to think that Michael is not the only reason you are seeing us now.”
“He isn’t,” I said.
“When are you required to take your smicha examinations?”
“Anytime in April or May that I tell them I’m ready.”
“Will you take them?”
“I—think so. I’m not sure.”
He was silent a moment. Then he said, walking with his eyes on the ground, “I would like to have you as my student, Reuven. I would like that very much. I’ve never quite met an Orthodox boy like you. You might even talk me into changing some of my views.” He looked at me then and smiled faintly. “You would have to work hard to do that.”
I did not say anything.
“But don’t abandon it until you’re certain you have no alternative. First be absolutely certain you’re in an intolerable situation and that you cannot alter it. Otherwise you’ll be torn the rest of your life. That’s free advice.”
We walked on awhile and passed a horse and rider that had raced by us some minutes ago. They were standing on the bridle path, the rider, a woman in her thirties, sitting forward with her elbow on the pummel, the horse sweating and steaming faintly in the cold air. It snorted as we went by and the rider patted it gently on the neck.
“He doesn’t understand my concept of God,” Abraham Gordon murmured. I ha
d told him earlier what Rav Kalman had said. “I don’t understand his. A God who worries about every human being, every creature. I find it an incomprehensible notion in the face of what we know about the world and about evil. A primitive concept. What do I do with the truth, Reuven? Evolutionary theory and astronomy and physics and biblical criticism and archeology and anthropology—they present us with truths. What do I do with the truth? I cannot ignore the truth. So I try to make it serve me. But don’t leave unless you are absolutely certain. If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble. Still,” he added, “I would like you as a student.”
We walked and talked a long time, making a wide circuit of the lake.
“Of course, that’s the problem,” he said to me once. “How can we teach others to regard the tradition critically and with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That’s everyone’s problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect.”
We came to one of the roads that ran through the park. The sun was only a few minutes away from setting. I saw Abraham Gordon stop by a tall sycamore alongside the road and put a skullcap on his head and pray the Afternoon Service. I prayed with him. When we were done, he said, “Come on home with me, Reuven, and let’s have dinner together. I’ve walked enough for one day. I did not put on my long underwear and I’m freezing.” He grimaced. “I don’t listen enough to Ruth. I should listen to her more.”
Outside the park we hailed a cab and rode to the apartment.
She served us hot, spiced wine and made a fire and we sat around awhile in the living room, and then Abraham Gordon excused himself for a few minutes and Ruth Gordon and I were alone. She wore dark slacks and a yellow long-sleeved blouse and her face was drawn with fatigue and concern. She stared into the fire, her fingers playing with strands of her chestnut hair.