The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  And so the weeks of March went by, and only on the days when I felt myself sweating a little in my coat did I realize that the sharp edge of winter was gone from the air. I saw nothing of Danny during those weeks and spoke to him only occasionally on the phone. There was no change in Michael. He sat on the mattress and did not move. He was visited hourly by a child-care worker and daily, sometimes twice a day, by Danny, and at least two or three times a week by Dr. Altman. He was spoon-fed; he was checked periodically by a pediatrician; he was helped to the bathroom; his clothes were changed regularly; he was bathed. He was completely docile; he responded to nothing and to no one; he did not talk; his face was stonelike, devoid of even a flicker of emotion. He sat and stared and was silent.

  Danny told me in the middle of March that he had anticipated a reaction of this sort from Michael and was not concerned. But as the weeks went by and Michael continued motionless, Danny began to waver. In the last week of March I was on the phone with him for almost an hour. He was in one of his black moods of self-doubt, and all I could do was tell him that if Dr. Altman felt the experiment should be continued, then it should be continued. I did not know what else to say to him, but somehow hearing me say that about half a dozen times helped him a little, and much of the fear and uncertainty were gone from his voice by the time he hung up the phone.

  Most of the time I studied alone. On occasion, when I felt myself too entangled in the complexities of source criticism, I would go into my father’s study and ask for his help. But I was reluctant to disturb him. He was working hard on another article. And he was constantly meeting with his colleagues. There was a curriculum battle going on in his school; the newcomers wanted the hours for secular Hebrew subjects—poetry, prose, history—reduced, and the time allotted to the study of religious law expanded. My father was not even certain he would be in the school next year. But as long as he was a part of it, he would fight to keep it the kind of school it had been before the appearance of the newcomers. So he fought. Between his writing and his fighting I had little opportunity to study Talmud with him.

  The book, we were informed by the publisher, was doing quite well. The attacks had aroused curiosity. Reviews of the book were still appearing in scholarly journals, and they were all uniform, and occasionally even impassioned, in their praise of my father’s scholarship. To our complete amazement and joy, the book was also reviewed in a popular national literary magazine: the technical chapters were intended for scholars, the reviewer said; but the introduction could be read by any intelligent layman and was “a model of clearly presented ideas about a method of scholarship that has radically altered man’s understanding not only of the Talmud but also of the great texts of the ancient world.” My father told me that one of the newcomers in his school had gone into a rage over that review and had called the reviewer an am ha’aretz. “Am ha’aretz” is the Hebrew term for ignoramus. The man who wrote the review was the same man I had met in the Frankel Seminary dining room in December, the person Abraham Gordon had referred to as one of the greatest Talmud scholars in the world.

  In the third week of March another attack against the book appeared in a popular Orthodox magazine. The reviewer followed Rav Kalman’s line of reasoning almost point by point—but his words were rather quiet in tone. There were a few other attacks in obscure Orthodox newspapers and newsletters. But most of the Orthodox press did not even bother to mention the book and treated it as if it did not exist.

  In the middle of March Rav Kalman came out with two tirades in one day, both of them about the projected graduate department of rabbinics. But he continued to ask me to remain after class. Both of us knew that the tirades were also aimed at my father. Yet he seemed perfectly able to dissociate his oblique attacks against my father from the after-class conversations we were having. He never mentioned my father during those conversations. He would ask me if I was still seeing Abraham Gordon; he would ask about Michael; he would point to a newspaper article and inquire about this or that section which had puzzled him. He wanted to know what I thought of Senator Joseph McCarthy, and I told him. He wanted to know whether McCarthy’s two young assistants were really Jews, and I told him. He was pleased by a photograph showing Mayor Impellitteri shaking hands with Mayor Shragai of Jerusalem during the latter’s visit to New York early in March. He was shocked by the vehemence with which a critic dismembered a Broadway play and its author. Slowly over the course of those weeks a subtle change occurred in our relationship: he remained my teacher during each shiur and became my student afterward.

  It was quite apparent that he was very concerned about my visits with Abraham Gordon for he was constantly asking me whether I was still seeing him. I kept telling him no, I was studying for the smicha examinations. By the end of March he no longer mentioned Abraham Gordon. But he always began our conversation with a tense inquiry about Michael. “How is the son of Gordon?” he would ask, and I would say there was no change, and he would be silent for a moment, smoking, his fingers drumming soundlessly upon the Talmud, and then we would talk.

  There was a grimness about him, a wall of stiff, humorless rigidity, an unbending quality of mind that placed everything it came into contact with into immediate and fixed categories of approval or disapproval where I knew they would remain forever. And his criterion of judgment was a rather harsh and inflexible version of Eastern European Orthodox Jewish law, which he applied to everything.

  All through March he kept asking me to remain after class so we could talk. I had the feeling sometimes that I was the only link he had to the bewildering American world into which he had suddenly been plunged.

  Then, in the first week of April, there was another raging tirade against the graduate department in rabbinics, and the next day he was absent and someone came into the class from the Dean’s office and told us to study by ourselves, Rav Kalman was ill. He was gone the next day too, and then the next, and we began to hear rumors that he was refusing to teach until he received an absolute assurance that there would be no graduate department in rabbinics and that if this assurance would not be given him soon he would resign.

  He was still out of the school the week I was supposed to take my smicha examinations. When I talked to the Dean about it, he gave me a diplomatic smile. I should come back tomorrow, he said. It would all be straightened out by tomorrow and he would assign a new date for the examinations. I returned the next day and was told to come back the following week.

  We heard only the faintest echoes of the fight that was going on behind the closed doors of the Dean’s office during those weeks. Rumors flew wildly about the synagogue: there had been a furious argument between Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson; each had threatened to resign if the other remained; Rav Gershenson favored having the department in rabbinics; Rav Kalman stated he would not continue to teach in the school if the department were established; there had been loud, angry words, some of which one would hardly associate with teachers of Talmud. Then Rav Kalman had actually resigned and word of this had somehow gotten out to certain very Orthodox circles, and there were phone calls and letters, and cables from as far away as Israel—the full force of Rav Kalman’s enormous influence and reputation hurled itself at the Dean and the school administration. Rabbinic arbiters were called in; some kind of compromise was reached; Rav Kalman was asked to return.

  We had no way of knowing what that compromise was. But on the Sunday before Passover Rav Kalman entered the classroom accompanied by the ringing of the church bells, placed his books on the desk, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to teach as if nothing at all had happened, as if more than a week of muted chaos simply did not exist. He even asked me to remain after class and we talked about an article he had read that morning in the magazine section of the Sunday Times. Before he dismissed me, he told me to go to the Dean and arrange for another examination date.

  The smicha examinations at Hirsch were always given on three consecutive days, two hours each day. They began at three thirty in the afternoon
and ended at five thirty in the evening. Because of the oncoming Passover festival, there were only two schooldays left in that week. I arranged to take the examinations after Passover in the last week of April.

  When I returned home from school the next evening I discovered that my father had been informed earlier in the day that the department in rabbinics would definitely be established but that the offer made to him to teach in it would have to be withdrawn—for reasons he was unhappily not able to discuss, the president of the school had said.

  Danny phoned the next night and wanted to know why I hadn’t told him about the results of my smicha examinations. I told him about the postponement, then asked him if there had been any change in Michael. There had been a brief change that morning, he said. One of the child-care workers had gone in to feed him and Michael had muttered something to her about knowing what he had to do but it was too hard—and had returned to his frozen silence. Yes, Danny had seen him later. But Michael had said nothing. He had sat on the mattress, staring blankly at the floor, and Danny had been unable to get him to say a word. Danny had immediately informed his parents. Ruth Gordon wanted the experiment stopped. But Abraham Gordon insisted that it be continued. Danny sounded exhausted. There were moments when I could barely hear his voice over the phone. He wished me a kosher Passover and hung up.

  It was a grim Passover. My father had invited an old colleague of his to the first Seder. He came with his wife—his children were all married and lived in distant parts of the country—and we chanted the Haggadah and then Manya served the Passover meal, and all through that meal my father and his colleague reminisced about the early days of the school, the struggles they had experienced in establishing it, the months during the Depression when they had gone unpaid because there were no funds for teachers’ salaries, the headaches and the heartaches, and the joy of seeing the school firmly established—and then the advent of the newcomers. My father’s colleague grew quite bitter about those newcomers. He was a man in his late sixties, with a shock of white hair and myopic eyes behind thick, rimless glasses, and he kept saying that he could understand my father wanting to leave the school now but that his going would seriously weaken the ranks of those who were trying to hold back the influence of the newcomers. His wife, a rather loud and sharp-tongued woman, contributed a few choice expressions of her own on the subject of the newcomers. It was an unpleasant time.

  Another of my father’s colleagues was his guest at the second Seder the following night, an old and kindly man who was retiring at the end of the term and was being replaced by a young European-trained rabbi who had survived Dachau. The talk was an almost word-for-word repetition of last night’s conversation. I sat and listened and saw how torn my father was, and said nothing.

  During the intermediate days of Passover I worked sporadically on the thesis I was doing for a Master’s degree in philosophy. Most of the time I studied Talmud. Then came the final two days of Passover. The following Sunday I returned to school.

  The next afternoon, at exactly three thirty, I walked into the small room on the second floor of the yeshiva where the smicha examinations were to be held. The room contained a long, polished black-wood table and some chairs. At the head of the table sat the Dean, looking small and chunky and uncomfortable. To his right sat Rav Gershenson and Rav Kalman, separated by two empty chairs. The walls of the room were painted a light green and were bare. The table was bare too, except for an ashtray. Overhead a light bulb burned inside a ceiling fixture. There were no windows.

  The door closed behind me with a loud click. I sat down opposite Rav Gershenson and Rav Kalman. The Dean brought the tips of his fingers together and rested his hands over his vest. He smiled at me, his pink face looking a little tense. Then he cleared his throat softly and said in Yiddish, “Let us begin.”

  Fifteen

  There were no preliminaries. Rav Gershenson smiled behind his gray beard and in a soft voice asked me a question having to do with a point of law found in the Yoreh Deah, which is a medieval work on Jewish law and which I was required to know together with the Talmud tractate Chullin and any other tractate of my choice. I was also required to know the various important commentaries on these works. I was required to know it all by heart. No other kind of knowing was recognized.

  I answered Rav Gershenson’s question, speaking quietly and slowly. It was a simple question and I gave it the terse and simple answer it needed. He asked me another relatively easy question from the Yoreh Deah, and I answered it in the same manner as before. He nodded and smiled, then asked me a somewhat more complicated question, also about the Yoreh Deah, and I cited a number of differences of opinion among various medieval authorities about the case he had referred to, then gave the accepted and final legal decision.

  This went on for about thirty minutes, the Dean sitting in his chair with his fingers over his vest, Rav Gershenson asking questions on the Yoreh Deah, and Rav Kalman absolutely silent, looking morose and grim and, I thought, a little tense. Sometime during the first ten minutes of Rav Gershenson’s questions, he had lit a cigarette. He was on his third cigarette now and still had not said a word.

  The questions and answers continued. I was having no difficulty at all and was actually beginning to feel as if I were alone in the room with Rav Gershenson. Rav Kalman seemed uninterested in what was happening. He smoked and tugged occasionally at his beard and frowned and stared down at the polished table top. He seemed impatient; he squirmed; I had the feeling he wanted to get up and pace back and forth. But he sat there, smoking and frowning, and said nothing.

  Three quarters of an hour later I was still answering questions on the Yoreh Deah, and Rav Kalman still had not said a word, and the Dean was beginning to give him uneasy and embarrassed glances, his pink face looking apprehensive. Rav Gershenson asked me one more question and I answered it, and then he sat back and nodded and was quiet, apparently satisfied that I knew the Yoreh Deah.

  There was a brief silence. The Dean stared at Rav Gershenson, then at Rav Kalman, then back at Rav Gershenson. He looked at his wristwatch. He cleared his throat and shifted uneasily on his chair.

  Then, with his eyes still on the table and his face quite grim and a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, Rav Kalman asked me to explain a passage from Chullin. I recognized it immediately. It was one of the passages he had asked me to read months ago, a difficult passage with obscure words which he had insisted over and over again I explain clearly. I cited the passage, explained it, cited some of the commentaries, and explained them. He asked me again to explain the words. He did not understand how the words could have the meaning I attributed to them, he said quietly. I told him that was the meaning most of the Rishonim had attributed to them. He said, his voice rising a little, that he knew what the Rishonim had said about the text, but was I satisfied with the meaning I had given the words. I told him yes, I was satisfied. It was a difficult though not an impossible text and I did not know what I could do to improve it, and so I did nothing.

  There was another brief silence. Then Rav Kalman cited a statement in one of the Rishonim I had quoted earlier, a statement that contained a reference to another tractate in which there was a word similar to one of those we had been discussing, and he asked me to explain the passage in that tractate. It was not the tractate I had chosen to take the examination on. I saw Rav Gershenson give Rav Kalman a sharp look. The Dean’s mouth opened slightly and a hand came off his vest and he was about to say something when I began to answer Rav Kalman’s question. The Dean looked at me and his mouth dropped a little further, then he sat back in his chair, shaking his head. Rav Gershenson smiled into his beard, and listened as I cited the passage and began to explain it.

  It was one of the passages I had been waiting for. There were others like it scattered all through the Talmud. Sooner or later I would have managed to steer us onto one, or we would have come across one by ourselves. Now I was in it and explaining it and knowing exactly what wo
rds I would use and seeing it all half a dozen steps in advance like a chess game.

  The passage was from a Mishnah. There are sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah. Orthodox Jewish scholars believe that together with the giving of the Written Law on Mount Sinai—the Pentateuch—there was also given an oral law; the latter is an amplification of the former and was handed down by sages through the generations together with the teachings of the Written Law. Both are sacred; both comprise what is referred to as Torah. Thus there is one Torah, and this Torah has two sources: the word of God committed to writing, and the parallel system of law transmitted orally by the sages of the tradition. This oral tradition was first set down in writing in the second century of the Common Era by a great sage of the Talmudic period. The early written oral tradition is called the Mishnah, which means, study or oral law, in contradistinction to the Mikra, which means reading and is the term applied to the recitation of a text of Scripture. The Rabbinic discussions of the Mishnah which took place in the various Jewish academies in Palestine and Babylonia are called Gemara, which means completion—the complete mastery or study of the Mishnah. The oral discussions on the Mishnah were ultimately set down in written form. Those oral discussions which took place in the Palestinian academies were set down in written form, together with the pertinent texts of the Mishnah, at about the beginning of the fifth century of the Common Era. This is the Palestinian Talmud. The discussions that occurred in the Babylonian academies were set down in final written form, also together with the pertinent texts of the Mishnah, in the sixth century. This is the Babylonian Talmud. In matters pertaining to Jewish religious law, the Babylonian Talmud is regarded as the more authoritative of the two because its teachers lived later than those mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud and because it was the first of the two Talmuds to reach the Jewish communities of the Western world. Many Orthodox Jewish scholars believe that the printed version of the Babylonian Talmud is the fixed and final depository of the oral tradition and that its teachings are identical in date, origin, and sanctity to the teachings which are derived from the interpretation of Scripture itself.