The Promise

by Chaim Potok

  This was a position which my father and I found impossible to maintain. There were too many variant readings, too many obvious scribal errors, too many emendations and substitutions of texts even within the Talmud itself for us to believe that text was frozen. We saw the Talmud as containing almost a thousand years of ideas and traditions that had been in flux; we saw the text of the Talmud as fluid, alive, like a body of rushing water with many tributaries leading into it and from it. And the Mishnaic passage which Rav Kalman had just led me to was one example of the nature of that fluidity.

  I recited the passage by heart, then went on to discuss at great length the many difficulties that the Amoraim, the Rabbis of the Gemara, saw in that passage. The resolution of these difficulties was rather difficult in itself, and the medieval commentaries struggled to make it clear. I cited the commentaries, showed how they had attempted to clarify the discussion, and concluded by saying that the commentaries were themselves difficult to understand. Then I was silent. I knew what would come next. But I was silent, and waited.

  Rav Kalman leaned across the table and put out his cigarette. Rav Gershenson sat very quietly, his hands on the table, looking at me intently and smiling. The Dean had been nodding his head all through my long review of the passage. He was still nodding.

  In a very quiet voice, Rav Kalman asked me if I thought I could add anything to our understanding of the passage. I told him it seemed to me that the text was very difficult to understand. I did not say it was wrong; I said it was very difficult to understand. But I used the word “text.”

  The Dean stopped nodding and opened his eyes very wide. Rav Gershenson did not move. The smile froze a little on his face.

  I emended the text.

  There was a long silence in the room. I could feel the silence. It was electric with sudden tension.

  Rav Kalman lit another cigarette, the two misshapen fingers jutting sharply outward from his hand. He put the cigarette between his lips and stroked his dark beard. On what did I base my emendation? he wanted to know. He used the English word “emendation,” and there was sarcasm in his voice.

  “On the correct text.”

  “Yes?” His voice shook a little. “Where is it found?”

  I cited the version of the text as it appears in another tractate of the Babylonian Talmud. This version was clear and precise and made the entire Amoraic discussion on the previous text unnecessary.

  The Dean squirmed in his chair. Rav Gershenson sat very still and said nothing.

  “The discussion in the Gemora is over a wrong Mishnah?” Rav Kalman said sharply. “You are telling us the Amoraim wasted their time discussing a wrong Mishnah?”

  I told him they hadn’t wasted their time; they had been trying to understand the version of the original text that had been transmitted to them, and had done the best they could with it. It was a minor change, I said, and was supported by internal evidence in the Talmud itself. Texts had been corrected in this manner by Talmud scholars all through the centuries, I said. I saw no reason why I could not do it if it helped clarify a difficult passage. I only used it when it would help me understand a passage that was otherwise unclear, I said. I spoke quietly and respectfully, and wondered from which of the three the explosion would come. But they sat there, staring at me, and were silent.

  A moment later the Dean rose to his feet and the first of the three examinations came to an end.

  I went home in a trembling sweat. At the supper table that evening I went over the passage with my father and he told me he had absolutely no doubt that I had emended it correctly. He also told me that he had received a firm offer of a professorship in Talmud that afternoon from the Zechariah Frankel Seminary.

  I came into the little room the following afternoon and encountered the grim faces of the Dean and Rav Kalman. But Rav Gershenson sat looking very relaxed, smiling occasionally, his pointed gray beard moving slowly back and forth as it accompanied the nodding of his head. Each time I answered a question he nodded and smiled. Once we spent twenty minutes on a point in Chullin and he tried to dissuade me from an interpretation I had given a certain passage in the Gemara and in the end I relented, realizing that he was probably right, despite the fact that his understanding of the passage contradicted that of some of the early commentaries. A few minutes later we were deep in a passage of Mishnah and when I cited the variant reading and said it was found in the Jerusalem Talmud, Rav Kalman suddenly jumped to his feet, almost upsetting his chair. We stared at him. I could feel my heart beating.

  “I know that Yerushalmi,” he almost shouted. “The Mishnah is not as you say it is. I will bring it and show you.” He stormed out of the room.

  The Dean squirmed some more in his chair and threw me angry looks. Rav Gershenson sat quietly, smiling. We waited in tense silence.

  Rav Kalman returned with one of the huge volumes of the printed Jerusalem Talmud. He had it open to the Mishnah. He put it down on the desk and, standing over it, read quickly. The text was an exact duplicate of the one found in the Babylonian Talmud.

  “Nu?” he said in angry triumph. “Where is the Mishnah different? How is it different? It is the same!”

  “It’s been corrected,” I said. He stared at me.

  “That’s the Vilna Edition. It was corrected according to the Bavli.”

  “Bavli” is the Hebrew term for the Babylonian Talmud.

  “Reuven,” Rav Gershenson said softly. “Is the reading you speak of found in the old Venice Edition of the Yerushalmi?”

  “Yes.”

  Rav Kalman straightened and stood stiffly behind the table, staring first at me, then at Rav Gershenson, then back at me. He closed the volume of the Talmud and went with it out of the room.

  There was another tense silence.

  The Dean looked at me, opened his mouth to say something, then changed his mind, and was quiet.

  Rav Kalman returned. There was a look of bewilderment on his face. He said nothing about the Venice Edition of the Yerushalmi, which he had no doubt checked for the variant reading. He sat down and asked me to explain a passage in Sanhedrin, which was the tractate I had chosen to be examined on. I explained the passage. We went from one passage to another in Sanhedrin, and then we were in the Mishnah which lists ten differences between cases concerning property and capital cases, and I recited the Mishnah by heart and instead of going directly to the Gemara that followed the Mishnah, I jumped a few pages to where an Amora questioned the number of items listed in the Mishnah, claiming that he saw only nine differences. The Gemara resolved the difficulty, but unsatisfactorily as far as I was concerned.

  “The second Amora did not have the exact same Mishnah as the first Amora,” I said, and then was silent, waiting.

  The Dean’s face went from its normal pink to very red. Rav Kalman’s face was pale above the starched white collar of his shirt. And Rav Gershenson looked at me narrowly.

  “Where is the other Mishnah found?” he asked softly. “It is not in the Bavli and it is not in the Yerushalmi.”

  “No.”

  “Where is it found?”

  “In a manuscript.”

  “A manuscript,” Rav Gershenson echoed.

  “You saw this manuscript?” Rav Kalman asked loudly.

  “The manuscript appears in the Napoli Edition of the Mishnah,” I said.

  “The Napoli Edition of the Mishnah,” Rav Kalman repeated, staring at me. His entire world of learning was being challenged. All the mental gymnastics to which he would have subjected that passage of Talmud had been turned into smoke by a variant reading found in a fifteenth-century edition of the Mishnah.

  “Where did you see this edition of the Mishnah?” the Dean asked abruptly, his voice a little high-pitched.

  “In the Frankel Seminary Library,” I said.

  He gaped at me. I heard a thin sigh escape from between his lips. He sat back heavily in his chair and said nothing. But his face was now a deeper shade of red than before.

  Rav Ge
rshenson said, quietly, “You found this manuscript by yourself, Reuven?”

  “Yes.”

  “You studied the Gemora and thought there might be a different Mishnah and you went and found it?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded heavily. He was no longer smiling. He did not mind emendations that were supported by internal evidence in the Talmud itself. But to appeal to a reading that was not found anywhere inside the Talmud—that was dangerous. That sort of method threatened the authority of the Talmud, for it meant that the Talmud did not have all the sources at its disposal upon which laws could be based. He shook his head slowly.

  Rav Kalman sat stiffly on his chair, his eyes very dark. He seemed not to know what to say or do.

  I decided then to go all the way. I had planned to do this tomorrow, for I was working in stages—first emending a text on the basis of a reading found within the Babylonian Talmud, then clarifying a text on the basis of a reading found outside the Babylonian Talmud but within the Palestinian Talmud, and finally showing that texts existed which were not found in either Talmud but which nevertheless had been used by the Amoraim in their discussions. Now I would show them that there were contradictions even within the existing text of the Bavli, that the text as we have it could not be regarded as a unity, a coherent whole.

  I started with an apology. It was not my intention, I said, to cause anyone unhappiness or pain by what I was doing. Nor was it my intention to defame the Talmud. I was defending the Talmud, not defaming it. I was trying to add to my understanding of it by going to the original sources of the many statements it contained. I understood that this method had dangerous implications, I said, but it was the only way I knew to study Talmud. I quoted from the works of Luria and Perlow and Pineles and Epstein in support of my position. I cited a passage in the tractate Pesachim where the statement of one Amora is quoted in order to contradict the words of a second Amora and is then brushed aside by the Gemara with the word “beduta”—foolishness, a rather strong word, which carries the implication that the Amora did not know what he was saying. The Gemara itself did not know what to do with the contradiction, and so it called the apparently unsupported words of the first Amora foolish. But they were not foolish at all, I said, and cited a text in another tractate upon which I felt the Amora had based his statement. The ones who had brushed that statement aside obviously had had no knowledge of the text upon which it had been based. The Amora had not been foolish. He had used a legitimate text which had been unknown to the ones who had later discussed his words. I wanted to defend this Amora, I said, speaking very quietly and respectfully. I wanted to show that he had not been foolish at all. Then I cited two Talmudic discussions in the Gemara of the tractate Ketubot. They dealt with similar problems; but it was obvious that neither Gemara knew of the other: one based law A upon law B, and the other based law B upon law A. Yet both discussions used virtually identical words. How was it possible for two separate discussions to contain the same words? Only if the discussions originated from the same source, a third source, which originally had contained both discussions in itself—and I reconstructed that third source.

  I was aware of the presumptuousness of my words, for they implied that I knew more than the Gemara had known. So I kept saying over and over again that I was not trying to be disrespectful to the Gemara but was only trying to better my understanding of it.

  They sat there, staring at me in stonelike silence, not moving, not saying anything, just staring.

  I was quiet. My hands were sweating and I could feel beads of sweat on my back. The silence lasted a very long time.

  Rav Kalman sat on his chair, swaying slightly back and forth. He had closed his eyes. Rav Gershenson looked down at the table. The Dean stared at them, glanced at his wristwatch, then stared at them again.

  Rav Kalman opened his eyes. “Malter,” he said quietly. “You will teach Gemora this way to others?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  He closed his eyes again.

  “You use this method on the Five Books of Moses too?” Rav Gershenson asked softly.

  “No,” I said.

  “And on the rest of the Tanach? On the Prophets and the Writings?”

  I did not answer. I was torn over that question and did not yet have an answer to it. But I did not have to answer it. These were questions of theology and they had no place in a smicha examination, and they all knew it. So I remained silent.

  Rav Kalman opened his eyes. “I have no more questions,” he said.

  The Dean looked at Rav Gershenson. “No more questions,” Rav Gershenson echoed in agreement.

  “We will meet again tomorrow,” the Dean said.

  “No,” said Rav Kalman. “I have no more questions.” He looked at me as he spoke. “It will not be necessary to meet tomorrow.”

  The Dean stared at him. Then he looked at Rav Gershenson.

  Rav Gershenson shrugged. “A meeting tomorrow is unnecessary,” he said, very quietly.

  The Dean asked me to leave the room. I rose and very respectfully thanked them for listening to me and for giving me the examinations. Then I went to the door. As I opened the door, I looked over my shoulder and saw the three of them sitting fixedly at the table. I closed the door behind me and went home.

  The smicha examinations marked the conclusion of my academic year and I no longer had to attend Talmud classes. I spent my time writing my Master’s thesis. The decision as to whether or not a student had passed his examinations always came in the mail two or three days after the last examination. Four days passed and nothing came in the mail. On the afternoon of the third day, Friday, Danny called to tell me that Michael had come out of his trancelike state and had asked to see me, and then had gone immediately back into his silence. No, Danny did not want me to visit Michael yet. He wanted Michael to talk to him, not to me. He wished me a good Shabbos and hung up.

  That night, after the Shabbat meal, my father told me that he had decided to accept the offer of the Zechariah Frankel Seminary to join its faculty as a professor of Talmud. He would leave the school he had helped create.

  I was not surprised—but again there was the feeling of old worlds crumbling to pieces.

  “I would have preferred to remain with my yeshiva,” he said quietly. “But it would mean spending the rest of my life fighting. I do not know how many years I have left, Reuven, but I do not want to spend them fighting. I am too tired now for fighting. This past year of fighting has been too much …” He blinked wearily. “Fighting is for those who are young and have strength. The young who wish to change the world should stay and fight. I do not have that strength … You are disappointed in me, Reuven?”

  I was proud of him, I said. A professorship in the Frankel Seminary was something to be proud of.

  “I would have enjoyed teaching in the Hirsch graduate school,” he said. “I would have enjoyed that very much. Still, it is a great privilege to be able to teach in the Frankel Seminary.”

  He had made his decision. But it would be a long time before he would reconcile himself to the fact that he was abandoning a school and a world he loved. He was moody and silent all the rest of that Shabbat and kept wandering through the rooms of the apartment and sighing softly to himself.

  On Sunday morning I called the office of the Dean and was informed that the matter of my smicha was still under discussion. Was it true that my father had accepted a position at the Frankel Seminary? the Dean asked. Yes, it was true. He hung up.

  That afternoon Danny called and asked me to stay near the phone as much as possible. Michael and he had talked for almost five minutes that morning, and Danny wanted me to be immediately available in case I was needed. I asked him what he could possibly need me for. Just be available, he said. I told him I would stay near the phone.

  It was a dismal day, wet with rain and gray with fog. Outside the window of my room I could see the ailanthus in the back yard, dripping rain, its buds beginning to open, tiny green shoots appearing on i
ts branches.

  A few minutes before supper that night the phone rang. I answered and heard Rav Kalman’s voice and sat down on the chair next to the telephone stand. He wanted to see me in his classroom after the shiur tomorrow, he said. I was trembling. All of me was shaking and trembling and cold. He must have heard the trembling in my voice because he said quickly that I should not worry, they were giving me smicha, but he wanted to see me tomorrow. I felt my heart surging and the blood beating inside my head and I told him I would be there at exactly three o’clock and hung up the phone and let out a whoop of joy that brought Manya racing from the kitchen in a fright and my father rushing from his study, his eyes wide, and I told him and we embraced and I do not remember too much of what else happened that night, except that I think the three of us did a dance in the hall and that I called Danny to tell him the news and he was very happy and asked me again to stay near the phone as much as possible. I went to sleep wondering why Rav Kalman wanted to see me.

  I was there at exactly three o’clock. The room was already empty and I saw none of my classmates in the corridor. He had apparently dismissed the class early.

  He rose to his feet as I entered the room and waited behind his desk while I moved toward him through the classroom. Then he offered me his hand. His palm was cool and hard, and I could feel the misshapen fingers, and I remember wondering for the briefest of seconds how many German soldiers he had killed with that hand. It was the strangest thought to associate with a scholar of the Talmud, and I did not know why it had suddenly occurred to me.

  He told me to sit down. Then he asked me about Michael.

  I said that Michael seemed to be improving slightly.