the chosen

One learns of the pain of others by suffering one's own pain, . . . by turning inside oneself, by finding one's own soul. And it is important to know of pain . . . . It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. It makes us aware of how frail and tiny we are and of how much we must depend upon the Master of the Universe. . . .

Chaim Potok's novel The Chosen was pushed on me this summer by my mom, who first heard about the book from one of her colleagues at River Oaks Baptist School. (I find it highly amusing to think of these two born-again Christian teachers at a Baptist school enthusing over this most Jewish of books. But then again, my mother has always been quite an original--one of her heroes is Malcolm X, he of the occasional radical Muslim, blue-eyed-devil-white-man philosophy.) My mom was reading the book at the beginning of July, and on the afternoon of Sunday, July 10, she was 40 pages from the end. This was also the day of the last Astros' game before the All-Star break.

The Dodgers were in town, and the 'Stros won the first two games of the series pretty handily, 3-2 and 4-2, respectively. A sweep would put us over .500 for the first time all season, a not-inconsiderable feat given that we started the season 15 games under that. (In fact, the hometown paper, the Houston Chronicle, buried them on Memorial Day. A half-page cartoon depicted a huge tombstone on which was inscribed, "2005 Houston Astros, RIP.") My mom, dad, brother and I attended, and my mom read at least through the first six innings. Of course, the action that afternoon at Minute Maid Park was really exciting, as Houston rallied from four runs down to tie the game at 5. In the bottom of the eighth, Brad Ausmus (the Dartmouth-history-major Jew) smacked a two-out, R.B.I. single to right for the winning run, and Brad Lidge retired the side in the top of the ninth to close the win. (I must also note that this game was my first clue to the cosmic Jewish significance to the 2005 Astros. More on that subject another time.)

As I was to find out later, reading this book at a baseball game in which a Jew participted is not actually all that strange. Chapter One opens with an inter-yeshiva softball game in the 1940's neighborhood of Williamsburg in Brooklyn. The protagonists, the secular modern Orthodox Reuven Malter and the Hasidic Orthodox Danny Saunders, meet each other for the first time, in an explosive encounter on the field that serves as the basis for their intense friendship. And in another odd coincidence, I left Houston three days after the Astros game to spend the next month in East Williamsburg. When I arrived, my mom, besides insisting that I require "all my Jewish boyfriends" to read the book as well, was fascinated by my actually living among the Hasids--she wanted to know all about what they wore and how they acted. (More on that subject later, too.)

Reuven and Danny are both studying to be rabbis, and the intensity and breadth of course of study enthralled me (and, truth be told, made me want to be a rabbi). As a near-universally-acknowledged dork, I longed to read and to study and to be tested on the Talmud as they are. In one college course, the boys are expected to come to class prepared to be Socratically interrogated for several hours, word for word, about a few lines of Talmud and all its commentaries. Danny's father employs the same method with his son at home. Reuven is especially interested in mathematics and logic, so the reader is treated to a good amount of gematriya. The system assigns a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet; all Hebrew words and phrases, then, have numerical value. The first time Reuven hears Danny's father speak in shul, Reb Saunders expounds:

"Rabbi Joshua son of Levi teaches us, 'Whoever does not labor in the Torah is said to be under the divine censure.' He is a nozuf, a person whom the Master of the Universe hates! A righteous man, a tzaddik, studies the Torah, for it is written, 'For his delight is in the Torah of G-d, and over His Torah doth he meditate day and night.' In gematriya, 'nozuf' comes out one hundred forty-three, and 'tzaddik' comes out two hundred four. What is the difference between 'nozuf' and 'tzaddik'? Sixty-one. To whom does a tzaddik dedicate his life? To the Master of the Universe! La-el, to G-d! The word, La-el, in gematriya is sixty-one! It is a life dedicated to G-d that makes the difference between the nozuf and the tzaddik!"

On the first day of Rosh Hashanah, I attended services at the historic Sixth and I Synagogue run by mesorahDC. Rabbi Teitelbaum, in his excellent commentary throughout the morning, mentioned that in Hebrew the phrase "Rosh Hashanah" has the same value as "our holy temple." His point was that by attending services that day, we were in essence doing our ancient duty of sacrificing at the temple. These are fairly typical examples of the use of gematriya; in addition, certain forms of rabbinical homiletic interpretation are based on inferences made from these values, and occasionally, a decision in Jewish law will be based on (or at least corroborated by) such an inference.

The birth of the state of Israel forms the background of the book. Reuven's father, David Malter, works tirelessly to promote support for the UN partition and subsequent Israeli declaration of independence, while Danny's father opposes the formation. I was especially interested to learn about how the event fractured an already fractitious Jewish community in mid-twentieth century Brooklyn. Potok says, "Long ago, in The Chosen, I set out to draw a map of the New York world through which I once journeyed. It was to be a map not only of broken streets, menacing alleys, concrete-surfaced backyards, neighborhood schools and stores . . . a map not only of the physical elements of my early life, but of the spiritual ones as well."