The Promise (24 page)

The next day he asked me again to remain behind after class. We sat together at the desk and there was sunlight on the dark wood and on the pages of my father’s book. We argued back and forth a very long time over an impossibly complicated passage of Talmud and I found myself quoting from half a dozen different tractates in support of the explanation my father had given the passage, and to my surprise one of the tractates I quoted from was not listed in the footnotes to the book. I would have to tell my father about that, I thought. Rav Kalman listened and argued and began scratching at the scar on his cheek with the two misshapen fingers of his right hand. After a while I found myself looking at those fingers, watching them move together across his cheek, and he noticed me and quickly put his hand on his lap. A moment later he dismissed me. I turned at the door. He sat behind the desk, his head in his hands, staring down at my father’s book. I thought I heard him sigh.

I told my father about the passage when I got home that evening. We were in his study. He looked at the footnotes, then checked the passage in the Talmud.

“You are right, Reuven. I did not remember the passage. I will have to correct the footnote if there is another printing. How did you come to think of the passage?”

I told him about my after-class sessions with Rav Kalman.

“You have been going over the book with Rav Kalman?” He looked astonished.

“I told you he asked me about some passages on Sunday.”

“But every day? He has asked you about it every day?”

“What’s wrong with that?”

He stared down at the book and said nothing.

“What’s going on?” I said.

He said nothing.

“Something’s going on. What’s happening?”

I heard Manya calling us in to supper.

“Rav Kalman has been asked to write an article about the book,” my father said.

I stared at him. “How do you know?”

“From a colleague in my yeshiva.”

“Why are you so upset?”

“It will be an attack against the book.”

“How do you know that? From your colleague?”

“Yes.”

I heard Manya calling us again.

“We should go in to eat, Reuven.”

“Why would he want to attack the book? They never attack works of technical scholarship.”

“The introduction. Anyone can read and understand the introduction.”

Manya called us a third time.

“Let us go in, Reuven. And let us not talk about this during the meal. We will talk afterwards.”

But shortly before the end of the meal he remembered he had a meeting that night with some of his colleagues. He did not return until after eleven o’clock. His face was gray and he seemed exhausted. We sat together at the kitchen table. He drank tea and I had some milk and cookies. He was silent and withdrawn. I heard the soft electric throb of the refrigerator and the ticking of the kitchen clock. Then I heard him sigh and say quietly, “At least it is for Torah. We are fighting for Torah. It is not this horrible insanity with Senator McCarthy. There is some consolation.”

I drank from my glass and looked at him and did not say anything.

He shook his head. “It is strange how ideas can float about and be ignored until they are put into a book. A book can be a weapon, Reuven. But I did not intend my book to be a weapon. I simply intended it to be—a book.” He was silent a moment. Then he shook his head again. “I expected it. But what could I do? I could not stop writing. I cannot stop writing because some people do not like what I say.”

“Rav Kalman?”

He looked at me and blinked his eyes wearily. “Yes,” he said. “Rav Kalman. And others.”

“Which others?”

“There will be others,” he said sadly. “Rav Kalman has great influence. There will certainly be others.”

“Two years,” I said. “Why couldn’t he have missed us by two years?”

“What are you saying, Reuven?”

“Why couldn’t he have come to America two years later?”

“You would like him to have suffered two more years somewhere in China merely to have avoided causing us a problem? That is a terrible thing to say, Reuven.”

I finished my milk and said nothing.

“Besides, there would have been someone else. The times are different. The climate is different. Everything is different. There would have been another Rav Kalman.”

“Not for my
Chullin
teacher.”

“Perhaps. But it is childish to think of what might have been.”

“You said China. Was he really in China?”

“Yes.”

“How do you know?”

“I have discovered a great deal about Rav Kalman.”

“From your colleague?”

He smiled faintly and nodded. “He is a great Talmud scholar and a fierce follower of the musar movement. He might have become another Rav Israel Salanter or Rav Nathan Finkel had Hitler not destroyed European Jewry. He is one of the great men in Orthodoxy today. That is why your yeshiva brought him over. They wanted to bring him over sooner, but he had established a yeshiva in Shanghai and would not leave earlier. If his signature is on your smicha it will be a great smicha, Reuven. You will have a right to be very proud of that smicha.”

“I’m not going to be proud of a smicha I have to lie for.”

“No,” he said soberly. “I do not expect that you will lie in order to receive smicha. You will have to make a choice.”

“What choice? There is no choice. I realized tonight while you were out that I have no choice at all. He’s not asking me to make a choice. He’s telling me to take a stand. I’m either with him or against him. All or nothing. I’m disgusted with the whole business. I don’t want smicha if the price I have to pay for it is to stop thinking. He can keep his smicha.”

“You will not receive smicha? What will you do, Reuven?”

“I don’t know. Maybe I’ll sit out the
Chullin
class until June, and then take a doctorate in philosophy. You always wanted me to teach in a university. Maybe I’ll teach in a university. I don’t know.”

“You have to make a decision now, Reuven?”

“No.”

“Then wait. Wait until you will have to make it.”

“I’ll have to make it by March or April.”

“Then wait until March or April.”

“I’m sick of it,” I said. “I’ve had it up to here now with Rav Kalman. I’m not going to change the way I study Talmud just because Rav Kalman has his head buried in a ghetto.”

“Do not talk that way, Reuven. It is disrespectful.”

“I’m sorry, abba. I’m angry.”

“Yes. I can see that. You will be a lot angrier before this is over. It is when you are angry that you must watch how you talk.”

“I’ll bet he asks me tomorrow to explain more of the book to him.”

“If he does,” my father said, “I expect you to answer him with respect.”

But I was wrong. Rav Kalman did not ask me to remain after class the next day. Nor did he call on me to read. And the same was true of the day after. I sat in the class and listened and from time to time I noticed him glancing at me, but he left me alone.

Early Friday afternoon I brought a copy of my father’s book over to Danny. It was a cold, bleak day. The streets teemed with caftan-garbed Hasidim rushing about in preparation for Shabbat. I turned up Danny’s block, which was almost a precise duplicate
of mine, but looked older, more worn, the brownstones unkempt, the stone banisters on the outside stairways chipped and smudged with dirt, and many of the front lawns paved over with cement. This block had always looked less neat and clean than mine, but mine had begun rapidly to resemble it in the past two years.

I came up the worn stone steps to Danny’s house and went through the front double door and the small foyer into the hallway. At the right of the hallway was the door that led to Reb Saunders’s synagogue. The door was open and I stopped for a moment and peered inside. Nothing about the synagogue had changed. It looked transplanted from another age, its individual stands, its old chairs and tables, its podium and Ark, the cushioned chair alongside the Ark where Reb Saunders sat, the separate screened-off section for women, the exposed light bulbs hanging from the ceiling, the walls that needed paint—so much of my life had once been tied to the things I had experienced inside that synagogue and all of it seemed strange to me now, quaint, almost exotic, as if it were a movie set or something I were watching an author describe in a historical novel. I turned away from the door and went to the foot of the stairs and called Danny’s name. I heard my voice echo through the empty hallway and up the staircase and through the house. Then I heard footsteps and I looked up and I saw a beardless caftaned figure come to the head of the stairs, a young caftaned figure, a boy of about fifteen, with dark hair and a sculptured face and dark eyes, and I looked up at him and in the shadows of the stairway he looked to be Danny and I felt a shock go through me and I put a hand on the banister. But it was not Danny; it was his brother Levi. I leaned against the banister and felt my heart beating.

“Hello,” Levi said in English. “Danny says to come up to his room.” He had a gentle voice and pale features and he smiled at me as I came toward him up the stairs.

“How are you, Levi?”

“Thank God. Thank God.”

“Your mother?”

“Thank God, all right”

“Is your father upstairs too?”

“In his study. How are you, Reuven?”

“I’ve had better days and worse days.”

“I can imagine,” he said, changing to Yiddish. “Nu, have a good Shabbos.”

“Shabbat shalom,” I said. I was almost to the third floor when it occurred to me to ask myself what he had meant by “I can imagine.”

Danny was in his room at the far end of the apartment hall on the third floor. The door was open. I poked my head inside and saw him seated at his desk over an open Talmud.

“Your Mitnaged friend is here with his heathen literature,” I said.

He looked up and smiled, a little grimly I thought, and told me to come in.

I gave him my father’s book. He thanked me for it and put it on his desk. Then he closed the Talmud he had been studying from and told me to sit down. I sat on the bed. There were bookcases against the walls and a worn rug on the floor. Outside in the back yard the naked branches of an ailanthus moved against the gray sky.

“Levi doesn’t look too well,” I said.

Danny said nothing.

“You’ve cleaned up the room.”

He smiled. “How are you?” he asked.

“I’m not sure any more.”

“You’re having a bad time.”

“How can you tell, doctor?”

“Rachel sends you her regards.”

“How is Rachel?”

“Fine.”

“How is the great doctor?”

“Tired.”

“Of course.”

“Michael has been talking all week about your visit.”

“Is that good?”

“It would be better if he talked about himself.”

“Shall I stop seeing him?”

“No. Are you going to the Gordons?”

“Yes.”

“The cherem doesn’t bother you?”

“Does it bother you?”

“No.”

“It doesn’t bother me either.”

“It doesn’t really apply to me.”

“You mean pickuach nefesh.”

“Yes.”

In the Jewish tradition, a religious law must be violated if it is even vaguely suspected of endangering a human life. “Pickuach nefesh” is the technical legal term for saving a life.

“How is Michael?” I asked.

“I don’t think Michael is going to talk. I can’t get to him.”

“It’s been less than two weeks, Danny.”

“I know how long it’s been. But I can already feel it. He talks to me more than he’s ever talked to anyone. But I can’t get to him with talk. There’s a thick shell around him and I can’t get through it.”

“A shell,” I said.

“I can’t get through.”

“You want to get through to his spark of a soul? You sound like your father. I’m surrounded by you people.”

He looked at me sadly.

“Between Rav Kalman in class and Hasidim on the streets I’m beginning to feel I could use some therapy myself.”

“You don’t need therapy.”

“What do I need, doctor?”

“You don’t need therapy.”

“I need a vacation from Rav Kalman, that’s what I need. You want to hear about his latest little game?”

“I know about it.”

I looked at him.

“I read it.”

“You read what?”

“It’s in the paper.”

“What’s in the paper?”

He stared at me. “I thought—” He stopped. “You haven’t seen it?”

“Seen what? What are you talking about?”

“Don’t you get that paper Rav Kalman writes for?”

“No.”

He reached up to a shelf over his desk, pushed some papers aside, and handed me the newspaper. It was a rather shabby weekly publication but it was reputed to have considerable influence upon those in positions of power in Orthodoxy. You could see it on the newsstands in Brooklyn, its masthead thick and black:
The Jewish Guardian
. It was of tabloid size, poorly printed and edited, its English often embarrassingly clumsy. Its readership comprised the very Orthodox, especially those who had come to America from the concentration camps. It had been in existence for about two years. I had read through one of its issues about a year ago and had found it smug, self-righteous, faintly hysterical, and generally dull. Then last week I had brought a copy to Michael, the copy containing the attack against his father. Now I was reading about my father.

Rav Kalman’s article was set in two wide columns on page three, and was headlined:
NEW BOOK A THREAT TO TORAH JUDAISM
. Beneath the headline, in italics, were these words:
This is the first of a two-part article on
THE MAKING OF THE TALMUD: STUDIES IN SOURCE CRITICISM
by David Malter. The author of these articles is the world-renowned Talmud scholar Rav Jacob Kalman, of the Samson Raphael Hirsch Yeshiva
.

I read the article very quickly. My face was hot and my hands were trembling and when I was done reading it I gave it back to Danny and he put it on his desk.

“He didn’t waste any time,” I said, feeling the anger and the shame deep inside me.

Danny said nothing.