Skip to main content

The Chosen - parenting and the path to a heart



"Long afterwards it remains in the mind and delights," says the New York Times Book Review quoted on the back cover of the Penguin Classic edition of Chaim Potok's 'The Chosen'.

This is undoubtedly true. I must have read it twice- once when at university when enthralled with my first encounter with Martin Buber and fascinated by a novel that, at its heart, had a relationship between a Hasidic rebbe and his son. Subsequently, having enjoyed it and read its sequel, 'The Promise' and many of Potok's other novels, I must have read it again sometime later.

Now, after a significant gap, I found myself reading it once more - both anew and with the renewing of memory. I was struck indeed by how much flowed back as remembered delight.

The vivid baseball game at its opening with the two yeshiva teams facing off with blistering rivalry. The 'accident' whereby Danny, the son of the rebbe, injures Reuven, endangering his eye, and yet become friends out of this adversity. The moving depiction of an adolescent friendship of gathering depth - that has both the immaturities of youthfulness and yet an abiding seriousness, one of those friendships that you seal for life.

The relationship between Danny and his father, Reb Saunders, whereby Danny seeks to extricate himself from assuming his to be inherited position of leadership so that he can follow the talents of his extraordinary mind in studying psychology. Whilst his father, with his own brother's apostasy on his mind, seeks to educate Danny's soul, alongside his mind, in the only way he can see fit. This is the 'way of silence' where he withholds himself from his son, forcing him to go inwards and rely on his own resources. It is a costly way, a way that incorporates much (mutual) suffering - and yet both seem to find a way to be at peace with it and recognise its virtue, much to Reuven's bewilderment given his quite different relationship with his father that is equally, and contrastingly, drawn.

All of this remarkable exploration of the relationship between fathers and sons drawn against the vivid background of growing up Jewish in 1940s America, the distinctions between conservative Orthodoxy and Hasidism, the intense backdrop of the unfolding war and the revelation of the Holocaust and the struggles over the birth of Israel - the excitement of Zionism and the anti-Zionist reaction of many Hasidic Jews including Reb Saunders. Only the Messiah can restore Israel not that goy Ben Gurion. It is better to live in a non-Jewish goy state like the US rather than a Jewish one. Here, as in Germany or Poland, you might lose your life but you can preserve, by living apart, your soul. All of which is fascinating and deftly drawn.

I had forgotten, however, how deeply moving the final section is when Reb Saunders addresses through Reuven his recognition of the path Danny has chosen to take and describes and explains the route of silence that he has taken. Moving because though most readers probably share Reuven's bewilderment (and hidden disgust), Potok allows Saunders' case to be deeply resonant.

This is because it speaks to every parents', person's, wish that whatever our gifts are, most notably if they are great and potentially influential, that they are subordinated, guided by soul, by heart. What is most important is that we grow in compassion and service - that in Reb Saunders' terms that our will is enfolded in making God's will manifest - and that we liberate what and whom we touch into a deeper liveliness of spirit and love.

This growth too can only ever be our own work, our own dispensation. Every parent would like to be sure, to make sure, that their children grow up walking a path with a heart but they can only set a tone, a context, make an invitation but whether we walk that way (or when) and how deeply is one of the mysteries of our freedom. One of the many things for which parents are fearful, hopeful. As Reb Saunders indicates his way may not have been wise but wisdom often fails us here and we must do the best we can, according to our lights, and hope to be forgiven!

Of such universalities is Potok's very particular tale expertly woven.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Red Shambala

Nicholas Roerich is oft depicted as a spiritual seeker, peace visionary, author of numberless paintings, and a brave explorer of Central Asia. However, Andrei Znamenski in his 'Red Shambala: Magic, Prophecy, and Geopolitics in the Heart of Asia' has him perform another role - that of geopolitical schemer. The scheming did have at its heart a religious vision - of a coalition of Buddhist races in Central Asia that would establish a budding utopia - the Shambala of the title - from which the truths of Buddhism (and co-operative labour) would flow around the globe. This would require the usurpation of the 13th Dalai Lama to be replaced by the Panchen Lama guided by the heroic saviour (Roerich) who appears above dressed for the part. In the achievement of these aims, the Roerichs (including his wife, Helena, who had a visionary connection with 'Mahatmas' whose cryptic messaging guided their steps) were willing to entertain strange bedfellows that at one time include...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Buddha meets Christ in embrace

Reading Lama Anagarika Govinda is proving nostalgic on a number of fronts. I recall my first reading of it in my first year at university, bought at Watkins, the famous 'esoteric' bookshop in Cecil Court in London. I sat in my hall of residence room transfixed by a world made familiar; and, it was deepening of a commitment to contemplation (which has been observed fitfully)! I remember returning, at the time, to my school to give a talk to the combined fifth form on Buddhism and using Govinda as the backbone of my delivery (both this book, and his equally wonderful, the Foundations of Tibetan Buddhism). I was voted (I immodestly remember) their best invited speaker of the year. I had even bought a recording of Tibetan music as opener and closer! He reminded me of how important Buddhism was (and is) to my own thinking and comprehension of my experience. The Buddha's First Sermon in the Deer Park was the first religious text I read (of my own volition) at the tender age...
13 comments
Read more

The Jewel in the Crown

I spent six months in Nizhny Novgorod ostensibly as both the chair and the director of a micro-finance fund. I must confess much of that work -apart from the spectacular resignation of my predecessor as director - has faded from view but what I vividly recall is at weekends progressing through Paul Scott's 'The Raj Quartet' and subsequently re-watching its painstaking and triumphant dramatization (by Granada) that I had watched, long before, on the television. It was without doubt my most deeply cherished reading experience to date. This extraordinary narrative of the British in the last, declining days of colonial rule that begins with the doomed relationship of Hari Kumar and Daphne Manners, her rape, and the injustice of Kumar as accused by Ronald Merrick, the Police Superintendent, and one of the most malevolent characters ever created in fiction. He is a magnified alter ego of Scott himself especially the sharply, destructively repressed homosexuality. The narrati...
Post a Comment
Read more