The Promise (41 page)

“Yes.”

“I know the method. I do not need you to show me that method.”

I did not say anything. There was another long silence.

Then he said, “What will you do if I refuse to give you smicha?” He spoke softly. “I don’t know.”

“You will go to the seminary of Gordon?”

“I don’t know.”

“You are very clever, Reuven. You are forcing me to make the choice, yes? That is what you are doing.”

I was quiet.

He tugged at his beard. He seemed to be controlling himself with enormous difficulty. There was anger on his face. But it remained on his face, soundless this time. “I do not know what to do with you,” he muttered. “I have never had such a problem.” I remembered him using those same words weeks ago. But there was quiet pain in them now. He closed his eyes. His fingers drummed noiselessly on the Talmud. He opened his eyes.

“When will you take the examinations?” he asked softly.

I told him.

He nodded his head once. “Tell the Dean I will give you the examinations.” His face was weary, expressionless. He dismissed me. At the door of the room I turned and saw him sitting behind the desk, staring fixedly at the Talmud, looking small and lonely and forlorn.

I arranged to take the examinations in the first week of April.

I saw Abraham and Ruth Gordon the following Sunday in their apartment. We spent some time together in the study, and I helped him read the galleys of his new book. Then we sat by the fire in the living room and drank hot, spiced wine and talked about the engagement celebration. Ruth Gordon had been with the women, together with Rachel and her mother. There had been singing and dancing, and the women, all of them in wigs and long-sleeved, high-necked dresses, had been sweet and kind and Old-Worldly, and Ruth Gordon had found it all very quaint and primitive and crude. She did not like the medieval subservience of Hasidic women. She did not like the meekness with which they accepted their secondary roles. She did not like the patriarchal aura of the Hasidic family. She despised their blind unwillingness to accept twentieth-century reality. She could understand someone objecting to opinions and half-formed ideas. But facts—how could anyone born in this century reject facts! She had grown up in Canada in the midst of blind Orthodoxy—this was the first time I was hearing that she had not been born in America—and had despised it and broken with it and now found herself incapable of comprehending it. What difference was there between Jewish Orthodoxy and Catholicism? she asked. What difference was there between the blind belief of Hasidism and that of the Catholic women who climbed the stone steps of the new church in Montreal that was being built where someone claimed to have seen a vision of Joseph—climbed those steps on their knees, saying a prayer on each step? There was no difference, she said. None at all. It was the same blindness, the same absurd rejection of facts. She could not understand Rachel marrying a Hasid, even a Hasid like Daniel Saunders. She grew quite heated and her eyes became bright with anger and her voice filled the room with her scorn.

Abraham Gordon pulled at an ear lobe and sat listening to her
patiently. “The attraction of opposites,” he said finally with a smile.

“That is nonsense!” she snapped. She was really angry. I had the feeling Rachel’s coming marriage to Danny was presenting her with some kind of bewildering challenge.

“I would wager,” Abraham Gordon said quietly, “that Rachel is attracted to Daniel’s God, and Daniel is attracted to Rachel’s twentieth century. Is that nonsense, Ruth?”

“It is inconceivable to me that Rachel finds anything sensible in Daniel’s God.”

“There is a great deal of beauty in that sort of faith,” Abraham Gordon murmured.

“I find no beauty in nonsense,” she said coldly.

“Only because you don’t believe in it. Nonsense is often that in which a person cannot believe. But you once believed in literature, Ruth. You found beauty in literature. You said so yourself. You believed in and loved the esthetic quality of French literature.” He was silent a moment. “Is it impossible for two people to fuse two separate commitments into a single purpose?” He spoke softly, gazing at his wife. “I seem to recall talking to someone about that once.”

She looked at him, her blue eyes suddenly narrow.

“I have a vague recollection of a conversation along those lines,” he said.

She was very quiet.

“A boat in the middle of the Atlantic and a long walk and talk on the deck. A man and a woman suddenly in love. The man wanted to write about certain ideas and was rather clumsy with words, and the woman was excellent with words and wanted to know about those ideas. Where could I have heard that?”

I saw a crimson flush spread slowly across her features.

“Where could I have heard that?” Abraham Gordon murmured, looking at his wife.

She smiled then. It was a hesitant smile at first. Then it broadened, and she laughed softly. For the first time since I had met
her, I saw the cool, regal composure in which she clothed herself melt away, and I caught a glimpse of what she was really like when she no longer felt it necessary to show she was all mind, all molded and formed by the century in which she had been born and in which, during a passage across the dark waters of an ocean, she had given away her freedom and joined herself to the destiny of a man whose deepest dreams she would help bring to life.

I did not see Abraham and Ruth Gordon again until the last week in April.

The twilight winter ended for me that second week in March. I began to study for my smicha examinations. And much of the time I was able not to think about Michael.

I locked myself into the world of the Talmud, lived in it even during the hours when the texts were not open in front of me, saw the shapes of its printed pages everywhere, on bus rides to and from school when I closed my eyes and silently recited whole sections of it by heart, on walks beneath the sycamores when I juggled complicated commentaries in my mind, on shopping expeditions to the stores on Lee Avenue when, surrounded by dark-clothed, bustling Hasidim, I would gleefully but soundlessly emend texts and go on mental safaris for parallel passages and search out contradictions within the Babylonian Talmud, a forbidden pleasure because such contradictions, according to very Orthodox Talmudists, could not exist since the Babylonian Talmud was regarded by them as a coherent unit. But they existed, all right, and I found them and would recite them to myself while waiting to be served by the red-bearded Hasid from whom we bought our meat, or the black-bearded Hasid from whom we bought our vegetables, or the pale, gray-bearded, wizened old Hasid from whom we bought our bread and rolls. Going home from the stores, I would sometimes review passages out loud, and once I passed a group of Hasidic boys playing stoopball two houses away from mine and barely noticed them and went on talking to myself, and I heard one of them say in Yiddish, “Who is that?” and heard another answer, also in Yiddish, “The son of Malter,” and heard the first one respond, “Malter, the goyische Talmudist?” to which the other said, “Yuh.” I thought to stop and go back to
them and tell them—tell them what? I did not know what I could tell them. They were boys and were mouthing things they heard in their homes. I continued walking, but it was a while before I was able to return to the Talmud. I had borrowed from my father some of the scholarly Talmudic works he had in his study library, books by Solomon Luria and Yerucham Fishel Perlow and H. M. Pineles and J. N. Epstein, and also the writings of Joshua Krokovsky on Maimonides, and often I would read as I walked—and one day I bumped heavily into a sycamore and bruised my knee. But the book I was reading remained undamaged and I walked more carefully from then on, but continued reading. I lived in a world two thousand years in the past, in a time when sages had been remarkably unafraid of new ideas, and I sat on the earthen floors of ancient academies, listening to lectures on the Mishnah, listening to the discussions that followed, and sometimes a sage would take my arm and we would go into a silent grove of trees, and walk and talk.

Twice during those weeks I traveled to the Zechariah Frankel Seminary and sat in the library and spent hours checking variant readings in medieval manuscripts of the Talmud. The second time I was there I went up to the fifth floor and knocked on Abraham Gordon’s door. But he was not in and I went home.

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.