The Promise (42 page)

It was quite apparent that he was very concerned about my
visits with Abraham Gordon for he was constantly asking me whether I was still seeing him. I kept telling him no, I was studying for the smicha examinations. By the end of March he no longer mentioned Abraham Gordon. But he always began our conversation with a tense inquiry about Michael. “How is the son of Gordon?” he would ask, and I would say there was no change, and he would be silent for a moment, smoking, his fingers drumming soundlessly upon the Talmud, and then we would talk.

There was a grimness about him, a wall of stiff, humorless rigidity, an unbending quality of mind that placed everything it came into contact with into immediate and fixed categories of approval or disapproval where I knew they would remain forever. And his criterion of judgment was a rather harsh and inflexible version of Eastern European Orthodox Jewish law, which he applied to everything.

All through March he kept asking me to remain after class so we could talk. I had the feeling sometimes that I was the only link he had to the bewildering American world into which he had suddenly been plunged.

Then, in the first week of April, there was another raging tirade against the graduate department in rabbinics, and the next day he was absent and someone came into the class from the Dean’s office and told us to study by ourselves, Rav Kalman was ill. He was gone the next day too, and then the next, and we began to hear rumors that he was refusing to teach until he received an absolute assurance that there would be no graduate department in rabbinics and that if this assurance would not be given him soon he would resign.

He was still out of the school the week I was supposed to take my smicha examinations. When I talked to the Dean about it, he gave me a diplomatic smile. I should come back tomorrow, he said. It would all be straightened out by tomorrow and he would assign a new date for the examinations. I returned the next day and was told to come back the following week.

We heard only the faintest echoes of the fight that was going on behind the closed doors of the Dean’s office during those weeks. Rumors flew wildly about the synagogue: there had been a furious argument between Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson; each had threatened to resign if the other remained; Rav Gershenson favored having the department in rabbinics; Rav Kalman stated he would not continue to teach in the school if the department were established; there had been loud, angry words, some of which one would hardly associate with teachers of Talmud. Then Rav Kalman had actually resigned and word of this had somehow gotten out to certain very Orthodox circles, and there were phone calls and letters, and cables from as far away as Israel—the full force of Rav Kalman’s enormous influence and reputation hurled itself at the Dean and the school administration. Rabbinic arbiters were called in; some kind of compromise was reached; Rav Kalman was asked to return.

We had no way of knowing what that compromise was. But on the Sunday before Passover Rav Kalman entered the classroom accompanied by the ringing of the church bells, placed his books on the desk, lit a cigarette, and proceeded to teach as if nothing at all had happened, as if more than a week of muted chaos simply did not exist. He even asked me to remain after class and we talked about an article he had read that morning in the magazine section of the Sunday
Times
. Before he dismissed me, he told me to go to the Dean and arrange for another examination date.

The smicha examinations at Hirsch were always given on three consecutive days, two hours each day. They began at three thirty in the afternoon and ended at five thirty in the evening. Because of the oncoming Passover festival, there were only two schooldays left in that week. I arranged to take the examinations after Passover in the last week of April.

When I returned home from school the next evening I discovered that my father had been informed earlier in the day that the department in rabbinics would definitely be established but that
the offer made to him to teach in it would have to be withdrawn—for reasons he was unhappily not able to discuss, the president of the school had said.

Danny phoned the next night and wanted to know why I hadn’t told him about the results of my smicha examinations. I told him about the postponement, then asked him if there had been any change in Michael. There had been a brief change that morning, he said. One of the child-care workers had gone in to feed him and Michael had muttered something to her about knowing what he had to do but it was too hard—and had returned to his frozen silence. Yes, Danny had seen him later. But Michael had said nothing. He had sat on the mattress, staring blankly at the floor, and Danny had been unable to get him to say a word. Danny had immediately informed his parents. Ruth Gordon wanted the experiment stopped. But Abraham Gordon insisted that it be continued. Danny sounded exhausted. There were moments when I could barely hear his voice over the phone. He wished me a kosher Passover and hung up.

It was a grim Passover. My father had invited an old colleague of his to the first Seder. He came with his wife—his children were all married and lived in distant parts of the country—and we chanted the Haggadah and then Manya served the Passover meal, and all through that meal my father and his colleague reminisced about the early days of the school, the struggles they had experienced in establishing it, the months during the Depression when they had gone unpaid because there were no funds for teachers’ salaries, the headaches and the heartaches, and the joy of seeing the school firmly established—and then the advent of the newcomers. My father’s colleague grew quite bitter about those newcomers. He was a man in his late sixties, with a shock of white hair and myopic eyes behind thick, rimless glasses, and he kept saying that he could understand my father wanting to leave the
school now but that his going would seriously weaken the ranks of those who were trying to hold back the influence of the newcomers. His wife, a rather loud and sharp-tongued woman, contributed a few choice expressions of her own on the subject of the newcomers. It was an unpleasant time.

Another of my father’s colleagues was his guest at the second Seder the following night, an old and kindly man who was retiring at the end of the term and was being replaced by a young European-trained rabbi who had survived Dachau. The talk was an almost word-for-word repetition of last night’s conversation. I sat and listened and saw how torn my father was, and said nothing.

During the intermediate days of Passover I worked sporadically on the thesis I was doing for a Master’s degree in philosophy. Most of the time I studied Talmud. Then came the final two days of Passover. The following Sunday I returned to school.

The next afternoon, at exactly three thirty, I walked into the small room on the second floor of the yeshiva where the smicha examinations were to be held. The room contained a long, polished black-wood table and some chairs. At the head of the table sat the Dean, looking small and chunky and uncomfortable. To his right sat Rav Gershenson and Rav Kalman, separated by two empty chairs. The walls of the room were painted a light green and were bare. The table was bare too, except for an ashtray. Overhead a light bulb burned inside a ceiling fixture. There were no windows.

The door closed behind me with a loud click. I sat down opposite Rav Gershenson and Rav Kalman. The Dean brought the tips of his fingers together and rested his hands over his vest. He smiled at me, his pink face looking a little tense. Then he cleared his throat softly and said in Yiddish, “Let us begin.”

There were no preliminaries. Rav Gershenson smiled behind his gray beard and in a soft voice asked me a question having to do with a point of law found in the
Yoreh Deah
, which is a medieval work on Jewish law and which I was required to know together with the Talmud tractate
Chullin
and any other tractate of my choice. I was also required to know the various important commentaries on these works. I was required to know it all by heart. No other kind of knowing was recognized.

I answered Rav Gershenson’s question, speaking quietly and slowly. It was a simple question and I gave it the terse and simple answer it needed. He asked me another relatively easy question from the
Yoreh Deah
, and I answered it in the same manner as before. He nodded and smiled, then asked me a somewhat more complicated question, also about the
Yoreh Deah
, and I cited a number of differences of opinion among various medieval authorities about the case he had referred to, then gave the accepted and final legal decision.

This went on for about thirty minutes, the Dean sitting in his chair with his fingers over his vest, Rav Gershenson asking questions on the
Yoreh Deah
, and Rav Kalman absolutely silent, looking morose and grim and, I thought, a little tense. Sometime during the first ten minutes of Rav Gershenson’s questions, he had lit a cigarette. He was on his third cigarette now and still had not said a word.

The questions and answers continued. I was having no difficulty at all and was actually beginning to feel as if I were alone in the room with Rav Gershenson. Rav Kalman seemed uninterested in what was happening. He smoked and tugged occasionally at his
beard and frowned and stared down at the polished table top. He seemed impatient; he squirmed; I had the feeling he wanted to get up and pace back and forth. But he sat there, smoking and frowning, and said nothing.

Three quarters of an hour later I was still answering questions on the
Yoreh Deah
, and Rav Kalman still had not said a word, and the Dean was beginning to give him uneasy and embarrassed glances, his pink face looking apprehensive. Rav Gershenson asked me one more question and I answered it, and then he sat back and nodded and was quiet, apparently satisfied that I knew the
Yoreh Deah
.

There was a brief silence. The Dean stared at Rav Gershenson, then at Rav Kalman, then back at Rav Gershenson. He looked at his wristwatch. He cleared his throat and shifted uneasily on his chair.

Then, with his eyes still on the table and his face quite grim and a cigarette between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, Rav Kalman asked me to explain a passage from
Chullin
. I recognized it immediately. It was one of the passages he had asked me to read months ago, a difficult passage with obscure words which he had insisted over and over again I explain clearly. I cited the passage, explained it, cited some of the commentaries, and explained them. He asked me again to explain the words. He did not understand how the words could have the meaning I attributed to them, he said quietly. I told him that was the meaning most of the Rishonim had attributed to them. He said, his voice rising a little, that he knew what the Rishonim had said about the text, but was
I
satisfied with the meaning I had given the words. I told him yes, I was satisfied. It was a difficult though not an impossible text and I did not know what I could do to improve it, and so I did nothing.

There was another brief silence. Then Rav Kalman cited a statement in one of the Rishonim I had quoted earlier, a statement that contained a reference to another tractate in which there was a word similar to one of those we had been discussing, and he
asked me to explain the passage in that tractate. It was not the tractate I had chosen to take the examination on. I saw Rav Gershenson give Rav Kalman a sharp look. The Dean’s mouth opened slightly and a hand came off his vest and he was about to say something when I began to answer Rav Kalman’s question. The Dean looked at me and his mouth dropped a little further, then he sat back in his chair, shaking his head. Rav Gershenson smiled into his beard, and listened as I cited the passage and began to explain it.

It was one of the passages I had been waiting for. There were others like it scattered all through the Talmud. Sooner or later I would have managed to steer us onto one, or we would have come across one by ourselves. Now I was in it and explaining it and knowing exactly what words I would use and seeing it all half a dozen steps in advance like a chess game.

The passage was from a Mishnah. There are sixty-three tractates of the Mishnah. Orthodox Jewish scholars believe that together with the giving of the Written Law on Mount Sinai—the Pentateuch—there was also given an oral law; the latter is an amplification of the former and was handed down by sages through the generations together with the teachings of the Written Law. Both are sacred; both comprise what is referred to as Torah. Thus there is one Torah, and this Torah has two sources: the word of God committed to writing, and the parallel system of law transmitted orally by the sages of the tradition. This oral tradition was first set down in writing in the second century of the Common Era by a great sage of the Talmudic period. The early written oral tradition is called the Mishnah, which means, study or oral law, in contradistinction to the Mikra, which means reading and is the term applied to the recitation of a text of Scripture. The Rabbinic discussions of the Mishnah which took place in the various Jewish academies in Palestine and Babylonia are called Gemara, which means completion—the complete mastery or study of the Mishnah. The oral discussions on the Mishnah were ultimately set down in written form. Those oral
discussions which took place in the Palestinian academies were set down in written form, together with the pertinent texts of the Mishnah, at about the beginning of the fifth century of the Common Era. This is the Palestinian Talmud. The discussions that occurred in the Babylonian academies were set down in final written form, also together with the pertinent texts of the Mishnah, in the sixth century. This is the Babylonian Talmud. In matters pertaining to Jewish religious law, the Babylonian Talmud is regarded as the more authoritative of the two because its teachers lived later than those mentioned in the Palestinian Talmud and because it was the first of the two Talmuds to reach the Jewish communities of the Western world. Many Orthodox Jewish scholars believe that the printed version of the Babylonian Talmud is the fixed and final depository of the oral tradition and that its teachings are identical in date, origin, and sanctity to the teachings which are derived from the interpretation of Scripture itself.