The Promise (34 page)

“It is a corrupt world! I will not be changed by it!”

“You are destroying people with your religiosity!” He used the Yiddish word “frumkeit,” hurling it at Rav Kalman as though it were an epithet. “Know that you are destroying people!”

The argument raged on a moment longer, and then as suddenly as it had begun it came to an end, and the two of them stormed away from each other, going in opposite directions along the corridor. None of us knew what had caused it, but it was the subject of awed conversation for weeks. The talk about my father’s book died quickly in the wake of that argument.

On a Monday morning in the middle of January, the Dean called me into his office and asked if I intended taking the smicha examinations that spring. I told him yes, I intended to take them. He was a short, roundish, pink-faced man in his fifties, clean-shaven, double-chinned, a scholar turned administrator, with a reputation for fairness in his dealings with the students. We called him “The Peacemaker.” He spent much of his time placating the various religious factions in the school. I knew, of course, that the examinations would be given by Rav Kalman and Rav Gershenson, he said; he would also be present, but merely as an onlooker, a representative of the school administration. I knew, I said. He had not had any negative reports about me from Rav Kalman, so he assumed there were no difficulties. Were there any difficulties? he wanted to know. I was quiet a moment.

“Ah,” he said softly. “There are difficulties.” He smiled in a kind and gentle way. “That is why I have these preliminary discussions. If there are difficulties, now is the time to discuss them.”

I decided to tell him what had been going on in the class the
past year and a half. He listened, a paternal smile on his face. Then he shrugged.

“I know all this. It is his style of teaching. A student must accustom himself to all kinds of teachers. You are upset that he attacked your father?”

“Yes.”

“It was his right. He is defending Torah. He was not of those who believed in going willingly to the crematoria. He was with the partisans and killed German soldiers for Torah. Now he defends it with words. I do not agree with everything he says. But it is his right.” He brought the tips of his fingers together, forming an arc over his vest. “Reuven, that is all that is troubling you?”

I hesitated for the briefest of seconds, then said, “Yes.”

He smiled and nodded. “You see? It is good that we discuss our difficulties. We expect that you will do very well in your examinations. You are one of the best students we have here.”

That was the week my father’s book was published. We thought at first that it had suffered the fate of Hume’s first work and had fallen stillborn from the press. But by the end of the month we began to hear that reviews of the book were being written for many important scholarly journals, and that the reviews would be quite laudatory. My father was happy when he learned of that—but not as happy as he might have been. The publication of the book had intensified the quarrel in his school.

My father’s school had always been one of the finest yeshivoth in Brooklyn, a model of enlightened teaching, both of Jewish and secular subjects. And so it did not take long before the quarrel spilled out beyond the walls of the school and I began to hear of it from different people—from students in my class who had younger brothers in that yeshiva; from Rav Gershenson, who stopped me in the corridor one day as I was leaving Rav Kalman’s shiur and asked me if what he had heard about my father’s yeshiva was true,
and when I told him yes, it was true, went away, looking angry and shaking his head and muttering darkly about frumkeit; and, one day in the last week of January, from Abraham Gordon, whom I had begun to see regularly now, in his office, in his home, in the dining room of his school, and once in Prospect Park where he had asked me to meet him just so we could walk and talk; he just wanted to walk and talk and thought I might not mind being the other half of his conversation. We walked and talked for three hours on the afternoon of the last Sunday in January. And then he took me to his apartment, and Ruth Gordon served up a magnificent meal—after which we all sat and talked for another three hours, and Abraham Gordon kept coming back to the subject of my father’s quarrel with his school. How serious was it? He had only heard what he had to assume were wild rumors. Were they really threatening to revoke his tenure? How could they possibly do that? He could take them to court. My father wouldn’t take his own school to court, I said. No he wouldn’t, Abraham Gordon said quietly. Not your father.

I double-dated with Danny and Rachel on the first Saturday night in February, and we went to a movie theater in Manhattan and saw
Death of a Salesman
. My date was the Brooklyn College friend who had first told me about Rachel last spring. Her name was Eileen Farber. She was a dark-haired, vivacious girl, and I had gone out with her a few times in December and January. She and Rachel had been friends for years.

Rachel came out of the theater with her eyes red and her face pale. She had put on her glasses for the movie and had forgotten to take them off, and, walking along the street, I reminded her she was still wearing them but she did not hear me. Danny walked silently beside her, his hat tilted on the top of his head. A few minutes later, as we sat around a table in a crowded dairy restaurant on a side street off Broadway, Rachel began to talk about the
structure of the plot, the development of the characters, and the way Arthur Miller had gone about proving his argument that it was possible to write tragedies for the contemporary stage and that the proper hero of such tragedies was the common man. I asked her what she had thought about the way this particular common man had cheated on his wife and his sons, and she said that’s what life was all about, the way we cheat and hurt each other and still try to live together somehow. Danny went into a lengthy psychological analysis of Willy Loman’s delusions and talked about how crucial it was to be able to distinguish between reality and fantasy. The two of them sat there, discussing the movie, and I drank my coffee and ate my pie and listened and saw Eileen looking fascinatedly at Danny. She had known about Danny, of course, from Rachel, but she had met him for the first time earlier that night, and now she seemed a little awed by him. Then Danny stopped his psychological analysis of Willy Loman and began to talk about what it must mean for a man to see everything he worked for cracking apart, his life suddenly rubble, his dreams suddenly smoke—and I stopped drinking my coffee and eating my pie and stared at him. He was looking down at the table but I saw Rachel glance at me, then glance quickly away. “I can’t think of anything more agonizing than that,” Danny said softly, “except a long dying. A person can do one of two things in that kind of situation, assuming that he isn’t a Willy Loman but is capable of making a decision. He can stay inside his world and try to reshape it somehow, or he can leave it and make his life over again elsewhere. Either choice involves further suffering, but it would be a creative suffering that might ultimately give rise to something worthwhile. It would not be Willy Loman’s delusional wallowing. He could, of course, try to destroy his world and then attempt to build a new world out of the rubble. But it probably wouldn’t work. No modern revolution ever really succeeded. They all substituted one tyranny for another.”

“The Jewish Marxists of the twenties and thirties should hear you talk,” I said.

“My father says most of those Marxists are real-estate salesmen now in California,” Eileen said. We laughed.

A few minutes later, Danny and I sat alone at the table. The girls had gone off together—“to powder our noses,” as Eileen had put it.

“We must be reading the same books,” I said.

“How is your French?” he asked.

“Pretty good.”

“Read
L’Homme Révolté
by Camus. It came out last year. You can get it in French.”

“We are reading the same books,” I said. Then I said, “Not everyone who resorts to violence is a fool. Remember the story of Abraham lopping off the heads of the idols.”

“Yes,” he said. “I can understand violence if a person makes a rational decision that his world is utterly evil and irredeemable and that nothing in it is worth saving.”

“Not many people can make a decision like that rationally.”

“They ought to read some good books.”

“Marx read a lot of good books.”

“Marx was full of rage. Books don’t do much good when you’re that full of rage.”

“We’re all full of rage. That’s something I’ve begun to think about these days. Who isn’t full of rage?”

“Yes. But most people manage in one way or another to handle it.”

“Why are people so full of rage? How would your friend Freud answer that?”

“With a lecture on sex and repression, and by drawing you a model of the id, ego, and superego.”

“Would it help?”

“To some extent. It would begin to teach you how to become aware of yourself. That’s what the soul is, I think. Self-awareness.”

“The soul,” I said.

“The crust is self-delusion. The soul is self-awareness.”

“And if you’re rebelling and are full of rage and don’t have that self-awareness—what then?”

“You become a Marx or a Michael.”

I looked at him. “Michael is rebelling?”

“Yes. That’s what it’s all about, I think.”

“What is he rebelling against?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does Michael?”

“No. He won’t know until he’s able to talk about it.”

“How is he getting along?” I asked.

“Michael is right now probably still smashing his fists against the door trying to get out of that room. He broke a knuckle on his right hand two days ago.”

“My God. Do his parents know?”

“His parents are told everything.”

“How long do you think it will take?”

“Weeks. Maybe months.”

I did not say anything.

“He was in a trembling panic when we first put him in. He kept screaming that we were throwing him into a toilet. Now he’s raging against it. I think he’ll start experiencing hallucinations and nightmares soon.”

“You think.”

“Yes.”

“That material you gave me to read made the experiment sound as if it had a solid theoretical base.”

“It has. But we’re dealing with a human being, not with one of your deductive systems.”

I asked him some of the questions that had occurred to me as I had read the material and he warned me that his answers were going to have to be a little technical. I told him I was ready to be impressed, and he hesitated a moment, choosing his words, then began to speak. “Most disturbed children are able to respond to normal therapy,” he said, “unless they are very disturbed. Those in a treatment center setting who resist normal therapy usually
manifest this resistance by manipulating their therapy sessions, by organizing members of their peer group in order to resist adult authority, by indulging in destructive behavior. They might use any or all of those forms of resistance. Am I describing someone you recognize? Yes … Now we become a little technical. When we have a boy like Michael, whose acting out is clearly destructive and with whom we cannot develop a workable therapeutic relationship, we can do one of two things. We can send him away—and in Michael’s case that would mean institutionalization, because he’s dangerous to himself and to others—or we can experiment. We’re experimenting with a radical intervention technique. We’re depriving him of his peer group so he’ll no longer be able to channel his resistance to adult authority into and through his peers; and we’re controlling his environment and showing him that his omnipotent defenses and magical thinking—which almost invariably occur in severe character disorders—are really ineffective. And now I’ll become very technical. A state of deprivation not only brings on regressive disorganization but also promotes a constructive reorganization of deeper resources within a person. It breaks him down so that, sometimes with help—in Michael’s case, the help would be normal therapy—he can then build himself back up. The regression it induces is utilized by the person in the service of renewed ego development. Regression in the service of the ego. How’s that?”