The Promise (38 page)

Rav Kalman sat behind his desk. In the year and a half that I had been in his class I had never seen him so happy. I was astonished by the look on his face; he seemed suddenly alive.

Rav Kalman got to his feet. Danny rose quickly. And I rose too.

“Nu,” Rav Kalman was saying, “it was good to sit and talk Torah with the Dubrover ilui.” “Ilui” is the term attributed to one who is young and has a phenomenal knowledge of Talmud. “It was a joy. I thank you for coming.” He was holding Danny’s hand, shaking it, seeming to be reluctant to part from him. Danny was tall, a little taller than I. Rav Kalman looked quite short next to him. He stood with his head tilted upward, and he was smiling and beaming and seemed not to know how to express his happiness to Danny. “In Vilna,” he was saying, “in Vilna, with my students, with one student especially, there were hours, days, when we sat and studied Torah, and—” He stopped, his face darkening. He lowered his eyes. “Nu,” he said quietly. “That was a dream …” He was silent a moment. Then he looked at me. “I give you my permission to see Gordon.” Then he said, softly, “But, Reuven, do not become a goy.”

He dismissed me with a barely perceptible nod of his head.

I got my coat and hat and came out of the school with Danny. The two of us stood on the street in the winter sunlight.

“Thanks,” I said.

“Thank Professor Gordon,” he said. “He told me to call Rav Kalman.”

I looked at him. The lines of his face stood out sharply in the bright sunlight. We started along the street.

“How did you know he would respond like that?” I asked.

“I’m not a threat. He knows who I am.”

“He would have gone up the walls if I had used that explanation by the Vilna Gaon.”

“You think so?”

“I know so.”

“Only because you would have used it against him as a weapon.”

I said nothing. We walked in silence.

“How do I show him I’m not a threat?” I asked.

“Aren’t you?” he said.

I was quiet.

“If you’re not, you’ll know how to show him.”

“Psychology is also a weapon,” I said.

“It’s not a weapon. It’s tool to heal people with. When it’s used as a weapon it’s ugly, and the people who use it are ugly.”

“Where are you going now?” I asked after a moment.

“To the treatment center.”

“How is Michael?”

“Nightmares and hallucinations. Yesterday morning his mother came through the walls to kill him.”

I stared.

“Whatever it is,” he said, “it’s beginning to surface.” Then he said, very quietly, “Thanks.”

“For what?”

“For talking to Rachel.” He looked at me and his eyes blinked. “Thanks,” he said again. Then he turned and went toward the subway, walking quickly, tall and lean even in his coat, with the hat still tilted back on top of his head.

I told my father all about it that night, and he said, “When your world is destroyed and only a remnant is saved, then whatever is seen as a threat to that remnant becomes a hated enemy. I can understand Rav Kalman. I can understand his colleagues in my yeshiva.”

“That’s why he attacked Abraham Gordon.”

“Yes.”

“That’s why he attacked you.”

“Yes. And he is right. We are both threats to his way of life.”

“That doesn’t mean you should both stop writing.”

“No, of course not. But it is different when you understand it. There is less of the—hatred.”

“How do I convince him that the way we study Talmud is not a threat?”

“But it is a threat, Reuven. I just told you it is a threat. In the hands of those who do not love the tradition it is a dangerous weapon.”

“Everything is dangerous in the wrong hands. How do I convince him that we’re not a threat?”

“I understand what you are asking. Let me think about it, Reuven. We will spend Shabbat talking about it.”

Later, I went into my room and took a book from a shelf of my bookcase and sat at my desk. It was a book about the concentration camps. I read the section that described what had gone on in Maidanek. I closed the book and put it back on the shelf and sat at my desk, staring out at the ailanthus in the back yard, and thinking of Rav Kalman’s reaction to the word “experiment.”

That Thursday he asked me to stay behind after class and we sat alone in the room and talked.

“Tell me,” he said. “You have seen Gordon since Tuesday?”

“No.”

“You will see him again soon?”

“On Sunday.”

He shook his head slowly. “I do not understand it. How can a man not believe in the Master of the Universe and write books asking Jews to remain good Jews? I do not understand it.”

“He loves his people,” I said.

He looked at me, bewildered. “And the Master of the Universe? He has no love for the Master of the Universe?”

“He can’t love what he doesn’t believe in.”

“I do not understand it.”

“He tried to find something else.”

“I know what he found.” His voice edged into contempt. “He found an idea. When we went to our deaths to sanctify the Name of God, we died for an idea? How can such a thing be, Reuven? My students died for an idea? You can pray to an idea? I do not understand it.”

I was quiet.

“Tell me,” he said. “How is his son?”

“Very sick.”

“There is no improvement?”

“No.”

He sat hunched forward on his chair, staring down at the closed Talmud and stroking his dark beard.

“Do not let him make you into a goy, Reuven,” he said. Then he dismissed me.

That Shabbat my father and I sat in his study. Piled high on the desk were half a dozen different tractates of the Babylonian Talmud, as well as the huge volumes of the Palestinian Talmud and a variety of critical editions of other ancient rabbinic texts. In careful detail, using texts as examples, we reviewed together the various techniques of the critical method and spent a great deal of time on the pioneering work done in this field by the nineteenth-century Eastern European Talmudist H. M. Pineles. We talked about the theoretical base that underlay each step of the method. I had grown up with this method of study, had always taken it for granted, and had never bothered to justify its use. We studied together all Shabbat afternoon and, because I had made no date for after Shabbat, we continued to study far into the night.

The next day I met Abraham Gordon at the lake in Prospect Park. We walked and talked.

It was cold and there were very few people in the park. The trees stood stiff and silent in the windless air, black-barked against
the dead, brown earth. Overhead the sun shone like a white disk through a film of high clouds. The lake was silvery, its rim frozen to thin ice. We could see horses trotting along the bridle paths, the riders leaning forward in the saddles. A group of horses passed close to us, going very fast, the steel hooves sending up sprays of earth. Abraham Gordon ignored them.

“I did not want your choice affected by your relationship to Michael,” he said. “I am very glad we’ve cleared that matter up with your Rav Kalman.” He was hatless, his coat collar up around his neck, his face ruddy with cold. His breath vaporized in the air as he spoke. “It was rather tactless of Ruth to ask you to have dinner with us in front of Michael. I understand that you could not refuse.” He looked at me, smiling. “I would like to think that Michael is not the only reason you are seeing us now.”

“He isn’t,” I said.

“When are you required to take your smicha examinations?”

“Anytime in April or May that I tell them I’m ready.”

“Will you take them?”

“I—think so. I’m not sure.”

He was silent a moment. Then he said, walking with his eyes on the ground, “I would like to have you as my student, Reuven. I would like that very much. I’ve never quite met an Orthodox boy like you. You might even talk me into changing some of my views.” He looked at me then and smiled faintly. “You would have to work hard to do that.”

I did not say anything.

“But don’t abandon it until you’re certain you have no alternative. First be absolutely certain you’re in an intolerable situation and that you cannot alter it. Otherwise you’ll be torn the rest of your life. That’s free advice.”

We walked on awhile and passed a horse and rider that had raced by us some minutes ago. They were standing on the bridle path, the rider, a woman in her thirties, sitting forward with her elbow on the pummel, the horse sweating and steaming faintly in
the cold air. It snorted as we went by and the rider patted it gently on the neck.

“He doesn’t understand my concept of God,” Abraham Gordon murmured. I had told him earlier what Rav Kalman had said. “I don’t understand his. A God who worries about every human being, every creature. I find it an incomprehensible notion in the face of what we know about the world and about evil. A primitive concept. What do I do with the truth, Reuven? Evolutionary theory and astronomy and physics and biblical criticism and archeology and anthropology—they present us with truths. What do I do with the truth? I cannot ignore the truth. So I try to make it serve me. But don’t leave unless you are absolutely certain. If everybody who had brains and doubts left Orthodoxy, we would be in a great deal of trouble. Still,” he added, “I would like you as a student.”

We walked and talked a long time, making a wide circuit of the lake.

“Of course, that’s the problem,” he said to me once. “How can we teach others to regard the tradition critically
and
with love? I grew up loving it, and then learned to look at it critically. That’s everyone’s problem today. How to love and respect what you are being taught to dissect.”

We came to one of the roads that ran through the park. The sun was only a few minutes away from setting. I saw Abraham Gordon stop by a tall sycamore alongside the road and put a skullcap on his head and pray the Afternoon Service. I prayed with him. When we were done, he said, “Come on home with me, Reuven, and let’s have dinner together. I’ve walked enough for one day. I did not put on my long underwear and I’m freezing.” He grimaced. “I don’t listen enough to Ruth. I should listen to her more.”

Outside the park we hailed a cab and rode to the apartment.

She served us hot, spiced wine and made a fire and we sat around awhile in the living room, and then Abraham Gordon excused himself for a few minutes and Ruth Gordon and I were alone. She wore dark slacks and a yellow long-sleeved blouse and her face was drawn with fatigue and concern. She stared into the fire, her fingers playing with strands of her chestnut hair.

“Has Daniel told you about Michael?” she asked softly.

“Yes.”

She nodded and continued staring into the flames. I could see the reflection of the flames on her face, the smooth skin gold and bronze.

“It is the strangest coincidence, you know,” she said suddenly. “Your name being Malter. When I was in graduate school I came across Henry Matter’s work on
Ta’anit
and read the introduction. I had never quite realized that Jewish scholarship could be so sophisticated and challenging.” She looked at me. “What do you make of a coincidence like that, Reuven?”

I told her I didn’t know.