The Promise (9 page)

“There is more to religion than sociology and anthropology,” he said to me once as we sat around the kitchen table talking about Abraham Gordon’s second book. “You are attracted to Abraham Gordon’s ideas, Reuven? They are very radical ideas.”

“I’m only curious.”

“Yes, I can see you are.”

“He asks very good questions. I don’t like his answers. But he asks some very important questions.”

He smiled. “I will tell him when I see him that my son likes his questions.”

The book we were discussing was on the table. I turned to the half-title page. It contained the same scrawled Hebrew warning I had found in the previous book: “This is the book of an apostate. Those who fear God are forbidden to read it.” I showed it to my father.

He became angry. “It should read ‘those who fear ideas,’ not ‘those who fear God.’ There are times when those who fear God make themselves very unpleasant as human beings.”

Abraham Gordon had published five books. Each of those books had the same words written on the half-title page: “This is the book of an apostate. Those who fear God are forbidden to read it.” I grew to loathe the writer of those words.

It was a long and lonely winter. My father was writing. Danny
was off at Columbia, working for his doctorate in clinical psychology. In September three new rabbis had come onto the Talmud faculty at Hirsch. They had been in concentration camps. They were great Talmudists. They valued nothing but Talmud and knew nothing but Talmud. The greatest scholar of the three was Rav Jacob Kalman. He was given the class in the Talmud tractate
Chullin
. The knowledge of that tractate was a prerequisite for ordination. I was put into his class. I spent the winter studying
Chullin
and reading the works of Abraham Gordon. The day after Passover I finished the last of his published books.

I found myself intrigued by those books. They were written in a clear and on occasion almost exquisite prose style, the kind of style one rarely finds in works of philosophy and theology. And they were filled with blunt questions: Do you believe the world was created in six days? Do you believe in the order of creation given in the Bible? Do you believe Eve was created from Adam’s rib? Do you believe in angels? Do you believe in the biblical account of the Revelation at Sinai? Do you believe in miracles? Do you believe that God guides the destiny of every living creature? Do you believe that God talked, actually talked, in the manner described in the Bible? How is one to react to the findings of archeology and anthropology and biology and astronomy and physics? How is one to react to the discoveries of modern biblical scholarship? How might one not believe literally in the Bible and still remain a traditional Jew? Are total belief or complete abandonment the only available choices, or is it possible to reinterpret ancient beliefs in a way that will make them relevant to the modern world and at the same time not cause one to abandon the tradition? The problems he raised fascinated me.

But Abraham Gordon was a humanist, a naturalist. For him supernaturalism and mysticism were irrelevant to modern thought. Revelation was a fiction, believed in by the ancients but no longer believable today. Religion was the creation of man; its purpose was to make meaningful certain aspects of human existence. Religious rituals heightened the routinized activities of man.
God was a lofty human idea, a goal, a man-created aspiration, an abstract guarantor of the intrinsic meaningfulness of the universe. None of this was I able to accept—yet, I remained intrigued by Abraham Gordon.

The dust jackets of his books had no biographical information on him beyond the brief statement that he was professor of Jewish philosophy at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary. Nor had there been any photographs. But I found him listed in
Who’s Who
: born forty-five years ago in Chicago; raised there; B.A., University of Chicago; doctorate, in philosophy, from Harvard; the next two years in Europe; the following four years studying for the rabbinate at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary, whose faculty he joined, at the age of thirty-two, immediately on being ordained. He published his first book at thirty-four. He belonged to some half-dozen national and international scholarly organizations. His wife’s name was Ruth, and he had one child, a son, Michael.

That was all I learned about Abraham Gordon from
Who’s Who
. The biographical data gave no indication as to how his books had been received over the years by the very Orthodox. There was no allusion to the loathing and hatred with which certain people pronounced Abraham Gordon’s name. But I did not need
Who’s Who
to tell me about that.

On a night in the first week of May I took a subway to Danny’s apartment near Columbia and we talked about Abraham Gordon. I had seen Danny only a few times during the winter. Before entering Columbia he had removed the visible indicators of his Hasidic origin—the sand-colored beard, the flowing earlocks, the dark suit, the caftan, the open-necked tieless shirt, the dark hat he wore on weekdays and the fur-trimmed cap he wore on Shabbat and festivals. He had glowed with his new freedom. And the glow had not dimmed even after he had settled down to the grinding routine of graduate work. He was doing very well in his studies, and his phenomenal memory was the subject of much conversation in the psychology department at Columbia. He was finding it somewhat difficult to make friends. The non-observant
Jewish students in the department were embarrassed by his skull-capped presence; the two other Orthodox Jewish students in the department were easier for him to talk to but not interesting enough for him to want their friendship; and the non-Jewish students treated him as some kind of holy man, an Alyosha Karamazov thrown suddenly into their midst, a Jew with the mind of an Einstein and the soul of a Schweitzer, someone to talk to perhaps about a sticky experiment, someone to use as a resource person when they needed a reference, but not someone to invite over to an apartment for a beer and idle talk, or to sit with in a corner cafeteria, or to talk to about the girls they went with, or to involve in a conversation about Senator Joseph McCarthy or Korea or the cold war. But Danny did not really care about his nonexistent social life. As a matter of fact, he would not have gone anywhere to eat even if he had been asked, for he was holding rigidly to the laws of kashruth and he ate only those foods he prepared by himself in his apartment. And he was not interested in idle talk, had never been interested in conversation that served merely to help time pass, was awkward and inept at it, and was not concerned at all about Senator McCarthy’s anti-Communist crusade or the Korean War or the diplomatic maneuverings of Russia and the United States. He was interested only in his studies.

The apartment in which he lived that year was a dingy one-room affair on the top floor of an old three-story red-brick house on a side street off Riverside Drive. The floor was covered with a cracked and lumpy piece of linoleum. There was a sofa bed against a peeling wall and a tiny kitchen-stove-sink-refrigerator arrangement in a part of the room that had once been a walk-in closet. Danny had never been particularly neat in his personal habits and the room he now lived in reflected that lack of neatness. It was a wild disarray of books, papers, unwashed dishes, and dirty clothes. Books were strewn everywhere, on the unmade sofa bed, on the small table where he ate, on the floor near the bed, on the worn and scarred wooden desk near the single window that looked out onto a fire escape and an alleyway. The small bookcase
that stood against the wall opposite the desk was jammed with books and monographs; they spilled out of the bookcase onto the floor, and precarious Pisas of books were piled high against the wall on both sides of the bookcase. A dim light illumined the room from the overhead fixture and cast bleak and gloomy shadows everywhere.

I had told him on a previous visit that it was a miserable apartment. He had told me he couldn’t afford anything else; he was spending most of his money on books. All he needed was a place to eat, sleep, and study. What else did he need? Now he was sitting on the old wooden chair near the desk and I was on the unmade sofa bed against the peeling wall. Stale air pervaded the room like a foul mist. The window was closed. The shade was up. The dark night pressed against the window, adding to the dinginess of the room. I got up and opened the window and pulled down the shade. It billowed faintly in the breeze, scraping against the sill. I went back to the bed and sat down and looked at him. He was pale and gaunt, and the lines of his sculptured face jutted sharply and his sand-colored hair was uncombed and his eyes were dark with fatigue behind his black horn-rimmed glasses.

I became a little angry that night at the way he was living. I told him the least he could do was keep the place clean. I told him I had thought that one of the things he had wanted to do with his new freedom was abandon his old Eastern European small-town living habits. Open the window, I said. Let in some air. Wash the dishes. Make the bed. Arrange the books neatly. Get the laundry done. What kind of freedom was this? And what about his life outside the apartment? He was free. But what was he doing with his freedom? Did he go to the opera? Did he see a ballet? Did he take in any of the good movies?

He shrugged. He was too busy with his schoolwork, he said. He went to the movies occasionally. He had seen
Symphonie Pastorale
a few months ago. It was a beautiful movie. He had seen
Aïda
at the City Center and had liked it very much. He didn’t care for ballet. But there was too much schoolwork. He didn’t have time.

“You need a girl,” I told him. “Why don’t you find yourself a girl and go out and enjoy yourself?”

He fidgeted uncomfortably on the chair.

There seemed little I could do to get him to remake his life. He was obsessed by his hunger to attain perfection in the profession for which he had broken with the tzaddikate. So I stopped badgering him about his personal habits and we talked for a while about my father’s book and about my own year at Hirsch, and we got onto the subject of the books I was reading that had nothing to do with my schoolwork and I asked him if he had ever heard of Abraham Gordon. Sure he had heard of Abraham Gordon, he said. Who hadn’t heard of Abraham Gordon? I had just finished reading all of his books, I said. He sat up very straight on the chair and gave me a strange look. He didn’t say anything. I had done some research on Abraham Gordon, I said, and was curious to find out more about him.

“Merely curious,” I said.

“Of course,” he said, giving me that strange look.

I told him that some Brooklyn College acquaintances had recently informed me that Abraham Gordon had a niece who was a junior at Brooklyn College and was majoring in English literature. I had decided that I wanted to meet her and had managed to obtain an invitation to a party she was going to be at. The party was in two weeks.

“It’s amazing what you can turn up sometimes with some hard research,” I said.

“Yes it is,” Danny said.

“What are you looking at me like that for?”

“Why did you start reading Abraham Gordon’s books?”

“I was curious.”

“Only curious?”

“He’s a breath of fresh air.”

“Why do you want to meet his niece?”

“Why not?”

“More research?”

“Something like that.”

“Don’t let Rav Kalman catch you doing research into Abraham Gordon.”

“Don’t worry.”

“Do you want some more coffee?”

“Not yet.”

“How is Rav Kalman?”

“A beauty. An absolute beauty. Yesterday it was the graduate school. A twenty-minute tirade against the graduate school. It teaches goyische subjects and should be abolished. Twenty minutes. I timed it.”

“They won’t abolish the graduate school because of Rav Kalman.”

“I’m a little tired of Rav Kalman.”

“You’re tired of Rav Kalman, so you’re reading Abraham Gordon.”

“That’s right. I need the fresh air.”

“You’ll freeze to death in Abraham Gordon’s fresh air.”

“I’m choking to death with Rav Kalman. Listen, let’s not talk any more about Rav Kalman. It depresses me. Let’s talk about anything but Rav Kalman. Let’s talk about politics. No, you’re not interested in politics. Let’s talk about the movies. Have you seen any good movies lately?”

Danny said nothing.

“All right, let’s talk about baseball. You think the Dodgers can take the pennant this year?”

He looked at me. “We talked enough about baseball years ago,” he said.

We had played a rather frenzied game of baseball years back, he as first baseman for a team of Hasidic yeshiva students, me as second baseman and pitcher for my own yeshiva team—and his line drive to my head had put me into a hospital for five days and had almost cost me my left eye. That was how we had met. We were fifteen years old then.

“I should have ducked,” I said. He had said that to me in the hospital.

He laughed softly.

“But I’m glad I didn’t,” I said. “Now I’ll have that other cup of coffee, if you can plow your way through all that stuff near the sink. And then I’m going home. I need my sleep. I need to be fresh and alert for Rav Kalman. I need to be strong and fresh and alert so I can learn about all the dangers confronting Yiddishkeit. I take cream and two sugars.”

“I remember what you take,” Danny said quietly.

Two weeks later I met Rachel Gordon. There was a radiance about her, a luminous quality in her face and in the self-assured, poised way she carried herself. We went out together often, and sometimes she talked about Abraham Gordon and at other times I talked about Danny. We liked each other and thought the liking might come to mean something in time.

From Rachel I learned that Abraham Gordon traveled a great deal, lecturing to students in colleges and universities throughout the country, played the violin, had turned down an invitation to teach logic at Harvard in order to enter the Zechariah Frankel Seminary as a rabbinical student, admired John Dewey and William James and the Vienna Circle logical positivists, found existentialism obscure, liked Hemingway as a writer and detested him as a person, and, before his heart attack at the age of forty-two, had been a wicked handball player. He had completely recovered from the heart attack, but he no longer played handball.