The Chosen

In the middle of a heated debate over an impossible passage in Kiddushin I heard Da

He was quiet as he walked me part of the way home that night, and when we got to the synagogue where my father and I prayed he muttered something about seeing me in the library the next day, then turned and went quickly back.

When I got to the library the next afternoon, I found him seated at his table. There were three books open in front of him. He smiled broadly and waved me to a chair. He had worked out a method of doing Freud, he said, and it seemed to be going all right, so far. He pointed to the three books. One was a volume of Freud's early papers, he told me. Some of them Freud had written together with Josef Breuer, a Vie

'I forgot what it was like to study Talmud.' he said excitedly. 'Talmud is so easy for me now, I don't remember what I used to go through when I first started it as a kid. Can you study Talmud without the commentaries? Imagine Talmud without Rashi. How far would you get?'.

I agreed with him that I wouldn't get very far at all.

He had been going at it all wrong, he said, his eyes bright with excitement. He had wanted to read Freud. That had been his mistake. Freud had to be studied, not read. He had to be studied like a page of Talmud. And he had to be studied with a commentary.

But Da

Was Freud worth all that effort? I wanted to know.

Freud was a genius, Da

I had nothing to say to that, except admit that he was probably right.

So I continued reading the Langer book, while Da

On Thursday, I told him that my father and I would be leaving next Tuesday morning for the cottage near Peekskill where we always stayed in August, and I gave him two books I thought he might like to read. One was The Making of the Modern Jew by Milton Steinberg, the other was The Thirteen Letters of Ben Uzziel by Samson Raphael Hirsch. He thanked me and said he would read them. When my father and I left for Peekskill on Tuesday morning, Da

We had agreed not to write to each other:… probably out of an unspoken feeling that two boys our age writing one another when we were only going to be separated for a month was a little childish – and I didn't see him again until after Labor Day.

My father and I returned home the day after Labor Day, and I called Da

We chatted for a while, and agreed to meet in the library the following afternoon. I found him at his table, looking a little pale, but happy. His tufts of beard had grown a bit thicker, he blinked his eyes a little too often, as if weary from all his reading, but otherwise he was the same, everything was the same, and it was as though we had not seen each other for, at most, a single night of dream-filled sleep. Yes, he had read the two books I had given him. They had been very good, and he had learned a lot from them about the problems of contemporary Judaism. His father had thrown some poisonous looks at him when he had taken them into the house, but the looks had disappeared when Da

But somehow we never got around to talking about it that Shabbat, and on Sunday morning we were both back in school again. The year – the real year of a person going to school – began and for a long while I had no time at all to think about, let alone discuss, the writings of Sigmund Freud.