The Chosen

The leaflets denounced the United Nations vote, ordered Jews to ignore it, called the state a desecration of the name of God, and a

Only the Dean's threat of immediate expulsion prevented me from engaging in a fist-fight that day. I was tempted more than once to scream at the groups of anti-Zionist students huddling together in the halls and classrooms that they ought to go join the Arabs and the British if they were so opposed to the Jewish state. But I managed somehow to control myself and remain silent.

In subsequent weeks, I was grateful for that silence. For as Arab forces began to attack the Jewish communities of Palestine, as an Arab mob surged through Princess Mary Avenue in Jerusalem, wrecking and gutting shops and leaving the old Jewish commerdalcenter looted and burned, and as the toll of Jewish dead increased daily, Reb Saunders' league grew strangely silent. The faces of the anti-Zionist Hasidic students in the school became tense and pained, and all anti-Zionist talk ceased. I watched them every day at lunch as they read to each other the accounts of the bloodshed reported in the Jewish press and then talked about it among themselves. I could hear sighs, see heads shaking and eyes filling with sadness. 'Again Jewish blood is being spilled,' they whispered to one another. 'Hitler wasn't enough. Now more Jewish blood, more slaughter. What does the world want from us? Six million isn't enough? More Jews have to die?' Their pain over this new outbreak of violence against the Jews of Palestine outweighed their hatred of· Zionism. They did not become Zionists; they merely became silent. I was glad during those weeks that I had restrained my anger.

I received straight A's in my college courses at the end of that semester. I also received an A in Talmud, despite the fact that Rav Gershenson had only called on me once during the entire four-month period I had spent in his class. I pla

He collapsed at a Jewish National Fund meeting and was rushed to the Brooklyn Memorial Hospital by ambulance. He hovered tenuously between life and death for three days. I lived in a nightmare of hallucinatory dread, and if it hadn't been for Manya constantly reminding me with gentle kindness that I had to eat or I would get sick, I might well have starved.

My father was begi

My classmates had all heard the news by the time the semester began, but their words of consolation didn't help very much. The look on Da

I lived alone. Manya came in the mornings and left after supper, and during the long winter nights of January and February I was all alone in the house. I had been alone before, but the knowledge that my father would return from his meetings and spend a few minutes with me had made the loneliness endurable. Now he wasn't attending meetings and wasn't coming into my room, and for the first few days the total silence inside the apartment was impossible for me to take, and I would go out of the house and take long walks in the bitter, cold winter nights. But my schoolwork began to suffer, and I finally took hold of myself. I spent as much of the early parts of every evening as I could visiting my father in the hospital. He was weak and could barely talk and kept asking me if I was taking care of myself. Dr Grossman had warned me not to tire him, so I left as soon as I could, went home, ate, then spent the night studying.

By the time my father had been in the hospital three weeks, the evenings had become almost an automatic routine. The dread of his possible death was gone. It was now a matter of waiting out the silence until he came home. And I waited out the silence by studying.

I began especially to study Talmud. In the past, I had done all my Talmud studying on Shabbat and during the morning preparation periods. Now I began to study Talmud in the evenings as well. I tried to finish my college work as quickly as I could, then I would turn to the passage of Talmud we were studying with Rav Gershenson. I would study it carefully, memorize it, find the various commentaries – those which were not printed in the Talmud itself could always be found in my father's library and memorize them. I tried to anticipate Rav Gershenson's tangled questions. And then I began to do something I had never done before with the Talmud I studied in school. After I was done memorizing the text and the commentaries, I began to go over the text again critically. I checked the Talmudic cross references for parallel texts and memorized whatever differences I found. I took the huge volumes of the Palestinian Talmud from my father's library – the text we studied in school was the Babylonian Talmud – and checked its parallel discussions just to see how it differed from the discussions in the Babylonian Talmud. I worked carefully and methodically, using everything my father had taught me and a lot of things I now was able to teach myself. I was able to do all of this in real depth because of Rav Gershenson's slow-paced method of teaching. And by doing all of this, I was able to anticipate most of Rav Gershenson's questions. I also became more and more certain of when he would call on me again.

He had never called on me since that day in October. And it was now the middle of February. As a result of my night sessions with Talmud, I had pulled ahead of the class by at least five or six days and was tangled in one of the most complicated discussions I had ever encountered. The complication was caused not only by the Talmud text itself, which seemed filled with gaps, but by the commentaries that struggled to explain it. The text consisted of nine lines. One of the commentaries on the text ran to two and a half pages, another ran to four pages. Neither was very clear. A third commentary, however, explained the text in six lines. The explanation was terse, clipped, and simple. The only thing wrong with it was that it seemed not to be based on the text it was explaining. A later commentary tried to reconcile the three commentaries by the method of pilpul, the result being a happy one for someone who enjoyed pilpul but quite strained as far as I was concerned. It looked to be a hopeless situation.

As we came closer and closer to this text, I became more and more convinced that Rav Gershenson was going to call on me to read and explain it. I didn't quite know why I was convinced of that; I just knew that I was.

I began painfully to unravel the puzzle. I did it in two ways.

First, in the traditional way, by memorizing the text and the commentaries, and then inventing all sorts of questions that Rav Gershenson might ask me. I would ride the trolley, walk the streets, or lie in bed – and ask myself questions. Second, in the way my father had taught me, by attempting to find or reconstruct the correct text, the text the commentator who had offered the simple explanation must have had before him. The first way was relatively simple; it was a matter of brute memorization. The second way was tortuous. I searched endlessly through all the cross-references and all the parallel passages in the Palestinian Talmud. When I was done, I had four different versions of the text on my hands. I now had to reconstruct the text upon which the simple commentary had been based. I did it by working backward, using the commentary as a base, then asking myself what passage among the four versions the commentator could have had before him as he wrote the commentary. It was painstaking work, but I finally thought I had it down right. It had taken hours and hours of precious time, but I was satisfied I had the correct text, the only text that really made sense. I had done it this way only to satisfy myself. When Rav Gershenson called On me, I would, of course, only use the first method of explanation. When my father returned from the hospital, I would show him what I had done with the second method. I felt very proud of my accomplishment.