Every now and then I re-read all of Chaim Potok’s books. I get in a certain mood, you see.
You may know Potok’s work from one of his biggest selling books, The Chosen.
All of Potok’s books deal with protagonists who eventually must confront the limitations of the touchstones they were given through childhood, their bedrock belief systems. With the exception of Davita’s Harp, that touchstone is an Orthodox Jewish community.
In My Name is Asher Lev, we get to know Asher, the son of a man accomplished in the Jewish community, the right-hand assistant to the Hassidic Rebbe who is the highest authority in the community, a man who works hard to build yeshivas all over Europe, a man of integrity, all that. And Asher, his son, is an artistic genius on the level of Picasso. Long story short, Asher finds that his masterpiece painting expresses itself with a crucifixion as part of its form. Needless to say, that causes a bit of a stir in his community, which already looks askance at his painting to begin with. Add the family dynamic to that, and Asher is confronted with a heavy task. And he is fully aware after he paints the picture exactly how much it will hurt his family, why it will hurt his family, and the kind of disapproval and anger it will draw down upon him.
In The Chosen, there’s the genius Danny Saunders with a photographic memory, he’s the son of yet another Hassidic Rebbe who is very powerful and very holy, even those who don’t like him in other Jewish orthodox circles acknowledge his greatness. And Danny wants to be a psychologist, not be the hereditary successor of his father, he would be breaking a tradition that went back several generations. Oy. Another heavy task.
David Lurie, another treasure produced in America by orthodox Jewsh culture, at least gets some help from his orthodox (non-Hassidic) teacher in Potok’s In the Beginning. He finds himself, right after the horrors of the Holocaust (in which his mother and father lost hundreds of their family members) drawn to study a form of Bible criticism that contradicts teachings people have given their lives for.
All of these protagonists could have simply left their communities and still had fulfilling and accomplished lives. Yet all of them chose a different path, to carve their own place in the tradition of their communities, to stay and bear the pain of hurting others, of being misunderstood and mistrusted — they refuse to assimilate entirely into American culture for they knew the value of what they had been given, through so many generations. Potok writes of these struggles, this balancing act, exquisitely.
The old giving way to the new. Why is it so painful? And oh, it’s so difficult. To know what to preserve, to know what to change, to understand just what it IS that you are changing!
My father used to sing an old song from the shtetl days in Eastern Europe, “Oy’fen Pripitchuk,” (In the Oven). I saw the song performed in Schindler’s List, giving a gruesome cast to the title. It’s a very famous Yiddish song and I’m sure Spielberg knew the horrible irony of using it in the scene in this video:
(Video courtesy of YouTuber Evolving2Change)
The lyrics in English:
In the oven burns a little flame,
And it’s hot in the room
And the teacher drills the little children in the alphabet
And the teacher drills the little children in the alphabetPay attention, children,
Remember, dear ones,
What you study here,
Repeat once again,
And then again
Komets A-lef O!Study, children, with great zest,
That is my request.
Which one of you will learn to read Hebrew
Will get a flag.When you children will grow older,
You’ll understand yourselves,
How many tears lie in these letters
And how much weeping!
America is a great treasury of cultures. Native American culture, as winter rabbit so wonderfully writes about. Mexican culture. And then those who came from all around the world, from all the continents, often remnants of cultures that were destroyed or utterly oppressed in the Cold War imperialism of the super powers.
I believe in each of these cultures there are great people who bear the pain of moving those cultures forward, of watering the roots, having respect and even love for tradition but not bound and censored by it. To me, these are truly free human beings, for their awareness of their choices is complete. They know that change is not rejection, nor is it conformity. It is the heart of being a human being, I think.
Anyway, every now and then I re-read all of Potok’s books. So that’s what I did this week.
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Happy Friday to all. Nice spring day here in the Big Apple. Grateful for that.
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… was a chaplain in North Korea, as described in the wiki (linked in the essay):
His novel Book of Lights speaks of this experience. It’s about a young and indecisive Jewish scholar who turns out to be gifted in the study of the Kabbalah and becomes roommates in his yeshiva (school) with a troubled fellow who is the son of one of the inventors of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The young scholar ends up pretty much drafted into the chaplaincy and goes to South Korea, where he makes the discovery described in the quote above.
this week. Ron at the restaurant was putting down some dem politician about being literate and said something about anybody being able to read. (he was also raving about the first lady doing the garden), We asked Ron how many books he reads, and he replied about 3 a year. That explained a lot. Guess he just watchs FoxSpews and listens to Rush.
using the past as one reference point until we establish our new one?
your spiritual teaching doesn’t incorporate that its in those tensions in life that our humanity emerges.
That seems to be a truth that I’ve experienced.
A wonderful way to reconnect with that which we have known, but, in so many ways, no longer seek to adhere to! Much of the past practices and notions have truly outlived themselves and, in fact, are no longer applicable to the times of the day. Nonetheless, we can and should continue to reap and cherish the phenomenal wisdoms of those past gone times and integrate them into our current philosophies, IMO! Everything has a connection in some way or another!
Thank you for this, NPK! Stirs deep feelings of the heart!