The Chosen

I have had more time than normal the past two days. So I read a novel that a friend from my church recommended–The Chosen by Chaim Potok. It made me cry, and made me realize my need for a more compassionate and easily broken heart.

Simplistically, the story has to do with a Jewish boy. The boy is a genius, reading Freud at 15 and learning German to read him in the original. The boy’s father is a very influential man in his Jewish community. Throughout the boy’s life, His father never talks to him, except when they study the Talmud together. This causes the son terrible pain. He tells his friend (from whose perspective the story is told), “I can hear the silence.”

At the end of the book, when the boy has graduated from college, the father reveals his reason for remaining silent all of his life.

Speaking of when he first discovered the brilliance of his son’s mind he says, “I went away and cried to the Master of the Universe, ‘What have you done to me? A mind like this I need for a son? A heart I need for a son, a soul I need for a son, compassion I want from my son, righteousness, mercy, strength to suffer and carry pain, that I want from my son, not a mind without a soul!’” (278).

“When I was very young, my father, may he rest in peace, began to wake me in the middle of the night, just so I would cry. . . . My father himself never talked to me, except when we studied together. He taught me with silence. . . . When his people would ask him why he was so silent with his son, he would say to them that he did not like to talk, words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal what is in the heart. The heart speaks through silence. One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s own soul. And it is important to know of pain, he said. It destroys our self-pride, our arrogance, our indifference toward others. . . . [One] must take [the pain of his people] and carry it on his shoulders. He must carry it always. He must grow old before his years. He must cry, in his heart he must always cry. Even when he dances and sings, he must cry for the sufferings of his people.”

The son learned from the silence. He says to his friend at another point in the book:

“You can listen to silence . . . I’ve begun to realize that you can listen to silence and learn from it. It has a quality and a dimension all its own. It talks to me sometimes. I feel myself alive in it. It talks. And I can hear it” (262).

“You have to want to listen to it, and then you can hear it. It has a strange, beautiful texture. It doesn’t always talk. Sometimes–sometimes it cries, and you can hear the pain of the world in it. It hurts to listen to it then. But you have to” (262).

I needed this lesson. I need to learn the pain of others through pain of my own. I need to grow old before my years. I need to cry. I need to hear the suffering of the world and feel its weight on my shoulders.