The Promise Read online

  There were seventeen students in my class. The room in which we attended Rav Kalman’s shiur was large, with light-green walls, a high white ceiling, and bright fluorescent lights. Almost the entire wall opposite the door was comprised of tall, wide windows that faced Bedford Avenue. On clear days the sun streamed through those windows—but it made little difference, for the room was always pervaded by the peculiar darkness that Rav Kalman brought with him whenever he came through the door. He seemed to radiate darkness. He was short but stockily built. He had a full black beard and dark eyes and thick black hair. His face was quite pale and contrasted sharply with the blackness of his beard. He wore a long black coatlike jacket that reached to just above the knees, a starched white shirt, a black tie, sharply pressed black trousers, black shoes, and a tall, shiny black skullcap.

  He was an angry, impatient, sarcastic teacher. I had had angry teachers before, but their anger had always been accompanied by a redeeming humor. There was nothing humorous about Rav Kalman. He rarely sat still behind his desk. He paced. I would watch him pace back and forth along the narrow corridor of space between his desk and the blackboard, going to the windows, turning, going to the opposite wall near the door, turning, going back to the windows. Sometimes he would stop at the windows and incline his head and close his eyes for a moment, as if he were listening to an invisible voice—and I would see him nod his head. Then he would turn and continue his pacing. He smoked incessantly, waiting until the cigarettes were almost ashes in his fingers before dropping them into the ashtray on his desk. His voice was loud and high-pitched; often at the end of a shiur I had the feeling that a sudden silence had descended upon the school. His classes left me drained, nerveless, tense.

  During our first week with him the year before, we had quickly realized that a student’s request for further clarification of a passage, or the normal barrage of questions with which we had always confronted our Talmud teachers in the past, was now laden with danger. Two or three days after I had first entered his class, I asked him about a passage we were studying that seemed to me to be clearly contradicted by another passage I had suddenly remembered from a different tractate. He stopped pacing and fixed his dark eyes on me and tugged at his beard. He did not simply stroke his beard; he took strands of hair between the thumb and forefinger of his right hand, and tugged. “A contradiction,” he muttered. “Malter has found a contradiction.” I tensed in my seat. “Tell me, Malter, have you studied the”—he named an obscure late-medieval commentary no one in the class ever paid attention to—“on the inyan? You have not? If you would have studied that commentary, you would not find your contradiction. Come better prepared, Malter. You will find fewer contradictions.” He did not answer my question. My father solved the problem for me that night by a simple emendation of the text in the other tractate. But I would not dare display that method to Rav Kalman. Textual emendation of Talmudic passages as practiced by those who studied Talmud in the modern, scientific manner was unheard of in my school.

  We had no way of knowing how Rav Kalman might react to any of our questions, and I had no desire to become the target of his sarcasm. So I stopped asking questions. I read without errors whenever I was called on, answered all his questions correctly, and contributed nothing on my own to the class. A Talmud class in which a student is fearful of asking questions can become a suffocating experience. I suffocated.

  His tirades were frightening. He talked about Hollywood as the symbol of American values; he ranted against a new instrument of horror called television; there was little about America he seemed to like. On occasion his tirades were based upon events occurring in the school. Students and teachers were attacked by name. A projected college course in Greek mythology was canceled because he labeled it paganism. A student was almost expelled because he caught him outside the school without a hat. The annual college senior show, to which girls had always been invited, was called off because he waged a vitriolic campaign against girls sitting together with boys in the yeshiva auditorium. The whole year was like that.

  In somewhat cynical fashion we referred to those tirades as musar messages. “Musar” is the Hebrew term for ethics or a lecture exhorting one to ethical living. There had been a great musar movement among Jews in Eastern Europe, particularly in Lithuania, during the latter part of the last century and in the decades before the Second World War. Much about that movement had been quite ennobling. But there was nothing ennobling about Rav Kalman’s musar messages. They were delivered with sarcasm and anger, and one is rarely ennobled by such exhortations.

  It had taken a considerable effort on my part over the past months of autumn to grow accustomed to his tirades. But I had finally succeeded. At the onset of a tirade I would slump down in my seat. I sat in the last row of the class but I could not look away from him because he would notice that almost immediately. So I would look straight at him, moving my head to keep him in view as he paced back and forth—and not listen to his words. I would do a logic problem in my head; one part of me would be seeing to it that I kept looking directly at him; the other part would be doing a logic problem, or thinking of Michael and Danny and Rachel, or conjuring up images of the huge presses that were running off my father’s book. There was a numbing sameness to those tirades, and by the end of November I discovered I could turn them off with ease and still convey the impression that I was listening. Then on the Monday morning of the first week of December he began to talk about something he had never mentioned before in class, and I found myself listening once again to his words.

  We were studying the ninth chapter of Chullin, which deals with various kinds of uncleanness that can result from contact with reptiles and dead animals. One of the students was reading the text and explaining as he went along. The class was absolutely silent, except for the lone voice of the student. Rav Kalman paced back and forth behind his desk, smoking. He had called on the student to read at the beginning of the class, and then had not said a word. The student had been reading and explaining for almost a quarter of an hour. Rav Kalman remained silent. He stopped at the window for a while and peered out at the street. He closed his eyes and inclined his head and seemed to be listening to something. Then he resumed his pacing. I kept my eyes on the text—all of us kept our eyes on the text when someone was reading—but I could hear him pacing back and forth. Then the pacing suddenly stopped. I glanced up. He was standing behind his desk. Others were looking at him now too. I could feel the class go tense. The student who had been reading became silent. Another musar message, I told myself, and started to set up a logic problem in my head. I slumped down in my seat.

  “Read,” Rav Kalman said. “Who told you to stop? Continue reading. Explain again the words of Rabbi Yehuda … Yes. Go on. Go on. What does Tosefos say about the comment of Rashi?… Yes. Continue reading.”

  I sat up in my seat and looked down at the text. The student went on reading and explaining. Outside, Bedford Avenue was bathed in sunlight and thick with traffic. Inside, the room was filled with its normal atmosphere of oppressive tension.

  Rav Kalman stood silently behind his desk, smoking a cigarette. Abruptly, without warning, he broke into the words of the student who was reading. The student stopped immediately.

  “If the body is made unclean by contact with the smallest of things that is unclean,” Rav Kalman said in Yiddish, “how much more so is it made unclean by contact with bigger things which are unclean.”

  I started to work on my logic problem.

  He did not pace. He stood stiffly behind his desk.

  “In America, everything is called Yiddishkeit,” Rav Kalman said. “A Jew travels to synagogue on Shabbos in his car, that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew eats ham but gives money to philanthropy, that is called Yiddishkeit. A Jew prays three times a year but is a member of a synagogue, that is called Yiddishkeit. Judaism”—he pronounced the word in English, contemptuously: Joo-dah-eeism—“everything in America calls itself Judaism.”

  He put his
cigarette into the ashtray and looked at me across the room. “Are you listening, Malter?”

  I nodded, without losing the thread of the logic problem. Outside, a car horn blared noisily, the sound strangely loud in the stillness of the room.

  Rav Kalman took a pack of cigarettes from a pocket of his long jacket and put a cigarette between his lips. He lit it, placed the match carefully in the ashtray, and blew smoke from his nostrils. He took the cigarette from his lips and looked at me intently.

  “In America there are schools that teach Judaism,” he said, talking to the class and looking at me. “The students do not wear skullcaps and the teachers do not believe in Torah from heaven, and they teach Judaism.” His voice was low but edged with contempt. “Judaism,” he said. “Everything in America is Judaism.”

  I dropped the logic problem and sat up straight in my chair.

  He was still looking at me. “What would you say of such a school, Malter?”

  I stared at him and said nothing.

  “How would you describe such a school, Malter? Is there a word for such a school?”

  I saw some of my classmates glancing at me. This was the first time Rav Kalman had ever turned one of his tirades into a question-and-answer affair. I sat very rigidly in my seat, and said nothing.

  “Unclean,” he said, his voice suddenly angry. “Unclean. Such a school is unclean. And whoever has contact with it becomes unclean himself.” Then he began pacing back and forth behind the desk and talking, not looking at us any more, but still talking. “Such a school is a falsehood. It is worse than a falsehood. It is a desecration of the Name of God. Do you hear? A desecration of the Name of God. It is a perversion. Where is the holiness in such a school? The Bible they change whenever they do not understand what they read. The Gemora”—he used the traditional synonym for the Talmud, though the Gemora, or Gemara, as I pronounced it, is actually only one part of the Talmud—“the Gemora they change. Whatever they do not like, they change. Where is the holiness in such a school?” He went on like that for a few more minutes. Then he carefully put out his cigarette in the ashtray and stood behind the desk. “Such a school is unclean. And whoever sets foot in it becomes unclean. Remember what I tell you. Now read further. Who was reading? Goldberg. Read. Read.”

  Two seats in front of me, the student who had been reading earlier began to read again. I looked at my hands on top of the open Talmud. They were trembling.

  I did not hear a single word of what went on during the rest of that class session. I sat there in a frightened daze, wondering whether Rav Kalman’s words had been deliberately directed at me or had simply been an accident of timing that had somehow managed to coincide closely with the weeks I had spent at the Zechariah Frankel Seminary working on my father’s book. But the way he had looked at me … I did not think it was a coincidence.

  I found out soon enough. Chairs scraped noisily and I came out of my daze. The room began to empty quickly. Hardly anyone ever stayed around to talk with Rav Kalman after a shiur. I started for the door. I wanted to get out of there. I heard someone call my name. I thought it was one of the students and I ignored him. I was almost at the door when someone tugged at the sleeve of my jacket. Rav Kalman wanted to talk to me, a classmate said, giving me a wide-eyed look. I turned and went back into the room.

  Rav Kalman was standing behind his desk, smoking another cigarette and gazing at me. I came over to him. Standing close to him, I could see the dark circles beneath his eyes and the long diagonal line of a white scar on his right cheek. He smelled strongly of tobacco. He took the cigarette from his mouth, placed it in the ashtray, and gazed at me intently. He tugged at his beard.

  “Malter, you understood what I said concerning schools for Judaism?” he asked in Yiddish.

  I told him I had understood. I spoke in English. We were able to use either English or Yiddish in class. My Yiddish was very poor. I used English.

  “You know which school I meant?”

  “No,” I said.

  “You do not know?” He looked at me intently. His eyes narrowed. He swayed back and forth on his legs. “Malter, tell me. You know Gordon?”

  “Which Gordon?” I heard myself ask.

  “Which Gordon,” he repeated with a faintly mocking smile. “Which Gordon.”

  “I know a lot of Gordons,” I said.

  “Yes? Very nice. I mean the Gordon of the Zechariah Frankel Seminary. You know that Gordon?”

  “Abraham Gordon? Yes.”

  “You know him well?”

  “I know him.”

  “How is it that you know him?”

  “I know him,” I said again.

  “Yes. You know him. That much is now clear. Malter, tell me. You know Gordon has been put into cherem?” “Cherem” is the Hebrew term for excommunication.

  I felt my fingers tighten on the Talmud I held in my hand. Yes, I knew about that, I said.

  “You know that. You tell me you know that. Now I must ask you, is it true that you were with Gordon in the Zechariah Frankel Library last month?”

  I stared at him and heard myself tell him that I didn’t know anyone who took that excommunication seriously.

  “You do not know anyone who takes it seriously. You do not—” He broke off. “Tell me, Malter, you think placing someone in cherem is a light thing? Have you read the books of Gordon?”

  I lied. I told him I had never read any of Abraham Gordon’s books.

  “Gordon destroys Yiddishkeit with his books. The cherem is not a light thing. Such a man is a danger.” He paused for a moment. He had to tilt his head backward a little to look up at me. His eyes were dark. The collar of his shirt was white and starched. His tie was carefully knotted. He was still tugging at his beard, and I noticed for the first time that the third and fourth fingers of his right hand were faintly misshapen, as if they had been broken at one time and poorly reset.

  “Tell me,” he was saying. Danny’s father talks that way, I thought. Rav Gershenson talks that way. They all talk that way. Tell me. Tell me. “Tell me, Malter. What were you doing all those weeks in the Zechariah Frankel Seminary?”

  I wondered where he was getting all his information about me. But it did not really matter. Anyone could have seen me going in and out of there. The Zechariah Frankel Seminary was less than a half hour’s walk from Hirsch. Rav Kalman might even have seen me himself. It made no difference how he knew. As far as I was concerned, it even made no difference that he knew. I had not intended to conceal my going to that library.

  I told him I had been doing some work for my father.

  “What work?” he asked.

  I told him I had been checking the footnotes and the variant readings in the galleys to my father’s book to save him time and spare him the physical effort of having to go back and forth to that library. He was very tired after more than a year of work on the book, I said. He was not a well man, I said.

  I had used the term variant readings. I saw his eyes open wide at that. “Your father has written a book?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I know of your father. Tell me, the book, your father’s book, what is it about? It is a book on the Gemora?”

  I told him it contained many of the scholarly articles my father had published over the years, as well as a lengthy introduction on the nature of the Talmud. The introduction had been written especially for the book, I said, a little proudly. I omitted mentioning that the introduction also contained a long section on the methodology of Talmudic text criticism.

  He was silent for a moment. He tugged at his beard. Then he lit another cigarette.

  “It is forbidden to punish without first giving a warning,” he said, his voice abruptly cold. “So I give you a warning. That school is unclean. You are not to set foot in that school.”

  I stared at him, not quite believing what I had heard. I told him I had seen dozens of Orthodox Jews in that library, studying, doing research, writing.

  He became angry then. “Ortho
dox! Everything is Orthodox! What kind of Orthodox? There is one Yiddishkeit. I know nothing about Orthodox. The school is unclean and its books are unclean. My students will not go into their school.”

  I said nothing. My face was suddenly hot. I felt the slow mounting of anger.

  “Malter, you understand that a student does not receive smicha from me simply because he knows Gemora. You understand that.”

  I did not say anything.

  “You understand, Malter? I do not give smicha only for Gemora.”

  I nodded or did something to indicate acknowledgment of his words.

  There was a brief silence.

  “When does your father’s book come out?” he asked quietly.

  I told him.

  He dismissed me with an abrupt wave of his hand and a curt nod of his head.

  I went through the corridor and the marble lobby and out into the street. The afternoon air was cold and sharp. I stood there for a moment, breathing deeply. Then I realized I had forgotten my coat in the synagogue. I went back inside.

  Irving Goldberg sat in a chair near the coat racks that stood against the wall opposite the Ark. He had obviously been waiting for me. He was short, round-faced, chubby, very solemn, and very good at Talmud. We studied together every morning to prepare for Rav Kalman’s shiur. He had read for today’s shiur.