The Promise Read online

  The next day Rav Kalman came into the classroom, arranged his books neatly on the desk, lit a cigarette, peered intently at our faces, and called on Abe Greenfield. There was a jubilant quality in Abe Greenfield’s voice. He had expected to be called on and had come superbly prepared. He read excitedly for three quarters of an hour, showing off what he knew, and Rav Kalman paced and smoked and did not interrupt. Then he came up to Abe Greenfield’s desk and stopped him.

  “Very good, Greenfield. You came prepared and you know the Gemora. Very good.”

  Abe Greenfield’s face shone with joy.

  “Tell me, Greenfield. How did you do in your mathematics examination?”

  Abe Greenfield’s face darkened a little. “Okay,” he said, guardedly.

  Rav Kalman tugged at his beard and nodded. “In Europe I had a student who was a great mathematician. But he never came to class unprepared. In America students come unprepared because of mathematics. He died in Maidanek. The student. They killed all my students in Maidanek. But he was the best.” He stood stiffly in front of Abe Greenfield’s desk and looked out at the class. “I do not expect that American students will be like my students in Europe. But I expect that everyone will come to the shiur prepared. If there is a choice, I expect everyone to choose the Gemora. I received my smicha from one of the greatest scholars and saints in Europe. It is not only my name I will place on your smicha. My name carries the name of my teacher, Rav Zvi Hirsch Finkel, of blessed memory, and the name of his teacher—all through the generations of great teachers who handed down the smicha. Do you understand? If you must make a choice, make it for Torah. I cannot give you my smicha otherwise. I have a responsibility.” He looked at Abe Greenfield. “You were angry at me yesterday, Greenfield. I made you angry, yes? You lost your temper at me and I accepted your apology. Now I must apologize for shaming you before the class. A teacher has a right to be angry at a student if he does not come prepared. Your mathematics professor would also be angry at you if you came unprepared. But I went too far with you, Greenfield. I apologize.”

  The class sat very still. I saw dust motes dancing in the rays of sunlight that came through the windows. Abe Greenfield’s mouth had dropped open. A lot of mouths had dropped open.

  “I did not want you to be so angry, Greenfield. I wanted you to understand what it means to make a choice for Torah. You understand now, yes? All right. Enough. We have spent enough time away from the study of Torah.” He looked at me. “Are you prepared, Malter?”

  I nodded.

  “Yes. You are always prepared. You study philosophy but you are always prepared.” He looked straight at me. “Schwartz, read the Gemora.”

  Stanley Schwartz, the tall heavy-set student who sat to my left, looked startled for a moment. Then he bent over his Talmud and commenced reading.

  Half an hour later, Rav Kalman called on me to read. It was another difficult passage and I gave him all the major commentaries on it and sat there, listening to him ask me for the fourth time to explain the words again.

  I took a deep breath and told him I couldn’t explain it any better than the commentaries and that I didn’t understand what was being gained by going over and over the same passage. I said it quietly and respectfully, though my voice quavered a little as the words came out.

  Rav Kalman gave me a sharp look and for a long moment said nothing. Then he said, “You cannot explain the words?”

  “I explained the words.”

  “You cannot explain the words better?”

  I told him I didn’t understand what he meant. Did he want me to explain them better than the Maharam and the Maharsha? I asked. Was he saying that the explanations given by the Maharam and the Maharsha were wrong? I spoke very respectfully. What did he mean by better? I asked. How could I explain them better than the commentaries?

  He seemed a little startled by my words. He stood in silence for a moment, his face dark. Then he blinked his eyes and cleared his throat. “Go on, Malter,” he said in a low voice. “Continue to read.”

  He had not answered my question.

  I had no classes the next day, Friday, and I spent the morning and early afternoon at home working on a paper for one of my philosophy courses. A bulky package arrived in the mail from my father’s publisher. It was addressed to my father and I would not open it. My father came back from his teaching shortly before two o’clock. His hands trembled as he tore open the package. It contained ten copies of his book.

  They lay on the desk in his study, covered with pale-blue dust jackets, and we looked down at them, and my father picked up one and held it in his hands and opened it and peered at the title page and riffled the pages and closed it and put it back down on the desk. His eyes were moist and his face shone and he stared down at the books and shook his head in disbelief. “So much work,” he murmured. “So much work in those pages.” Then he picked up a copy and turned pages quickly and read and nodded. “Yes, they made the correction,” he said, smiling. “You caught it just in time, Reuven. They were able to correct it.” He put the book down and sat behind his desk. “A book,” he murmured. “It is only a book. But what it means to write a book.”

  I took a copy into my room and lay down on my bed and opened it. I held it close to my face and smelled the ink. I have always loved the smell of ink in a new book. I hoped I hadn’t overlooked any errors while checking the galleys. I began to read. I was halfway through the fourth page when the phone rang.

  It was Danny. He was calling to remind me of my visit to Michael on Sunday.

  “Where are you?” I asked.

  “Home.” Home meant five blocks away in his parents’ brownstone. “You want to come over tomorrow?” he asked after a moment.

  I told him I planned to spend Shabbat reading my father’s book which had just arrived in the mail.

  He sounded very happy to hear that and asked me to send him a copy. I said I would bring a copy over during the week and leave it with his father.

  “Bring it over next Friday afternoon,” he said. “My father won’t enjoy having to receive a book filled with scientific criticism.”

  “How is Michael?” I asked.

  “So-so,” he said. “He talked about you again the whole second hour. You never told me you were that good at sailing.”

  “Does that mean he’s not resisting therapy any more? I mean the fact that he’s talking so much about me.”

  “I don’t know what it means yet.”

  “How’s Rachel?” I asked.

  “I’m seeing her tomorrow night.”

  I did not say anything.

  “Have a good Shabbos,” Danny said.

  “Shabbat shalom,” I said.

  Later, my father and I went to the small synagogue on Lee Avenue where we prayed the service that welcomes the Shabbat. It was dark when we returned home and a winter wind blew through the naked sycamores on our street. After dinner I took a copy of my father’s book into the living room and sat by the light we kept burning all through Shabbat, and read. I read until late that night and all of Shabbat afternoon. I read very carefully, on a nervous hunt for errors that might have slipped by us but at the same time reading in order to study again what my father had written. I found no errors and more than half a dozen places where my father’s words took on meanings I had not seen in them before. I marveled at his scholarship. I never ceased being amazed at his scholarship. It was a beautiful book, and I told him so as we sat down to supper.

  His eyes shone behind their steel-rimmed spectacles.

  “I couldn’t find any mistakes,” I said.

  He had found one typographical error, he said. But it was insignificant and did not affect the meaning of his words.

  “It’s a beautiful book, abba,” I said again. “Especially the introduction.”

  “We will see what others have to say,” he murmured.

  “You’re not worried about critics?”

  “A writer always worries about critics,” he said. He looked up a
t the clock on the shelf over the refrigerator. “It is almost time for Ma’ariv. You are going out tonight, Reuven?”

  “Yes.”

  “I have a Zionist meeting I must attend. You will be home late?”

  “No. I want to be wide awake tomorrow.”

  “You will see Rachel there too?”

  “I don’t know. We have to ask Danny about Rachel.”

  He looked at me.

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Danny and Rachel?” he asked, his eyes very wide.

  “Danny Saunders and Rachel Gordon. Saunders and Gordon. Sodium and water. I don’t know which is the sodium and which is the water. But it’s sodium and water, all right.”

  “Danny and Rachel,” he said again.

  “Let’s finish up and make Havdalah,” I said.

  Nine

  A block away from the Hirsch Yeshiva, across the street, stood a Catholic church. At precisely eleven o’clock every Sunday morning the bells of that church would toll. They tolled every hour on the hour every Sunday morning, and we assumed they were tolling to announce the Mass. But we especially noted the eleven-o’clock tolling because it was then that Rav Kalman entered the class. He always came into the class together with the tolling of the bells.

  That Sunday morning the bells tolled and the door opened and Rav Kalman entered the classroom, carrying his Talmud and the books of commentaries under his arms. The Talmud and the other volumes had old, worn brown or black bindings, and so the book with the blue dust jacket was easy to see. I watched him put the Talmud on the desk, then place the books of the commentaries neatly one on top of the other to the right of the Talmud, and the book with the blue dust jacket to the left of the Talmud, face down on the desk. He opened the Talmud, turned to the page we were on, and stood there, surveying the class. I sat in my seat, frozen, staring at my father’s book.

  He lit a cigarette and called on a student to read. Outside, Bedford Avenue was silent, deserted, its black surface glistening in the bright winter sunlight. I saw Rav Kalman glance at me. I looked down at my Talmud and tried to concentrate on the words. Rav Kalman stood behind his desk, smoking and listening to the student. Half an hour before the end of the shiur he sat down and put his hands against the sides of his face, elbows on the desk, and sat very still. He said almost nothing during that entire two-hour period.

  A minute before the end of the period, he looked up and told the student to stop reading. Then he said quietly to me, “I want to speak with you, Malter,” and he dismissed the class.

  I remained in my seat and he remained behind his desk and the students went quickly out and we were alone.

  He closed his Talmud and I closed mine. He sat behind his desk, smoking and looking down at his closed Talmud. Sunlight came through the windows onto his tall black skullcap and pale features and dark beard and dark clothes and starched white shirt. The almost milk-white fingers of his right hand drummed soundlessly on the Talmud, the two misshapen fingers moving up and down together as if operated by a single set of muscles and tendons. His eyes were dark and narrow.

  “I do not know what to do with you, Malter,” he said. He was silent a moment. “I have never experienced such a problem.” He was silent again. Then he said, “Tell me, Malter. This is the book you were working on in the Zechariah Frankel Seminary?”

  I heard myself say, “Yes.”

  “Tell me again what you did for the book.”

  I told him I had checked my father’s footnotes and had gone over the many variant readings he had cited in the book to make certain the quotations were accurate.

  “You are familiar with all the manuscripts your father brings in the book?”

  “Yes.”

  “And you are familiar with all the works by other scholars your father quotes?”

  “Yes.”

  “You have studied these works?”

  “I know about them. I haven’t studied them carefully.”

  “You study Gemora with your father?”

  “Yes.”

  “And the Gemora you prepare for the shiur, you also study that Gemora with your father?”

  “No. I prepare by myself.”

  “But sometimes when there is a problem with the Gemora you discuss it with your father, yes?”

  “Yes.”

  “And sometimes he solves the problem by changing the words?”

  “Sometimes.”

  “You know this method of studying Gemora?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me, Malter, why do you never use this method in my shiur?”

  I stared at him.

  “Because Gemora is not studied this way in a yeshiva? That is the reason?”

  “Yes.”

  He nodded slowly and was silent a moment, his fingers drumming soundlessly on the Talmud. “I have read your father’s book, Malter. I discovered I knew enough English to be able to read it. It was easier for me to read than the works of Gordon. But I did not understand the Greek words your father uses. Tell me, Malter, you understand Greek?”

  “A little,” I said.

  “You understand the Greek in your father’s book?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then I will ask you to explain some things to me. There are explanations based upon Greek words, and I would like to understand what your father is saying. Come, bring a chair over here, Malter, and sit beside me. You will teach me what your father is saying.”

  I moved a chair next to him behind the desk and sat down. I felt the blood beating in my head but I sat very quietly and watched him open my father’s book to one of the very technical scholarly essays that dealt with a passage of Talmud that contained a number of Greek words written in Hebrew letters.

  “That is a very difficult inyan, Malter. I have never clearly understood that inyan. Your father writes at the end of this chapter that the inyan is very clear to him. Explain it to me, Malter. How does your father make clear the inyan?”

  The article only cited the difficult passage. But I knew by heart the entire Talmudic discussion in which that passage was located. I reviewed the discussion that led up to the passage. He listened intently. I reviewed some of the remarks of the commentaries on various points in the discussion. Then I read the passage with the Greek words and showed him how the commentaries had struggled with it because they had not known Greek. They had simply not known what to do with the words. Then I explained the meaning of the Greek words and showed him how simple the passage was once the Greek was understood.

  He stared down at the book in silence, his fingers tapping soundlessly on the Talmud, the two misshapen fingers moving together up and down.

  “You are saying to me that your father understands the Gemora better than the Rishonim?”

  “Rishonim” is the Hebrew term for the earliest and greatest of the medieval commentators on the Talmud.

  I hesitated for a moment. “He understands it differently,” I said.

  He gazed at me narrowly. “If an understanding of the passage is based on a knowledge of Greek and if the Rishonim did not know Greek, then your father understands the Gemora better than the Rishonim.”

  I did not respond to that. In a yeshiva you never said that a contemporary scholar could understand Talmud better than the Rishonim.

  There was an uncomfortable silence. I looked away from him and down at his fingers drumming soundlessly on the Talmud.

  “Let me ask you something else, Malter. In this chapter your father explains an inyan by changing the words of the Gemora. Explain to me why it is necessary to change the words in order to understand the inyan.”

  It was a fairly simple passage and it seemed quite clear to me that an easily identifiable scribal error had been made at one point by someone who had been copying the text. I explained it to him.

  “How can you change the words of the Gemora? Just like that you change the words of the Gemora? By what authority does your father change words?”

  “A lot of the commenta
ries changed words. The Vilna Gaon was always changing words he thought were wrong.” Rabbi Elijah of Vilna, who is known as the Vilna Gaon, was the greatest Talmudist of the eighteenth century. “There’s nothing new about changing words in the Talmud,” I said.

  Rav Kalman raised his eyebrows. “The Vilna Gaon? You are comparing your father to the Vilna Gaon?”

  I had expected that question. No one in the present could possibly be compared in depth of learning to the great ones of the past. So the works of the commentators of the past had to be accepted as valid for the present; and the liberties these commentators had taken with the text could not be practiced today because no one equaled them in knowledge. You could never say that a great contemporary Bible scholar had a better knowledge of the Bible than, say, Rashi, who was one of the greatest medieval commentators on the Bible; nor could you say that a modern scholar of the Talmud knew more than the accepted classical commentators on the Talmud. I knew that attitude, and so I said nothing to Rav Kalman’s remark.

  We spent the next few minutes going over some additional passages in my father’s book. I was beginning to feel quite uncomfortable. This was the first time I had ever used this method of study at Hirsch, and it felt strange and awkward, and I kept glancing at the door and worrying about someone suddenly coming into the room and seeing us studying my father’s book.

  We sat there almost an hour. Then Rav Kalman closed the book face down on the desk. He stroked his beard and gazed at me intently, then lit a cigarette and dropped the match carefully into the ashtray.

  “I see you know this method very well, Malter. Your father has taught you well.” He inhaled deeply on the cigarette. Smoke curled from his mouth and nostrils as he spoke. “I also see you enjoy this method of study. That is very clear to me. Tell me, Malter, do you believe the written Torah is from heaven?” He was asking me if I believed the Pentateuch had been revealed by God to Moses at Sinai.

  I hesitated a moment. Then I said, “Yes.”

  He had noticed my hesitation. I saw by the sudden stiffening of his shoulders that he had noticed it. “You believe that every word in the Torah was revealed by God blessed by He to Moses at Sinai?”