The Gift of Rabbi Chaim Potok
- Timothy Larsen
- 1 day ago
- 8 min read
Timothy Larsen, McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College on Chiam Potok's The Chosen
Chaim Potok | Wikimedia Commons
Wheaton College, where I teach, is a storied bastion of evangelical Protestantism. It was founded in 1860, in Wheaton IL, by the Reverend Jonathan Blanchard, a Congregational minister and a fiery abolitionist. During the fundamentalist-modernist controversy of the 1920s, when every other liberal arts college in America started down a path towards a more religiously pluralistic or secular identity, Wheaton alone sided with fundamentalism. For many decades in the minds of many people, it became “the school where the students are not allowed to dance.” To this day, the college is a determinedly theologically conservative, Protestant place: even Roman Catholics are not allowed on the faculty. Therefore, perhaps Wheaton has no business having a favorite rabbi. Yet it does—Chaim Potok (1929-2002).
I lead Wheaton College’s faculty development Faith and Learning Program. Every faculty member that Wheaton hires—whatever they teach, whether it’s anthropology or piano, business or chemistry, literature or engineering—gets trapped in a room with me for a year-long seminar. I only require them to read around eight books, but one of them is Potok’s first novel, The Chosen (1967). Therefore, more Wheaton professors have read a book about Orthodox Jews written by a rabbi than have ever read a volume by John Calvin, or John Bunyan, or Jonathan Edwards, or John Piper, or any other great Protestant John you can think of.
Potok was raised in an Orthodox family that discouraged reading beyond approved Jewish voices. He nevertheless was drawn to numerous other authors, including the Christian novelists Evelyn Waugh and Fyodor Dostoevsky.
The Chosen (a New York Times best-selling novel) is the story of two teenage, Jewish boys, Reuven and Danny. Reuven is the son of the Talmudic scholar, David Malter, and he is being raised Modern Orthodox. Danny is the son of the Hasidic rabbi, Isaac Saunders, and thus is being raised “very Orthodox,” with all the outward and visible signs that go with it: “I could see the earlocks hanging down alongside his sculptured face and the fringes outside the trousers below the jacket.” Reuven disdains the Hasidim as fanatics; Danny has been taught to despise the Modern Orthodox as heretics. An angry rivalry during a baseball game ends with Reuven getting injured by Danny and having to spend some time in a hospital which, in turn, leads on to an unlikely friendship. Reuven’s father seeks to soften his son’s dismissiveness of this rival form of Judaism that he is now encountering more closely for the first time.
first printed in 1967
From the perspective of a conservative Protestant college in fly-over country, the story reads strikingly like the origins of the evangelical movement. Through the debates of the boys, one learns that the founder of Hasidism, Israel ben Eliezer, more commonly known as the Baal Shem Tov “was born about the year 1700.” John Wesley was born in 1703. The Baal Shem Tov opposed “mechanical religion,” and championed instead worshipping God “through a sincere heart.” But to a Protestant, such teaching sounded like it could easily have been from Wesley. Thus Hasidism satisfied the deep need felt by ordinary people “for a new way to approach God.” Even the ways that the tradition had become narrow and rigid, Reuven’s father casts in a more sympathetic light: “the fanaticism of men like Reb Saunders kept us alive for two thousand years of exile.”
Danny has a truly brilliant mind—the outward and visible sign of which is his photographic memory. Yet his destined lot in life according to his religious community is to study only Talmud, to remain forever cut off from the wider world of ideas, and to take his place as his father’s successor as a tzaddik, a rabbi and spiritual leader in a kind of mystically revered position of honor and authority. Danny can learn his Talmud in a fraction of the time it would take someone else, and thus spends many hours secretly reading books in the public library that Hasidim are supposed to eschew as contaminating and forbidden.
Danny has become obsessed with Freud. Part of the drama of his adolescent and young adult life, therefore, becomes the tension between faith and learning. Reuven muses regarding his Hasidic friend, “I began to wonder how it was possible for the ideas of the Talmud and the thinking of Freud to live side by side within one person.” As Danny continues his illicit studies, it seems that the final result might be that he no longer believes in God at all. Again, Reuven is witnessing Danny’s crisis of faith: “Freud had clearly upset him in a fundamental kind of way—had thrown him off balance, as he once put it.”
Both boys end up going to Samson Raphael Hirsch College. Occupying a similar place in the ecosystem of Judaism as Wheaton College does in Protestantism, “It was a rigidly Orthodox school.” Yet with a vital twist that again reflects the unique place in the landscape that Wheaton held in the decades just after the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, Hirsch “was the only yeshiva in the United States that offered a secular college education.” The outward and visible sign of this is a mural on Hirsch’s campus which depicts “Homer, Dante, Tolstoi, Balzac, and Shakespeare engaged in conversation.”
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Chaim Potok gave a lecture on Wheaton’s campus on May 4, 1991. He spoke in Barrows auditorium. Cliff Barrows was a graduate of the flagship fundamentalist school, Bob Jones University. In the post-World War II era, Wheaton had moved away from sectarian fundamentalism and instead helped to led a movement that was called at the time “neo-evangelicalism.” Samson Raphael Hirsch (the rabbi who the college in The Chosen is named after), in a parallel fashion, had led a movement in Judaism called “neo-orthodoxy.” The most prominent leader of neo-evangelicalism was the evangelist Billy Graham, who graduated from Wheaton College. Cliff Barrows, an ordained Baptist minister, was Graham’s long-serving worship leader and music director.
According to Wheaton’s student newspaper, the Record, Potok spoke “on scripture as literature.” That was an uncannily perfect Wheaton theme. The college’s legendary English professor (and the father of Wheaton’s current president), Dr Leland Ryken, had written an influential book on the same subject, The Literature of the Bible (1974). The Record article even included a photograph of Potok and Ryken together.
Potok had been invited to campus as part of an ambitious Wheaton College theater festival comprised of specially commissioned, one-act plays. The other high-profile authors who had agreed to write plays for the festival were Protestants, include Garrison Keillor—the host of the NPR radio show, A Prairie Home Companion—and Madeleine L’Engle, the author of A Wrinkle in Time.
Potok was revered in Wheaton’s theater program most particularly for two novels he wrote about a Jewish character who has to navigate the tension between his calling as an artist and the demands and strictures of his Hasidic faith and community, the second of which had been published just the year before Potok’s address in Barrows auditorium, My Name is Asher Lev (1972) and The Gift of Asher Lev (1990). With extraordinary generosity, Chaim Potok wrote two plays especially for the Wheaton College community. Carnival “is the story of two Jewish seminary students looking for a little fun away from their studies and finding more than they bargained for.” Galley was the story of Asher Lev.
first published 1990
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At Hirsch College, the only professor in Danny’s favorite subject teaches experimental psychology. Danny, who is intoxicated by grand theories, chafes against it: “He just couldn’t see himself spending four years running rats through mazes and checking human responses to blinking lights and buzzing sounds.” Professor Appleman, however, counters with the bracing assessment that a lot of Freudian thought is just unscientific dogmatism. David Malter is also informally mentoring Danny.
Malter’s way is the Wheaton way: the solution is not to hide from unsettling ideas, but to learn to evaluate them critically: “I will give him other books to read, and he will see that Freud is not God in psychology.” Danny is also upset by reading Heinrich Graetz’s multi-volume History of the Jews (1853-1870). He realizes that Hasidim are deliberately kept in the dark about a lot of the history of their own movement, and that this material puts it in a disturbing light. Danny is cowed by the author’s erudition: “Graetz was a great scholar . . . He was one of the greatest Jewish scholars of the last century.” Malter agrees, but guides Danny into seeing that he nevertheless needs to be read critically: “Graetz was biased, and his sources were not accurate… there is enough to dislike about Hasidism without exaggerating its faults.”
In the end, Danny decides that he will not become a rabbi, but rather a psychologist. He cuts of his earlocks as the outward and visible sign that he will no longer confine himself within the subculture of Hasidism. Nevertheless, not only has he not lost his faith, but he is even still committed to being an observant Jew, to following the Commandments. Danny’s stern rabbi father is reconciled to the path their community’s chosen one has chosen for himself: “Let my Daniel become a psychologist. I have no more fear now. All his life he will be a tzaddik. He will be a tzaddik for the world. And the world needs a tzaddik.”
Reflecting the broader reading that Potok engaged in during his Orthodox childhood, that conclusion echoes the ending of Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. In that story, Father Zosima, in his own way, is a tzaddik, a person who lives a righteous life, a person who is a pious spiritual leader, acting as a bridge between the material and spiritual world. Alyosha wanted to become a monk, but Zosima prophesies his true calling: “This is what I think of you, you will go forth from these walls, but will live like a monk in the world.” Tzaddikim have extraordinary power but are the most human of human beings, yet it is through them that we learn to see our true selves in the world, to learn that we are, essentially, divine because we are all tzelem Elohim, divine sparks of the Creator.
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I first read The Chosen in 1989. I was a student at Wheaton College, and it was an assigned text in my introductory New Testament course. During the first week of class, our professor had a heart attack and was on medical leave for the rest of the semester. He never was replaced. There might have been a few guest lecturers who came in here and there, but we were basically left on our own without an instructor. We were required to just do the best we could with the assignments as listed in the syllabus, turning in our work to a student assistant so that some unnamed person would grade them.
A book we were required to read early in the course was a work of biblical criticism by a scholar who was very public about not being a Christian. Like Graetz, he was a great scholar and, like Danny, I was thrown off balance. I remember one argument in the book that particularly stress-tested my faith. In Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives instructions on how to deal with fellow believers who fall into sin and who ignore your attempts to confront them about it: “If they still refuse to listen, tell it to the church.” This formidable biblical scholar asserted that these instructions presume that the church already exists and so, clearly, they are not a genuine saying of Jesus, but just something someone else made up later. In the normal Wheaton way, our professor would have taught us to read this book critically, to recognize that even great scholars have their own biases, errors, and limitations.
My Wheaton professor, however, was in a hospital bed somewhere, and I was left to wrestle with this challenge on my own. Only not entirely. Because some weeks later on the syllabus came another required text, The Chosen. And so I learned to realize that the solution was not hiding from ideas, but handling them critically and gaining additional knowledge that would put them in perspective. This Christian believer and professor at an evangelical Protestant college recalls, to this day, that memorable moment in his faith and learning journey as the gift of Rabbi Chaim Potok.
Timothy Larsen is McManis Professor of Christian Thought at Wheaton College (IL), and president of the American Society of Church History. His forthcoming book is The Fires of Moloch: Anglican Clergymen in the Furnace of World War One (Oxford University Press, 2025).
