The Chosen
Author: Chaim Potok
Release: April 28, 1967
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0-671-13674-7
Main Character(s): Reuven Malter, Daniel Saunders, Rabbi Isaac Saunders, David Malter
Synopsis: “It’s the spring of 1944 and fifteen-year-olds Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders have lived five blocks apart all their lives. But they’ve never met, not until the day an accident at a softball game sparks an unlikely friendship. Soon these two boys—one expected to become a Hasidic rebbe, the other at ease with secular America—are drawn into one another’s worlds despite a father’s strong opposition.”
Declassified by Agent Palmer: Six decades later, The Chosen still tackles the Judaism vs. Zionism eloquently
Quotes and Lines
My father had told me he didn’t mind their beliefs. What annoyed him was their fanatic sense of righteousness, their absolute certainty that they and they alone had God’s ear, and every other Jew was wrong, totally wrong, a sinner, a hypocrite, an apikoros, and doomed, therefore, to burn in hell.
“I am worried about my baseball player.” He smiled at me. “I worry all the time you will get hit by a taxi or a trolley car, and you go and get hit by a baseball.”
“My father doesn’t write,” Danny said. “He reads a lot, but he never writes. He says that words distort what a person really feels in his heart. He doesn’t like to talk too much, either. Oh, he talks plenty when we’re studying Talmud together. But otherwise he doesn’t say much. He told me once he wishes everyone could talk in silence.”
“No one knows he is fortunate until he becomes unfortunate, that’s the way the world is.”
“Reuven, as you grow older you will discover that the most important thing that will happen to you will often come as a result of silly things, as you call them- ‘ordinary things’ is a better expression. That is the way the world is.”
“The Jewish world is changed,” he said, almost in a whisper. “A madman has destroyed our treasures. If we do not rebuild Jewry in America, we will die as a people.”
“Human beings do not live forever, Reuven. We live less than the time it takes to blink an eye, if we measure our lives against eternity. So it may be asked what value is there to a human life. There is so much pain in the world. What does it mean to have to suffer so much if our lives are nothing more than the blink of an eye? I learned a long time ago, Reuven, that a blink of an eye in itself is nothing. But the eye that blinks, that is something. A span of life is nothing. But the man who lives that span, he is something. He can fill that tiny span with meaning, so its quality is immeasurable though its quantity may be insignificant. Do you understand what I am saying? A man must fill his life with meaning, meaning is not automatically given to life. It is hard work to fill one’s life with meaning. That I do not think you understand yet. A life filled with meaning is worthy of rest. I want to be worthy of rest when I am no longer here.”
“I did not want to sound morbid. I only wanted to tell you that I am doing things I consider very important now. If I could not do these things, my life would have no value. Merely to live, merely to exist–what sense is there to it? A fly also lives.”