LiL = Lost in Literature
Book: The Chosen by Chaim Potok
Episode Tie-In: Dr Linus, Season 6 Episode 7
It’s been a while since I’ve written an accompanying blog for the book featured on a given week’s podcast. In all honesty, I’m beyond busy and unfortunately it is something like this that gets bumped down to the bottom of my list on non-essentials. I wish it wasn’t this way, I wish I could dedicate my whole day to blogs like this, where I tell people why they need to read a certain book, but alas…
This book was meaningful to me in ways that have nothing to do with Lost. This post is about what this book meant to me personally. My Lost in Literature segment on the We Have to Go Back podcast compares the father/son relationships of the characters in The Chosen to Jacob’s relationship with Ilana, Richard and Ben. For the LOST references, listen to the podcast!
A couple years back, one of my good friends, whom I’d met at church and had several lively discussions with about faith and the Bible, told me he didn’t actually believe that Jesus is the Son of God and through his personal reading and study he’d decided to convert to Judaism. As a Christian (I grew up, and still consider myself, Evangelical), and a firm believer that the Bible is the inerrant Word of God and Jesus is the Son of God, this broke my heart. I appreciated his honesty in telling me and providing me with the opportunity to speak with him and ask him about his reasons for converting, but I knew from the get-go that he came to our meeting prepared to shut me down at every juncture. Every point I brought up, every argument I made, every passage of Scripture I cited, he had something to combat it with; not perfectly, of course, but he was able to offer up counter explanations or arguments when I brought them up. I explain this not because I want to paint him in a bad light nor do I want to make me sound unprepared, but because this was the first encounter I’d ever had with someone converting from Christianity.
There is a remarkable devotion to study in Judaism that is largely lost on Christians. I participate in a Bible study outside of church, which requires (or requests) a daily allotment of time and study in order to prepare for the meeting the following week, but my study of Scripture is laughable in comparison to how Danny and Reuven and other boys in Orthodox Jewish homes grow up. To compare, I know some homeschoolers who might have slightly comparable childhoods, but I’ve never heard of pre-collegiate education taking the form that it does in this book, religious or not. It’s hard to even compare a child who is being fast-tracked toward early childhood proficiency in a certain instrument because in that case, the child is unique. Here, it seems, that every child, or every boy at least during the era in which the book was written, goes to a Jewish school, is required to memorize passages from the Talmud, and is required to study quite a bit. Trade-offs are made depending on which Jewish sect a child belongs to, but even so, even as Danny is Hasidic and Reuven Orthodox, they can have deep Talmudic discussions on relatively the same playing field. By the time they enter college and the story incorporates interactions with other boys in the school, we realize that Danny and Reuven are rather unique in the depth of their knowledge and understanding, and so they might then qualify as more a Gifted Student than a archetypical Jewish college student. However, my point is the devotion the Jewish culture lays on study.
In Christianity, it would seem, the only time it isn’t unusual for a student to study the Bible and other religious texts in this same manner is either because they are in a private school or home schooled. And by college it doesn’t matter, study what you want to achieve whatever you want. We worry about high schoolers leaving home and going off to live at college because it is then up to them to carry their faith with them and make the decision to follow Jesus and make their faith their own, not something that is inherited from their parents. Appropriately, Danny, being what we would call a P.K. (Preacher’s kid), struggled in his late adolescence and undergraduate college years with balancing secular and religious texts; while he still followed the rigorous coursework his Tzaddik father set out for him and he threw himself into the study of the Talmud, his heart was studying psychology and Freud and so not unlike a preacher’s kid, he fought the path he was destined for. This dualism of the spirit is often what causes kids who grow up Christian or grow up going to church to dramatically veer off in the opposite direction. Whether rebellion is the right word is probably more semantics than anything, they challenge the morals and beliefs of their parents or of the church and decide to try acting in opposition to them.
By the end of The Chosen, Danny is finally able to balance his religious and secular studies, not so they necessarily work symbiotically (though they might down the road), but so that his heart is no longer split over which course he must follow. When it comes time to admit to his father he does not intend to take over as the Tzaddik and pursue Rabbinical studies, he has finally found a healthy medium, balancing the spiritual forces within him so that one does not dominate the other.
The irony in all of what I’ve just outline is that despite the devotion laid on these kids and their study of the Talmud and such other Judaic texts, there was still not much directly about God. And so this brings me to another vital point in the discussion. As Christians, we frown on the type of education these boys receive because it is considered “legalistic”, where too much attention is paid to how much time one spends studying or how much of the Bible a person reads every day. In Galatians, Paul writes about how he had once been a zealous Jew who had followed strictly the ancestral teachings in order to advance quickly. But he tells us also that God called him out of that life in grace so that he might preach the words of Jesus to the Gentiles. Those who grew up as Jews, he writes, “know that a person is not justified by the works of the law, but by faith in Jesus Christ” (Gal. 2:16), which essentially means that the crux of our faith isn’t found in what we do (how we atone for our sin), but because Jesus died for our sins we must go out and do what he has called us to do. Legalism, then, would be forcing children or teenagers to participate in the type of schooling depicted in The Chosen because it is what is required, not because it is something that they have been called by God to participate in.
And so because we want our kids to grow into their faith and make it their own, make choices because they deeply understand the sacrifice Jesus made for them before they were even thought of, we don’t force these kinds of studies on them.
Honestly, I think there are a lot of other factors involved in the direction high schoolers take in entering college, it’s not all because of a lack of understanding of the Bible. Environmental factors play a role, particularly the behavior and lifestyles of their parents; biological factors play a role, such as unaddressed, underaddressed, or improperly handled mental issues. The list is extensive. However, I can’t help but to think we’ve gone so far off the route of legalism that it has made us afraid to incorporate any structured education into the lives of young Christians. I don’t really think that there is much difference between expecting a kid to know what to major in and expecting a kid to live out their faith when it comes to how they are prepared to do so. We force kids to go to school five days a week, sometimes starting well before the age of five, but Sunday School is optional and taught by individuals who have not had proper training (it’s volunteer-based, I’ve done it myself). When they enter middle school or junior high school we let them start selecting electives depending on their interests, slowly preparing them for making their own decisions in another six years; but in church, kids are handed off, year after year, to another volunteer who decides their own class structure and hopes that some kids know the answers to questions, and hope that the kids come back week after week. In high school, we give the intelligent kids, or the ambitious kids, the option of attending college classes while still in high school; they like school and probably have a good idea of what the future holds. But when kids enter “Youth Group” at church and have access to their own car, there is no certainty that they will follow through in attending Youth Group, nor that they will participate, nor that they are being instructed in any formal way. The Bible is popularly taught in a topical way (this is what the Bible says about sex, this is what the Bible says about friendship, etc). And so kids go off to college wanting to study biology and become a doctor because of x, y, z. They go off and study criminology because of x, y, z. But they drop their faith, drop church, and start making Biblically-conflicting choices because that is what is optional.
They’re right. It is optional. Faith in Jesus is a choice we make, not just in acknowledging or accepting who he is and what he has done for us, but as a declaration of a lifestyle. And that lifestyle, and all that accompanies it, that is what is abandoned. Not Jesus, necessarily, but everything he stands for.
Do I sound fanatical? I loved school, the actual education part of it. I squeezed in two years of college before I technically graduated from high school and it was one of the best experiences of my life. I was challenged in new and exciting ways, I got to interact with students older than me and learn from them and their experiences. It was scary, but I learned so much and transferred to another institution after I graduated from high school, then, that further solidified my love of learning. But I didn’t get any of that in my faith. Yes, I have pursued it on my own and have been transformed by my personal study, but I can say that I was very similar to Danny in my pursuit of knowledge. It was difficult for me to balance all that I knew of Jesus and the way I am supposed to live against philosophy, centuries of literature, and science that was poured onto me in college. A structured, faith-based education would have challenged me in the same ways growing up. I would have hated it the same way I sometimes hated school; I would have dreaded homework in the same way I dreaded it anywhere else. But here I am, seven years removed from (my first degree) college, and I have found a medium in which to put my practical analytic skills to work in really obscure ways.
On the whole, I don’t think I am the rule by which most Christian kids can be gauged. I am not saying I’ve met every person my age in Minnesota and I am definitely in the minority, but I’ve met a lot and I’ve found it very rare that someone is in my same situation. Raised Christian, attended Sunday School, Youth Group, went to church in college, and left having grown in my faith, not abandoning it. I fully acknowledge that I might be looking in the wrong place for others like me, but I just wonder how much of it simply has to do with not knowing that foundation in a way that Danny and Reuven did. Danny knew the Talmud very well and could talk any of his classmates in circles about its teachings and he still almost fell off, but it was, I think, because he knew all of it that he could never fall completely off.
the quantum bubble 