Religion & Ethics NewsWeekly . WEB EXCLUSIVE . Chaim Potok . July 26, 2002

"May His Influence Be Wide": Celebrating the Life of Chaim Potok

Read the comments and appreciations of writers and scholars on the death of Chaim Potok:

When I think about how audiences, both Jewish and non-Jewish, acquire their notions of Judaism in the modern world, I am convinced that these notions come not from sermons or historical studies, but from novels or plays or movies. In the first rank of these I would place Leon Uris's EXODUS, the musical FIDDLER ON THE ROOF, and Chaim Potok's THE CHOSEN.

Students and adults I meet in my work have some awareness of the world of Hasidim in this country and the struggle of young people brought up in that world to forge an identity of their own. Those who understand the emotional and ideological struggles have usually learned about them from reading Chaim's books, especially THE CHOSEN. And what makes the book so compelling is the fact that the world of religion one struggles to leave is portrayed with such understanding and love.

It is indeed rare that one finds someone, either in fiction or in life, who [can] view the world he ... struggled to leave with such love and sympathy. In all my conversations with Chaim, I never sensed any bitterness or anger about the constricted world of piety he left. This is rare. In his own life he retained a close link with those practices and beliefs he still found meaningful to him [as] a novelist and artist. I recall, for instance, a conversation we had about James Joyce, a paradigm of the young man who left the world of piety to forge his own consciousness. Joyce was clearly angry about the world he left, but Chaim didn't feel that way at all.

--Arnold J. Band is professor emeritus of comparative literature and Near Eastern languages and culture at UCLA.

According to the Talmud, if a king dies any other Israelite can succeed him, but if a scholar dies, "ein lanu kayotze bo," "we have nobody like him" (b. Horayot 13a).

No two scholars are alike because no two represent the same combination of intellectual and spiritual qualities. Chaim possessed an absolutely unique combination of gifts that I don't think is ever likely to be repeated. He was, of course, best known as a novelist, but he was also a rabbi, a scholar, a philosopher, an educator, a painter, and an editor. He received his scholarly training in Judaica at the Jewish Theological Seminary and in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania. He served as a military chaplain and then directed Camp Ramah in California and the seminary's Leaders Training Fellowship. He taught writing and philosophy of literature at Penn and other universities. He was the editor in chief of the Jewish Publication Society (JPS) and secretary of the committee that translated the Ketuvim for its Bible translation, serving along with Moshe Greenberg, Jonas Greenfield, and Nahum Sarna. It was Chaim, along with Nahum Sarna, who proposed that the JPS publish a Torah commentary, for which Chaim then served as literary editor. Most recently, he served as co-editor of ETZ HAYIM, the new Torah commentary that the Conservative Movement published last year. One of the greatest blessings that life brought to Chaim was that he was not only endowed with so many gifts, but that he was given the opportunity to use them all.

I first heard of Chaim in the sixties, before he published THE CHOSEN, when he wrote a valuable series of pamphlets about Jewish ethics, dealing with human nature and the ethics of such areas as business and advertising, language, law, and family. A couple years later Chaim was one of 38 leading rabbis who took part in a symposium on the state of Jewish belief published in the magazine COMMENTARY. There Chaim explained some of the themes that would become constant elements in most of his subsequent writing, both in his novels and in WANDERINGS, his book about Jewish history that traced Judaism's exposure to a succession of other great civilizations.

In the symposium Chaim wrote, "Theology has its origins in the anguish that is felt when one's commitment to a particular religious model of reality is confronted by new knowledge and experiential data that threaten the root assumptions of the model." That new knowledge and data were the modernity of every age and civilization to which the Jews were exposed. Chaim knew that anguish personally. His refusal to ignore modern thought, coupled with his love of Judaism and the Jewish people, led to his own crisis of faith, which he resolved by embracing both modernity and observant Judaism. This included embracing critical scholarship, the very approach that others regard as a threat to religion. For Chaim, critical scholarship made Judaism come alive by showing the unusual sophistication that went into the shaping of Jewish sacred texts. Chaim felt, as one of his characters later put it, "If the Torah cannot go into [the] world of [critical] scholarship and return stronger, then we are all fools and charlatans. I have faith in the Torah. I am not afraid of truth" (IN THE BEGINNING). At the same time, Chaim rejected any attempt to splinter the universe into separate domains of religion and science. He decided to forge a religious life out of what he called "provisional absolutes," meaning that he was constantly prepared to alter his basic religious assumptions should critical thinking make this necessary. And finally, he insisted on a commitment to a universe that is intrinsically meaningful, and on the unity of theology and behavior, the need for a pattern of behavior that can concretize this commitment and infuse it into the everyday activities of man. As he put it: "A theology that is not linked directly to a pattern of behavior is a blowing of wind and a macabre game with words. And a pattern of behavior that is not linked to a system of thought is an instance of religious robotry."

For most of his life, Chaim worked out these issues by telling stories. He was a master storyteller, and his novels expose us to individuals who struggle to remain true to the forms of Orthodox Judaism in which they were raised while being irresistibly drawn to modern intellectual or artistic paths that challenge those forms of Judaism. The novels are set against the moral, intellectual, spiritual, and artistic currents of the twentieth century, such as the Holocaust, the atomic bomb, Picasso and Guernica, modern biblical scholarship, and the scholarly recovery of Jewish mysticism. His novels [are] learned, philosophical, and extraordinarily informative about all of these subjects and many more like them. For readers they [are] a rich curriculum in liberal arts and Jewish studies, but they [are] also gripping literature, and whenever I finished one I felt a sadness at saying good-bye to the characters and not knowing what would happen next in their lives.

At a party in honor of Chaim's 72nd birthday, our friend Saul Wachs observed that Chaim's books "opened a window to the Jewish soul for Jew and non-Jew alike. I think all of us walked a little more proudly as Chaim's books appeared. At last we had a voice that combined authorial majesty with a warm Jewish heart." Another friend, Mort Civan, told of being in France and reading HA'ARETZ; when a woman looking over his shoulder noticed that he could read Hebrew and learned that he was Jewish, the first thing she said was, "Well, then, you must have read Chaim Potok." Mort's point was that to the world Chaim IS Judaism.

At the birthday party, a dozen or so friends and family members spoke movingly about Chaim. Everybody present knew of his illness, but that was completely in the background. Chaim was moved and responded very simply: he said that we live from minute to minute and nobody knows what's coming except the One who's in charge of it all, and then he said, "Shehecheyanu." ("Blessed are You, Lord our God, King of the Universe, who has granted me life and sustenance and has permitted me to reach this occasion.")

The intense media coverage of Chaim's death illustrated another Talmudic statement: "chacham she-met, hakol k'rovav." "If a sage dies, ALL are his kinsmen," ALL go into mourning. That is surely the case with Chaim, who touched millions of lives. He was one of the most famous Jews of his generation, one who will be remembered for a long time. Those who knew and loved him personally and those who know him only through his work will always be grateful that he was part of our lives.

--Jeffrey H. Tigay is the A. M. Ellis Professor of Hebrew and Semitic Languages and Literatures at the University of Pennsylvania.

When Chaim Potok died Tuesday morning, July 23, 2002, aged 73, he left a body of work that will endure for many years. A world-class writer and scholar, author of THE CHOSEN (1967), THE PROMISE (1969), MY NAME IS ASHER LEV (1972), THE BOOK OF LIGHTS (1981), DAVITA'S HARP (1985), his most recent novel OLD MEN AT MIDNIGHT (2001), to name a selected few, several children's books, and WANDERINGS, his history of the Jews, he was also a significant editor of a recent translation of one book of the Tanakh.

With a plain, straightforward style reminiscent of Hemingway, whom he worked hard to understand and master, Potok was not always appreciated by the critics. But as he put it to me in a recent interview, his style was as complex as it was simple, and as simple as it was complex. The fact is that millions of people, Jews and non-Jews, loved to read Potok. Having grown up in a closed world of Orthodoxy, he moved to Jewish Conservatism, which meant he moved from a closed system to one that allowed and encouraged flexibility, interpretation and imagination. Potok's work explored the tensions and conflicts between the world that religious Jews inhabited and the greater world around them, what he called "core to core cultural confrontations." He believed that his themes were universal ones, because they resonated with people all over the world in much the same ways that Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County, centered in Oxford, Mississippi, was able to capture the imagination of readers all over the world. Potok said he was writing about a small and particular world, the world of the pious, ascetic Orthodox Jews; indeed he was the first American Jewish author who carried that set of beliefs and values and traditions and rituals, unlike the secular trio of Bellow, Malamud and Roth, to a mass audience.

Chaim Potok wasn't in the literary world; he didn't go to writers' colonies, said Robert Gottlieb, his longtime editor, he went to Israel. His characters did not share the assimilationist goals of Bellow

and Roth, observed Lillian Kremer. But his work was loved and read by millions in many languages and from many cultures. I remember he told me once that for years he'd been getting notes and letters and recently emails from nuns and priests and people from Catholic and Protestant institutions--responses to THE CHOSEN because they were so touched by it.

Chaim Potok was able to communicate to millions and millions of people, who were Jewish and non-Jewish, because he pursued the truth in his imagination, because he wrote from the inside, as a believer. In my judgment, his novels and stories will endure and his reputation will grow. As a country, the United States is acknowledging more and more that it is a multiethnic and multireligious country. Potok's works will more and more fit into that spectrum that is American civilization. In his pursuit of the tensions between faith and culture, between the individual's beliefs and the cultural systems and beliefs and ideas that permeate an individual's existence, he touched a chord that resonated and will continue to touch countless numbers of readers. We have lost a major voice, a penetrating and sensitive voice.

--Daniel Walden is professor emeritus of American studies, English, and comparative literature at Penn State University and the author of CONVERSATIONS WITH CHAIM POTOK (2001).

There are so many reasons to deeply admire this man, but chief among them for me is his unending creativity, the constant exploration of his craft. Even when addled by illness, he never stopped trying to write, read, think, discuss. I remember that he used to carry a tiny tape recorder in his shirt pocket, repeating into it a phrase or thought that he found insightful. Nothing of interest escaped his notice. He became a role model: A writer who sustains a powerful will to create, and continually musters the courage to put those creations before an always-critical public.

He was an important role model in another way, as well: as a Jewish Renaissance man. Deeply steeped in and devoted to his religion, he nonetheless embraced the ideas of both Western and Eastern cultures with a passion....The struggle between tradition and modernity courses through his work, and he seemed to relish the challenge. There was always something universal about the cultural confrontations his characters faced, and that is why his work was beloved in so many countries, translated into so many languages, relevant to so many of us who search for meaning and identity in a coarse, bewildering world.

At a time when religiosity is sometimes synonymous with intolerance and fanaticism, Potok proved that one could be devoted to an ancient religion -- to its beliefs, rituals and texts -- without narrowing one's mind or forsaking one's humanity.

He was a brooding, complicated man, and as he grew older, the unbridled American optimism that infused his earlier work gave way to a gloomier assessment of the times ahead. The events of Sept. 11 touched him deeply. A devoted family man, he worried aloud about the world his progeny would inherit.

His faith -- a "rambunctious faith," he called it -- was tested by his illness but also gave him the strength to prepare to die, and die his way. He passed away peacefully in his sleep, at home, surrounded by his family and his books and his paintings.

May his memory be for a blessing.

--Jane Eisner is a columnist for THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER. These remarks are excerpted with permission from her column of July 24, 2002.

On July 23, 2002, the Jewish community lost one of its most articulate spokesmen; the wider world, one of its most passionate writers. Chaim Potok, whose life began within the narrow confines of a hasidic shtiebel, wrote his way out into the wider world of arts and letters, and then through his writing brought us back with him inside that narrow world to understand what he had loved and learned and lost. For his Jewish readers, he represented a new kind of Jew -- fiercely proud of his heritage and learned in its sacred texts, but unafraid to embrace secular culture and its syncretic roots. For the Jew in the pew, he represented a new kind of rabbi -- reverent yet unabashedly critical, intensely loyal to his community yet a citizen of the world.

But Chaim did not only make his contributions on the large stage. He also participated in several focused communities of influence, most notably The Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia, where he served as editor-in-chief from 1966 to 1974, then as special projects editor, and finally, as chairman of its editorial committee until shortly before his death. In 1966, when the young Rabbi Potok assumed the JPS editorship, retiring editor Dr.Solomon Grayzel made this wish for him: "May his tenure be long; may his achievements be high; may his influence be wide; may his success be spectacular." His words indeed proved prophetic.

Chaim's rise to international fame coincided with his tenure at JPS. Only a year after assuming the editorship, his first novel, THE CHOSEN, was published and immediately rocketed to the top of the bestseller list. Yet despite his commitment to writing his novels before he came into the office each day and his ongoing doctoral studies (he received his Ph.D. in Jewish philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania in 1974), Chaim continued to devote his heart, mind and spirit to serving the Jewish community through his work at the Society. In his first remarks to the JPS board as editor, Chaim declared his intention to focus his editorial attentions on the questions of "How to remain human in a world that has been witness to an Auschwitz and a Bergen-Belsen... ... How to live as a Jew in a free society, how to have Jewish concepts compete successfully in the open marketplace of ideas, how to make our tradition vibrant and alive, how to enable Judaism to make a viable contribution to twentieth-century cultures -- these are the problems born of our encounter with Western civilization." Today these challenges remain just as relevant and urgent as they did when Chaim Potok identified them in 1966.

Perhaps his most lasting achievements during his almost four decades of association with JPS were in the field of Bible. As a translator, editor and scholar, he participated in the most important project in JPS's history: a totally new translation of the Hebrew Bible, launched by Harry Orlinsky in 1953 and completed in 1985 with the publication in one volume of the JPS TANAKH. Then, in 1973, when the Society launched another monumental Bible project, the five-volume Torah Commentary Series, Chaim Potok was appointed literary editor of the project, with Nahum Sarna as general editor. It was also at that time that the idea of a one-volume synagogue humash (Torah and commentary) was conceived, with the new JPS translation and condensed commentary at its heart. With the publication this past fall of Etz Hayim, in which Chaim Potok played a pivotal role as editor of the critical commentary, all of these important Bible projects have come to fruition, in no small measure thanks to the talents, vision and dedication of Chaim Potok.

But Chaim's vision was not confined to scholarly dreams. In 1972, when three scruffy college students came to him with an innovative project inspired by the counter-cultural movement among American young people (a project that already had been rejected by Schocken Books), Chaim Potok took it on, brooking intense opposition from his own editorial committee and board. But it turned out that he was prophetic in understanding the incredible potential that the project represented to JPS and the Jewish community. Indeed, with Chaim's brilliant editorial guidance, THE JEWISH WHOLE EARTH CATALOG (it eventually dropped the "whole earth" in its title) took off like a rocket, selling hundred of thousands of copies and sparking a national renewal in Jewish practice, learning and artistic expression for the Baby Boomer generation of American Jews.

Chaim did not only touch communities and institutions. Everyone who came into contact with him was changed and vitalized by that contact. He was fiercely loyal to his friends, devoted to his family, and delighted about his literary relationships, especially with younger writers. His networks of connection ringed the world, and he reveled in the span of that reach.

Chaim was an incredibly complicated man -- warm, intense, moody, whimsical, brilliant, possessed. He was passionate about so many things, and he never shied away from committing himself to his beliefs. Most of all, he was a man of inexhaustible faith-in humanity, especially the young; in ideas, especially the original and audacious; and in God, especially as worthy challenger and steadfast hevruta-partner, companion, teacher, friend.

At his funeral on July 24 at the Conservative synagogue in the Philadelphia suburbs to which his family belonged, all three of his grown children as well as his wife Adena eulogized this towering patriarch of their family. For those who knew Chaim as a public man, their words were almost embarrassingly intimate. It was as if those of us gathered there were eavesdropping at his deathbed, listening in as each child addressed his and her final words to "Abba," the hidden presence in the plain pine box draped in purple velvet that defined the central space flanked by the crowded pews. One by one, Chaim's two daughters and son expressed gratitude for what they had shared together and voiced regret for what they had failed to complete. The hundreds of guests sitting in taut silence learned that during his final weeks, Chaim was sheltered by close family and friends, the answering machine deactivated, the email disregarded. Told that he wished to see the water one last time, Chaim's family brought him to Long Beach Island where he was carried to the beach each day to watch his grandchildren build sand castles. Unable to leave his bed, his close friends and family brought his last Shabbat to Chaim's bedside, sanctifying the hallah and wine, and singing songs as he listened on, mute.

All who spoke at the funeral referred to this inexorable loss of speech, the cruelest aspect of the brain cancer that eventually killed him after two years of attrition, slowly robbing this consummate wordsmith of his most precious possession: his language. In his final months, Chaim gradually lost his hold on words. They slipped from his grasp until his sentences became splintered and incomplete. His daughter Rena, who as a literary critic and professor most closely has followed in her father's literary footsteps, revealed that as his speech began to disintegrate, Chaim took to signaling the end of his faltering sentences with the phrase: "And that's it." And as a final tribute to her father, Rena herself finished her own remarks with that same simple signature.

At the end Chaim was unable to speak at all, although only ten days before he died, he managed to chant the Friday night Kiddush, the lengthy Hebrew prayer over wine. It seems that his Hebrew self was rooted more deeply than his American one, so deeply that it managed to elude the grasp of the cancerous silence robbing Chaim of speech. It was as if Chaim's Jewish soul had been annealed, like his character Danny Malter's, by the silence of his childhood, toughened for this last stand. One of Chaim's friends and fellow congregants who also spoke at the funeral told how Chaim, despite his weak body and faltering speech, had willed himself that past Yom Kippur to chant the entire Ne'ilah service that traditionally closes the day of fasting and repentance. It was not lost on anyone that evening that the dominant metaphor of this service -- "The gates are closing! Answer us, O God!" -- was as much about Chaim's life as about the community's prayers for atonement. All knew that this was to be Chaim's last Yom Kippur. The gates were indeed closing-although no one knew then just how fast.

Though words failed him in the end, music did not. Adena Potok, whose dogged, heroic companionship during the two years of her husband's illness amazed even those who knew her well, revealed that Chaim spent his final day listening to a recording by one of his dearest friends, pianist Walter Hautzig, playing Chopin. Hearing the music, Chaim's strength seemed to revive, summoning back from the grave before sleep overcame him. She mentioned with a slight smile that Chaim had keenly loved Frank Sinatra and had worn out the records he'd brought with him as a chaplain in Korea. But Chaim also had a secret music, a niggun, a wordless melody passed down from his mother that was known by the family as a tikkun, a kind of incantation to repair a broken world. It was this melody that his family sang to him as he departed the world.

Chaim also loved theater and film. Not surprising then that one of his children, his daughter Naamah, became an actress; the other, his son Akiva, a filmmaker. In a light moment that briefly broke the solemnity, their mother disclosed that the last movie Chaim had seen in a theater was SPIDER-MAN "He loved the comics," she said with no apology. More evidence of how Chaim swallowed the world whole-all of it.

Adena spoke of the Navajo boy who had been so deeply moved by reading Chaim's tales about Jewish identity and then meeting him on one of their trips out West, that he wrote to the famous author to tell him that it was through Chaim's books that he had come to cherish his Indian heritage proudly as his own. Indeed, the more deeply Chaim dug at his own tangled roots, the more universal his writings became. And he knew that about himself and about the need to write from his Jewish gut and the cost of letting himself off that hook. A few times he tried to break free of this truth-with his Korean novel, I AM THE CLAY, that according to his brother-in-law had been Chaim's attempt at a first novel, written before THE CHOSEN but not published until thirty years later; and again with two generic children's books and a short story collection, ZEBRA AND OTHER STORIES, populated with non-Jewish teenage protagonists -- but his public wouldn't let him go, felt betrayed, and deserted him. Or else his power left him when he longer trod familiar ground. Whether chosen or pigeon-holed, he seemed stuck: his pen preferred to spill Jewish ink.

I was privileged to work with Chaim for over a decade in my capacity as editor-in-chief of The Jewish Publication Society, the job Chaim held twenty years before me. As chairman of the editorial committee, Chaim served as a second gatekeeper of JPS acquisitions, giving a thumbs up to certain submissions so that they could go forward to the committee for review or a thumbs down, which sent them on their way elsewhere. Several times a year Chaim would meet me at a back booth in Hymie's Delicatessen near the Potoks' home on the Main Line, and there we would pore over a stack of manuscripts and proposals. I would ask him: Are these right for publication by JPS? I always welcomed Chaim's read. He was able to see things I couldn't -- both flaws and hidden potential. It was amazing to watch him go to work at these two-hour breakfasts: his keen editorial eye sizing up, calculating, reconceiving another author's vision and skill. Over his unbuttered bagel or onion-smothered eggs and several cups of coffee, he rendered judgment over new readings of Jewish history, theology, ritual and feminist interpretation, biblical criticism and Holocaust testimony, ethics and folklore. The breadth of his knowledge was vast; the range of his curiosity, capacious. He was open to all ideas as long as they were thoughtfully reasoned, urgent, significant. As his daughter Rena remarked at the funeral, her father rewarded good questions, but he did not suffer fools lightly. He made room at his intellectual table for all comers-traditionalists and iconoclasts, feminists and seekers, Jews by choice and Jews by protest, scholars and literary mavericks. He bristled at pat convention, at received opinion. What he looked for in books was rigor, originality, engagement with questions that mattered.

Bible scholar Jeffrey Tigay, another friend and colleague, suggested at the funeral that the world will never again see anyone like Chaim Potok, rabbi, scholar, novelist, philosopher. Perhaps he is right. Chaim was an oxymoron of a man-immersed in a faith community but disquieted by existential angst; charismatic and private; devoted to family and home and friends, yet repeatedly dragged off to spar in the brawl of the world. Of course, that's precisely what made him so fascinating to us: He defied our understanding. His novels were so accessible, but he wasn't. His material was so parochial, but it spoke to everyone. His public persona was so dark and powerful, but he was a warm family man and shul mensch (regular synagogue participant). Not the profile of an international celebrity.

So who was the real Chaim Potok?

Like the silence that shaped his first fictional character and the silence that governed his final days, the answer to this question will not yield to our entreaty. We have no choice but to let his works and their echoes speak on his behalf.

May his memory be for a blessing.

--Dr. Ellen Frankel is CEO and editor-in-chief of The Jewish Publication Society in Philadelphia.

Did you like this story? How can we improve our program or Web site?