The Work
The Chosen was first published in 1967 by Simon and Schuster (New York). It was Chaim Potok's first novel and became an immediate bestseller, spending twenty-six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list. The novel is approximately 290 pages, set in the Borough Park and Williamsburg neighborhoods of Brooklyn, New York, during and immediately after World War II (1944-1947). It follows two Jewish boys - Reuven Malter, the son of a Modern Orthodox scholar and Zionist activist, and Danny Saunders, the son of Reb Saunders, the tzaddik (spiritual leader) of a Hasidic dynasty - whose friendship begins when a hardball Danny hits at a baseball game breaks Reuven's glasses and injures his eye.
The novel was adapted as a film in 1981 (directed by Jeremy Kagan, starring Maximilian Schell, Rod Steiger, Barry Miller, and Robby Benson) and as a musical theatre production. It is widely assigned in American high school and college literature curricula and has sold millions of copies.
Biblical Engagement
Deuteronomy 7:6 ('For thou art an holy people unto the LORD thy God: the LORD thy God hath chosen thee to be a special people unto himself, above all people that are upon the face of the earth') provides the title's theological resonance. The concept of Israel as God's 'chosen people' (am segulah) is the central affirmation of Jewish identity, and Potok's novel explores its meaning through the contrasting interpretations embodied in the two fathers: David Malter, who reads 'chosenness' as a responsibility to engage with the modern world and contribute to the building of a Jewish homeland; and Reb Saunders, who reads it as the obligation to preserve an ancient way of life against the corruptions of modernity.
The title also resonates with the Hasidic concept of the tzaddik as the 'chosen one' of the community - the holy man through whom divine blessing flows to the people. Danny Saunders is destined from birth to succeed his father as tzaddik, a role he increasingly cannot accept because his intellectual gifts are driving him toward secular psychology rather than religious leadership. The tension between the divine calling of the chosen and the individual's need to follow his own gifts is one of the novel's central conflicts.
Psalm 22:1 ('My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?') is invoked through the novel's most distinctive and disturbing narrative element: Reb Saunders's raising of Danny in near-total silence. Reb Saunders reveals, in a shattering conversation near the end of the novel, that he chose silence as a pedagogical method - a way of cultivating in Danny the neshama (soul) that could endure suffering and bear the sorrows of the community he would serve as tzaddik. 'A man's silence is his suffering,' Reb Saunders says. The silence is his version of Psalm 22's cry - the desolation that opens into authentic spiritual depth.
This use of Psalm 22 connects to the central Jewish theological question the novel addresses: the Holocaust. The novel is set in the immediate post-Holocaust period, and the news of the death camps' extent pervades its final chapters. Psalm 22 - the psalm of forsakenness that ends in praise - is the biblical resource that Potok draws on to explore the question of how a people 'chosen' by God can undergo the Holocaust without losing their faith.
Proverbs 13:24 ('He that spareth his rod hateth his son: but he that loveth him chasteneth him betimes') is invoked in the novel's treatment of Reb Saunders's silence as a form of discipline - a harsh discipline motivated by love. The Proverbs passage has its own dark history in Jewish and Christian pedagogy, and Potok uses it to explore the ambiguity of authoritarian love: the father who genuinely loves his child may discipline him in ways that cause real suffering. Danny's final liberation from his father's silence is not a repudiation of that love but an acceptance of its cost and its purpose.
Ecclesiastes 3:7 ('a time to rend, and a time to sew; a time to keep silence, and a time to speak') provides another layer of meaning for the silence motif. The Preacher's observation that there is a time for silence and a time for speech frames the novel's ethical question: when has Reb Saunders's time of silence ended and Danny's time of speaking begun?
The Talmudic tradition, while not strictly biblical, is the medium through which the biblical texts are transmitted and interpreted in the novel. The chavruta (paired Torah study) between Reuven and Danny - the two young scholars studying Talmud together - is the novel's model of genuine friendship: the meeting of minds in shared engagement with the tradition that has shaped them both.
Author & Context
Chaim Potok (the pen name of Herman Harold Potok, 1929-2002) was born in The Bronx, New York, to Polish immigrant parents. He was raised in an Orthodox Jewish family, educated at Yeshiva University (BA), the Jewish Theological Seminary (MA in Hebrew Literature; ordination as a Conservative rabbi), and the University of Pennsylvania (PhD in philosophy, 1965). He served as a military chaplain in Korea (1956-1957) and later as editor and executive director of the Jewish Publication Society of America. He was also a painter and playwright.
Potok's own intellectual journey - from Orthodox Judaism to Conservative Judaism, from Torah study to Western literature and philosophy, from the Yeshiva world to the secular university - is the direct autobiographical source of The Chosen. Like Reuven, he was shaped by an Orthodox community; like Danny, he was intellectually drawn to secular learning that his community viewed with suspicion. The novel's exploration of the 'core culture collision' between traditional Judaism and secular modernity was his way of understanding his own experience.
The Chosen was written during a period of intense discussion in the American Jewish community about the meaning of the Holocaust and the creation of the State of Israel. Both events are central to the novel's plot: the discovery of the full extent of the Holocaust (represented in the novel through news reports and community response) and the debate about the legitimacy of a Jewish state in Palestine (represented through the conflict between David Malter's Zionism and Reb Saunders's anti-Zionist Hasidism). The theological and political debates of 1944-1947 that the novel depicts are presented with careful historical specificity.
Structure and Argument
The novel is narrated entirely in Reuven's first person, which means that Danny - the more intellectually extraordinary of the two - is always seen from the outside. This narrative choice means that Danny's inner transformation is conveyed through his behavior, his reading list (Freud and experimental psychology, pursued secretly), and the silences - both his father's imposed silence and his own - that punctuate the novel.
The plot is organized around the seasons of the Jewish liturgical year and the historical events of 1944-1947: the baseball game that begins the friendship, the news of the concentration camps, the death of Franklin Roosevelt, the publication of the Nuremberg trials' findings, the UN vote on the partition of Palestine, and the declaration of the State of Israel. Each historical event is a moral and theological test for both fathers and both sons.
The novel's climax is Reb Saunders's conversation with Reuven and Danny, in which he explains the silence and releases Danny from his destiny as tzaddik. This scene is widely regarded as one of the most moving in American Jewish fiction: the inarticulate love of a father who cannot speak his love directly confronting the inarticulate love of a son who cannot confess his departure from his father's path.
Critical Reception
The novel was praised by both Jewish and non-Jewish reviewers for its specificity of cultural detail, its emotional honesty, and its moral seriousness. It introduced many readers to the world of Orthodox and Hasidic Judaism with a fullness and respect that had not previously been available in popular fiction.
Some Orthodox Jewish readers have questioned the accuracy of Potok's portrayal of the Hasidic world, arguing that it is filtered through the lens of the Conservative tradition in which Potok was formed. Some Hasidic readers have objected to the portrayal of Reb Saunders as authoritarian and his silence as cruel, reading the novel as an outsider's misrepresentation of the Hasidic pedagogy of the tzaddik.
Theological Significance
The novel's most lasting theological contribution is its dramatization of the question that faces every religious tradition in modernity: what is to be preserved and what must change when the tradition encounters a changed world? Reb Saunders and David Malter embody two different answers to this question, and the novel refuses to decide definitively between them - both men are shown as sincere, loving, and partly wrong.
Legacy
The novel has been continuously in print and is regularly assigned in American high school and college curricula as an introduction to Jewish culture and to the broader questions of tradition, modernity, and intergenerational conflict. A sequel, The Promise (1969), followed Reuven and Danny into young adulthood. Potok's later novels - My Name Is Asher Lev (1972), In the Beginning (1975), The Book of Lights (1981) - continued to explore the 'core culture collision' that The Chosen first mapped.
Reading Alongside Scripture
Readers should study Deuteronomy 7:6-11 (the election of Israel and its responsibilities), Psalm 22 (the desolation that opens into praise - the theological resource for both the Holocaust and the silence), Proverbs 13:24 and 23:13-14 (discipline and love), Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 (times and seasons), Exodus 19:3-6 (Israel as a kingdom of priests and a holy nation), and the priestly blessing of Numbers 6:24-26 (the blessing that Reb Saunders embodies for his community).
Further Reading
- Edward Abramson, Chaim Potok (1986) - a critical study of Potok's fiction that places The Chosen in the context of his entire literary project and his engagement with Jewish-American identity. - Gershom Scholem, Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (1941) - the standard scholarly account of Hasidism and Jewish mysticism, providing the historical background for the Hasidic world Potok depicts. - Irving Howe, World of Our Fathers (1976) - a comprehensive account of the Eastern European Jewish immigrant culture in New York City that provides the social and historical context for The Chosen.