The Chosen

by

Chaim Potok

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Judaism and Tradition Theme Analysis

Themes and Colors
Judaism and Tradition Theme Icon
Choosing and Being Chosen Theme Icon
Fathers, Sons, and Rebellion Theme Icon
Friendship Theme Icon
World War II and War Theme Icon
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in The Chosen, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
Judaism and Tradition Theme Icon

The Chosen takes place in an Orthodox community in Williamsburg, Brooklyn that is shaped by Jewish faith and customs. Chaim Potok highlights the influence of Judaism on his characters by filling his novel with references to and quotes from the Talmud (a book of Jewish laws and lessons) and the Torah. Reuven Malter and Danny Saunders, although they are teenage boys, think more about complex interpretations of Jewish texts than they do about girls, sports, or general adolescent preoccupations. They are both shaped by the expectations and values of their families and neighbors in their isolated yet highly educated community.

The Chosen is not simply a Jewish book for Jewish readers, although it was the first widely read and popular book of its time to depict such a world. The people in this community are clearly separated from the rest of America, but Potok takes care to demonstrate that many of their struggles are the same. Danny fights against his family’s expectations in order to follow his own dream for his own life. As Danny works to find his place in the world he has to struggle with distant treatment from his father (based on Hasidic tradition) and the knowledge of the complex and often conflicted history of the Hasidic sect. In other words he has a complicated relationship with his dad and a complex cultural past, which he learns about as he ages. Taken out of a Jewish context, his path is like that of many other smart ambitious Americans, or any Faulkner novel.

The Chosen also focuses on the thin line between different sorts of Jewish faith, and between piousness and fanaticism in both religion and life. Hasidic Judaism, with its strict rules based on hundreds of years of tradition, demonstrates how close piety can be to fanaticism. Reb Saunders and his family and followers are deeply devout but there are costs to their religious and cultural inflexibility. Danny has to live through years of silence from his father because of a Hasidic tradition, and Reb Saunders breaks apart Danny and Reuven’s friendship for two years again because of his religious beliefs. David Malter, orthodox but not Hasidic, provides an example of an equally pious yet more open-minded father figure, yet he also nearly works himself to death because of a fanatical obsession with Zionism (the founding of a Jewish state in Palestine). The Chosen’s geographically and culturally narrow focus on Jews in Brooklyn leads the reader towards larger questions about a blind obsession with the rules of tradition and religion.

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Judaism and Tradition ThemeTracker

The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Judaism and Tradition appears in each chapter of The Chosen. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Judaism and Tradition Quotes in The Chosen

Below you will find the important quotes in The Chosen related to the theme of Judaism and Tradition.
Chapter 1 Quotes

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.

Related Characters: David Malter
Page Number: 24
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 2 Quotes

“Things are always what they seem to be, Reuven? Since when?”

Related Characters: David Malter (speaker), Reuven Malter
Related Symbols: Eyes and Blindness
Page Number: 50
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 6 Quotes

“We are like other people, Reuven. We do not survive disaster merely by appealing to invisible powers. We are as easily degraded as any other people.”

Related Characters: David Malter (speaker), Reuven Malter
Page Number: 103
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 7 Quotes

“I feel like a cowboy surrounded by Indians.”

Related Characters: Reuven Malter (speaker)
Page Number: 122
Explanation and Analysis:

I didn’t agree at all with his notions of the world as being contaminated. Albert Einstein is part of the world, I told myself. President Roosevelt is part of the world. The millions of soldiers fighting Hitler are part of the world.

Related Characters: Reuven Malter (speaker), Reb Isaac Saunders
Page Number: 135
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 8 Quotes

“Master of the Universe,” he almost chanted. “you gave me a brilliant son, and I have thanked you for him a million times. But you had to make him so brilliant?

Related Characters: Reb Isaac Saunders (speaker), Danny Saunders, Reb Isaac Saunders
Page Number: 167
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 9 Quotes

A spider had spun a web across the corner of the upper rail, and there was a housefly trapped in it now, its wings spread-eagled, glued to the strands of the web, its legs flaying the air frantically.

Related Characters: Reuven Malter (speaker)
Page Number: 173
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 11 Quotes

“The world kills us,” he said quietly.” Ah, how the world kills us.” … “The world drinks our blood,” Reb Saunders said. “How the world makes us suffer. It is the will of God. We must accept the will of God.”

Related Characters: Reb Isaac Saunders (speaker)
Page Number: 190
Explanation and Analysis:

“I am not satisfied with it either, Reuven. We cannot wait for God. If there is an answer, we must make it ourselves.”

Related Characters: David Malter (speaker), Reuven Malter
Page Number: 191
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 13 Quotes

“What followers of a genius aren’t dogmatic, for heaven’s sake? The Freudians have plenty to be dogmatic about. Freud was a genius.”

Related Characters: Danny Saunders (speaker)
Page Number: 211
Explanation and Analysis:

“It is beginning to happen everywhere in America. A religious renaissance some call it.”

Related Characters: David Malter (speaker)
Page Number: 219
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 14 Quotes

The death of six million Jews had finally been given meaning, he kept saying over and over again. It had happened. After two thousand years, it had finally happened. We were a people again, with our own land. We were a blessed generation. We had been give the opportunity to see the creation of the Jewish state.

Related Characters: Reuven Malter (speaker), David Malter
Page Number: 241
Explanation and Analysis:
Chapter 18 Quotes

“… words are cruel, words play tricks, they distort what is in the heart, they conceal the heart, the heart speaks through silence. One learns of the pain of others by suffering one’s own pain, he would say, by turning inside oneself, by finding one’s soul.”

Related Characters: Reb Isaac Saunders (speaker)
Page Number: 284
Explanation and Analysis: