Editor’s (admin’s) note. I began this post a couple of weeks ago, and I was just about finished with it when I went in the hospital for a week. During that time, I did a lot of reading. (What else can you do when you’re strapped to a hospital bed?) So I lost my train of thought. After I was discharged, I picked it up again and completed it. If it seems a little disconnected in places, that’s why.
While I had no intention of doing any such thing at the time, I charted a new direction in my spiritual journey during the 1960s. I was an English major at the University of Tennessee. an unlikely setting for a spiritual renewal; UT-Knoxville was a big state university better known for its football teams and tailgate parties than any inclination toward theological and ethical scholarship. And my journey began not so much in my lit classes as in the bars and off-campus bookstores on Cumberland Avenue. It was as much a part of the Zeitgeist as long hair, wire-rimmed glasses, the Beatles and Hari Krishnas handing out leaflets at airports.
But my gurus were midlist Jewish novelists from Chicago and New York City. It’s hard to look back now and realize how much of pop culture in the 60s and 70s was Jewish, from borscht belt comedians like George Burns and Jack Benny to musicians like Leonard Bernstein and Gershwin (Janis Joplin’s cover of “Summertime” was all over the charts in 1968). Movies like The Pawnbroker, starring Rod Steiger, were beginning to show the horrors of the Holocaust, and, as an aspiring English teacher, I felt duty-bound to keep up with authors like Saul Bellow, Allen Ginsberg, Bernard Malamud and Philip Roth (this was before Portnoy’s Complaint, I should add).
The novels of Chaim Potok especially spoke to me. In an extended 1978 meditation on Jewish history titled Wanderings, Potok said this literary flowering reflected the experience of Jews who fled the Russian Empire, Poland and Germany during the early 20th century, and it profoundly influenced American literature in general:
The children and grandchildren of that generation of eastern European Jews now participate in and help mold the Jewish and secular cultures of the land. With little sense of Jewish self-consciousness, many of these Jews are actively creating much of what is today American culture.
Certainly they were part of the secular culture when I switched my major from history to English in the mid-60s. Not only were their novels entertaining; they reflected ethical standards I had absorbed in the church of my childhood but found lacking in the popular Christianity of the day. Jewish ethics — aptly summed up by Wikipedia as “[k]indness to the needy, benevolence, faith, compassion for the suffering, a peace-loving disposition, and a truly humble and contrite spirit” — were just plain ethics, as far as I was concerned, and I found them in the literature of the day.
Potok was born in New York City to survivors of the antisemitic pogroms in Poland after World War I. He was raised in an Orthodox household; studied at an Orthodox yeshiva high school, went on to Yeshiva University and the Jewish Theological Seminary; was ordained a Conservative rabbi; and later went for a secular PhD in literature at Penn, where he later taught. His novels tend to be autobiographical, focusing on how his characters resolve the conflict between religious and secular values. As a budding academic, I found them especially relatable.
One, The Chosen, tells the story of a young Hasidic Jew who opts for a secular grad school instead of following his father’s footsteps as a Hadidic rebbe, a hereditary spiritual leader. (The novel was later adapted as a movie; see video clip above. Better than most movie adaptations, it captures the spirit of the novel, at least the parts that drew me in. ) The Chosen, book and movie, explores the tension between the ultra-Orthodox Hasidic community and the more middle-of-the-road Conservative tradition. Another novel, My Name is Asher Lev. came out about the time I was writing my dissertation, and I’m sure that’s when I picked it up in a bookstore down on Cumberland.
Asher Lev is about a gifted young painter whose art puts him in conflict with his father and their Hasidic community in Brooklyn. The arts, and painting in particular, were considered at best frivolous and at worst, as when Asher exhibits a “Brooklyn Crucifixion,” as blasphemous. My religious background was nowhere near as strict — mine was small-town, Southern, “low-church” Episcopalian — but Potok’s was exotic enough to be interesting. And parts of it were very familiar.
For one thing, my father’s family was from Brooklyn. (A Jewish friend in grad school once joked the Garden of Eden must have been the Brooklyn Botanical Garden, because everybody’s family — “and I mean everybody!” — was from Brooklyn.) More important, the underlying conflict between religion and secular, academic values was more than famiiar. In a mild-mannered, mainline Protestant way, I had lived it.
Wesley Hill, an associate prof at Trinity School for Ministry in Ambridge, Pa., and deacon in Pittsburgh’s Trinity Episcopal Cathedral, went through a similar evolution, although from a different perspective. In an appreciation of Potok in Plough (a Bruderhof magazine), he says:
Like Potok’s characters, I went away to university and experienced something of the wider world beyond the confines of my Baptist, Republican childhood. I now make use of historical critical tools in my biblical scholarship and seminary classroom, and I am now a member of the Episcopal Church, which, to my childhood eyes, was barely a church at all.
In other words, Hill winds up more or less where I started out. The Episcopal Church of my childhood, as I recall it now, was benign enough but somewhat distant from my daily life, especially as a teenager with Beatnik tendencies. I rebelled against the church — that’s what you did if you’d read a smattering of Ginsburg and Keroauc — but I reacted more to the popular culture of the day than to my own upbringing. And I liked what I saw in Chaim Potok.
At least in Tennessee during the 1950s and 60s, Christians were defined in the popular culture by what they were against, drinking, dancing, playing cards, rock’n’roll, evolution, the scientific method — the list went on. By those criteria, Hill has it about right: My church — the “whiskey-palians” — hardly qualified as a church at all. I left it as soon as I went off to college, not in protest so much as a general sense the churches — none of them — had much to offer I didn’t already know. In comparison, the rabbinic texts Potok’s characters wrestled with seemed like religion for grownups. Of all the fiction I read in grad school, Potok’s has stayed with me.
There was something else that reached out to me. One of Potok’s themes is how to integrate the values of “a forbiddingly strict and insular realm of piety,” in Hill’s words, into ” wider secular culture that has little use for it — and how to allow that world’s ideals to challenge the way they practice their Judaism, too” Substitute Christianity for Judaism, and there you have it.
After grad school, my spiritual life went on the back burner. (Is that metaphor kosher? Or is it too much of a stretch?) I went into the newspaper business instead of academia, and I didn’t have much time to read. (Faulkner once said you either have time to read or to write, but you don’t have time to do both.) Nor did I work up much interest in religion. Reading about the antics of Jerry Fallwell, Jimmy Lee Swaggart, Pat Robertson and the self-proclaimed “Christian Right” was more than enough for me, thank you.
So it went for more years than I can count. I moved to Illinois, went into politics — briefly! — in the 1990s and finally got a job teaching English. Every so often I’d come across a book of Potok’s at Barnes & Noble, and I remember reading “The Jewbird” by Bernard Malamud, a very funny, deeply thought-provoking story in a freshman lit anthology. I highly recommend it — it’s available online.) My attitudes toward religion softened after I joined a church — Lutheran, for family reasons, instead of Episcopal, but liturgically and theologically very similar — and got a full-time tenure track teaching gig at a Catholic liberal arts college.
When I retired after 20 years, I retired and started presenting historical papers on the old Swedish-American Augustana Lutheran Synod in Chicago and the upper Mississippi Valley. I also started reading theology and became a Dominican lay associate. Not to put too fine a point on it, I developed into kind of an ecumenical mutt. In 2023, when I was recovering from chemotherapy and cancer surgery, I rediscovered Chaim Potok. By summer’s end, I was ordering books from an online bookseller and working my way through his backlist. He’s one of the few fiction writers I go back and reread.
LATER (Jan. 23). That’s as far as I got with this post before I was admitted to HSHS St. John’s Hospital a week ago, the evening of of Jan. 16. Turned out I was in the hospital for observation till yesterday. So let’s just say I lost my train of thought.
So why don’t I just tack on a conclusion and click “send” (or “publish” in WordPress)? Luckily, I had a conclusion in mind. The post was turning into more of a spiritual autobiography than I’d planned on anyway. Time to wrap it up! Luckily enough, I had a scratch outline and I knew where I wanted to go with it.
Why don’t I just quote the scratch outline? I can fill in the rough spots as needed. (You can tell I’ve been in a hospital, can’t you? At least I didn’t say “PRN” for as needed.) I wrote:
- davita’s harp — other orthodoxies (CPUSA)
- ethics — shema & lev 19
- where does this leave me?
Davita’s Harp is one of Potok’s later novels. Its title character is a teenge girl, a “red diaper baby” who discovers her Jewish heritage after her devoted Communist father dies in the Spanish Civil War; religion isn’t the only orthodoxy Potok’s young protagonists struggle to overcome. My cryptic note about ethics refers to the Shema Yisrael, the prayer in Deuteronomy that begins “Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one,” and the command in Leviticus, “Love your neighbor as yourself.”
Both passages are fundamental to Judaism and Christianity alike, and I heard them combined in Jesus of Nazareth’s Great Commandment in the Episcopal Church of my growing-up years. Here it is in the language of the 1928 prayer book:
THOU shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind. This is the first and great commandment. And the second is like unto it; Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself. On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets.
So where does this leave me? That may be the most important thing I learned growing up in the church. At least it’s the one I remember most clearly (I was kind of a snotty kid, and my only memory of confirmation class is asking about the wives of King Henry VIII of England). Love thy neighbor. It stayed with me. As did a table grace. Bless this food to our use, and us to thy service. And make us ever mindful of the needs of others. We didn’t use words like social justice in the 1950s. At least not in my hearing. But I think we tried to live it.
And, somehow, the concept stuck. Even when I was in full-scale rebellion against organized religion as a grad student and newly minted PhD, I found it reflected on every page of writers like Chaim Potok. In his survey of mid-century lit for the My Jewish Learning website, freelance writer and film critic Saul Austerlitz says they benefitted from the same emerging diversity as white Southern novelist William Faulkner and Black writers like James Baldwin and Richard Wright.
Not only did many of them come out against the Vietnam War — an important qualification for me at the time — but, in Austerlitz’ words, they “were devoted to simultaneously embracing, and rebelling against” midcentury American culture. “In so doing, they made Jewish characters, Jewish themes, and Jewish history part and parcel of the American story.”
And that made them part of my story too.
Links and Citations
Saul Austerlitz, Mainstream American Jewish Literature, My Jewish Learning, 70 Faces Media https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/mainstream-american-jewish-literature/.
Wesley Hill, “Chaim Potok’s Wandering Jews: Holding to Faith in a Critical Age,” Plough, Aug. 7, 2020 https://www.plough.com/en/topics/culture/literature/chaim-potoks-wandering-jews.
Bernard Malamud, “The Jewbird, “The Reporter on April 11, 1963, rpt. https://images.shulcloud.com/3435/uploads/Pictures/TheJewbirdbyBernardMalamud.pdf.
The Order for Holy Communion, 1928 Book of Common Prayer, Saint Luke’s Anglican Church, Sedona Ariz. https://www.episcopalnet.org/1928bcp/communion.html.
Chaim Potok, Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1978): 509.
[Revised and uplinked, Jan. 25, 2025]
Ordinary Time 