The Chosen is a beautiful book about Jewishness, fathers and sons, and adapting to modernity. In 1944, Reuven is a 15 year old orthodox Jew growing up in Brooklyn, playing baseball, following World War 2, studying the Talmud with his father. A baseball game with the Hasidic team leaves Reuven wounded by David Saunders, son of a powerful Hasidic rabbi, and a polymathic genius. A wound turns to an unlikely friendship between two brilliant intellectual youths, as Reuven studies mathematical logic, David studies Freud, and they both continue to study the Talmud. The tension of the novel is in David’s destiny. He is expected to continue his family’s rabbinical dynasty, but wants to become a psychologist. To make matters worse, David is being “raised in silence”, his father the Rabbi will only discuss theological matters with him, and nothing so mundane as what his son wants to be when he grows up.

The plot arcs and curls, with the Zionist question interrupting Reuven and David’s friendship as they go to college, and Rueven caring for his own brilliant father’s failing health, before the Rabbi makes it clear that his son can find his own path.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the Torah, and the stories of Abraham and Isaac, Isaac and Jacob, Jacob and Joseph, the generational chains of sacrifice and blessing and brother against brother. Being “raised in silence” seems a special cruelty, but is also an apt metaphor for the (Reform) Jewish experience. God, after all, does not talk directly to us. Over all, a deep and moving little book about adulthood and the necessity and limits of faith.