The Chosen

Introduction

Chaim Potok's The Chosen reveals a succession of conflicts. All of these conflicts center around each character's deeply rooted sense of righteousness and faith. The profound and meaningful relationships between fathers, sons, and friends is both nourished and challenged by Judaism, which is the foundation of this deeply religious book (Walden, pp.74). The Chosen, Potok discovered a cultural dynamic, a "culture war."

Discussion

The Chosen, is about two boys: Danny Saunders, a Hasidic rabbi's son, and Reuven Malter, whose Orthodox family takes a more rational, less mystical approach to religious issues and exhibits a more loving bond between father and son (Walden, pp.74).

Danny Saunders, a Hasidic Jew who is the age of Reuven, is a brilliant student who feels trapped by a legacy of their community responsibility (Walden, p.74). Because he is the son of a tzaddik, a character who acts as a bridge between his people and God, Danny, is expected to take over his father's place. However, making the strict religious and cultural constraints on Danny were there to pursue their interests, especially Sigmund Freud and the study of psychology even more angry with their own, in secret. In addition, due to eternal silence of his father, except when, the Talmud study every Shabbat, Danny, no real outlet of his feelings until he Reuben, an intellectual hunger and the desire for friendship befriends shares. If, as Reuven Malter, a teenager at the time of opening of the novel, an Orthodox Jew and the son of a scholar, and a widower named David Malter (starlight, p 57). Although there to explore their religion, Reuven, like his father commits, the mood in their faith with logic, in other areas of study, more broadly, to find the laws in the Talmud (an idea favored by Potok himself, from Orthodox Judaism, conservatives) (Walden, p.74 converted). By integrating non-traditional methods, but is an observer of the commandments is set Reuven assimilated as a child of America, especially in contrast to Danny Saunders, consisting almost exclusively in the isolated bubble of his Hasidic community. Ruben is the vehicle through the reader into the secret world of the Hasidim and likeable young man's curiosity, judgment, wonder and admiration not only for the points of fear among the various sects of the Jews to explain, but often were exposed in the reader emotions to the world for the first time (Stampfer, pp. 494-98).

In The Chosen, set in the urban Crown Heights and Williamsburg sections of Brooklyn, a baseball game between an Orthodox team and a Hasidic team brings together Danny Saunders, son of the Hasidic Rebbe (and thus heir to his father's position), and Reuven Malter, son of a Zionist activist modern Orthodox talmudic textual scholar. Danny, elevating the game to a holy war, purposely hits Reuven with a ball, sending him to the hospital. At the hospital, Danny visits Reuven and makes amends. They become friends, which is frowned on by the Rebbe, who, believing that there is a danger that his son's soul might be ...