Lively Jewish Arts and Culture

The ChosenSo I saw The Chosen last night at Writers Theatre, outside Chicago. It was a decent production, very true to the book as I remember it. Nevertheless it bothered me. It was very good at showing observant Jews beyond their stereotypes.

But it didn't seem to have a point of view. It was so busy being respectful it didn't have an edge. It had a narrator, Chaim Potok I suppose-the older Reuven Malter, and he was very pleasant and the rabbi we all wish we had. He was warm, thoughtful, animated, seemingly easy to get along with. And the set seemed to be in the rabbi's study, so it had a comfortable panelled wood feeling about it. But gone was the time period it was set in, WWII (though it came up enough), economic difficulties, and the desire to assimilate (the character from the book, in the hospital, who loses an eye and who is a wise-cracking secular Jew, doesn't make an appearance) were faint at best. The play lacked the bite and anguish of the times because it was mostly about Jews getting along with each other.

Recently Maurice Sendak was interviewed on the radio show "Fresh Air" and he talked about how that time period was so depressing for his family and other Jewish families he knew. The War made everything feel like Jews had to disappear and their homelife was filled with guilt, pain, and suffering.

Nevertheless the play was a well directed and acted production and the things it got right, it got right very well -- giving a good sense of the importance of study for Jewish knowledge, observance, and tradition; the problems of fathers expecting too much from their children; the friendship of the two boys and how they supported each other like a Jonathan and David -- all done at a high level.

Of course it exhibited a strong Jewish sensibility, not only in its content, but through the staging of the narrator, time and space conflation, and scenes that were both about Talmudic interpretation and written as though they were intertextual midrash. For instance the use of the narrator and how he stepped in and out of the story, the story of the baseball game, the scene with numerology that leads to deeper spiritual meanings in the texts, the mystical use of silence, and the singing of Chasidic niggunim, all lent itself to a very strong Jewish aesthetic.

When Chaim Potok wrote the book, The Chosen, it was the first novel that depicted religious Jews positively and showed their drive to succeed in America and their desire to explore pathways to faith. It was revolutionary and perhaps still revolutionary today because it shows that faith and learning, whether religious learning or secular learning, can live together even if they sometimes make each other uncomfortable. Today in the age of political false messiahs and fundamentalist creationism, The Chosen may still have something to teach us.