“Tzadiks”, a Yiddish word meaning “wise” persons, are rare in society. To imagine the impact of such a person in society is to imagine a modern day Jesus or a Theodore Bikel portraying the leader of a Hassidic group in Brooklyn during World War II. “The Chosen” is not all about a tzadik, Rabbi Saunders, father of one of the two protagonists in the story. Theodore Bikel brings his persona of a genuine European Jewish actor/activist whose age and makeup suggested a human attempt to play the role imposed by gift, time and place on certain individuals.
A whole way of life of thousands of the millions liquidated during the Holocaust in Europe during World War II was destroyed. The subject of the play was, then, Jews. The whole theater in Coconut Grove was obviously filled with elderly Jews and this is the point of my writing this essay about a problem I have with dealing with very wise Jews. Two worlds of Jewry resided in that theater. One, which disappeared from Eastern Europe, was where the “Shtetle” characterized little changed small town life in Poland, Russia, Lithuania and Rumania. The other, a mirror of the people but not the civilization, was the elderly American audience. The culture of Hassidim sketched by the play was shared to the extent that the words were recognized and the story remembered from tales heard long ago.
It is hard for most of us to live with someone who is wise and who perplexes us with special understanding of the problems all of us face and who tell us the meaning of life with difficulty. We do not understand most subtleties and the tzadik does not make it easier by bringing higher and more important themes before us while we are trying to explain for ourselves what we really want to become. The two young boys who meet each other in the story exchange roles envisioned by fathers who know more about their antecedents than can fit into the frames the boys provide. They have to be themselves and really do not disappoint their fathers for they are brilliant and will carry on the genius of their people into new times.
What concerned me most was the grief I felt in knowing that this group of playgoers will be the last to fully appreciate a story that will soon be irrelevant and not understood. This group will be gone and their children and their children’s children will have no idea about the genius of a Potok who wrote the story or the actors who recreated the sense of that time when the play was set. The time, which this story commemorates, will be lost and no one will be here who can fully understand the tragedy of the loss.
There are so few tzadiks and we are so many and we understand so little.