REUVEN
I’d hate that. To not have my father talk to me. .
Reuven is destined for his own academic career, Danny is destined to follow in his father’s footsteps as a leader in the Hasidic community, and the weight of these opposing destinies draws the boys together, while the opposing philosophies of their fathers threaten to tear them apart. Danny tries to illuminate Reuven to the power of orthodox faith, explains how the founder of Hasidism in the 1700s believed that
DANNY
To be a good Jew didn’t depend on how much you knew, but on how much you felt. .
but we eventually learn that Danny secretly dreams of attending a secular university in order to study psychology and psychoanalysis. Meanwhile, Reuven finds himself drawn to the deeper mystery of faith — his own dream will be to attend rabbinical school — and yet he is saddened to see Danny’s struggle with the pain of his silent relationship with his distant father, the brewing tension between them over Danny’s yearning for a life beyond their figurative Hasidic walls. By the end of the movie, Reb Saunders gives in: He summons Reuven for a talk (Reuven is surprised by this until his own father tells him Reb Saunders actually wants to talk to Danny, through Reuven) and tries to explain, with Danny present, that he and his son were close when Danny was a child, yes, but as Danny got older, Reb Saunders felt his son’s intellect was developing to the detriment of his compassion and so decided he must raise him
REB SAUNDERS
through the wisdom and the pain of silence. To teach him other people are alone, are suffering, other people are carrying pain. And he learned through the wisdom and the pain of silence that a mind without a heart is nothing.
Reuven, clearly disapproving, does not respond, so Reb Saunders asks — still of Reuven, not Danny:
REB SAUNDERS
So, you think I’ve been cruel? Maybe. But I don’t think so, because my beloved Daniel has learned. So, let him go. .
And he finally turns to Danny:
REB SAUNDERS
Daniel? You heard?
DANIEL
Yes, Papa.
REB SAUNDERS
And when you go forth into the world, you will be proud, and go forth as a Jew? And you will keep the commandments of a Jew?
Daniel begins to cry.
REB SAUNDERS
Maybe you should forgive me. For not being a wiser father. .
They embrace; now both of them are crying, and I am crying, too, for it is so moving to watch this stern patriarch soften, express weakness and doubt, accept Danny for who he really is, to share in this loving reconciliation between parent and child.
I am also moved during the scene when the United Nations votes Yes on a resolution to support the state of Israel, the first step in the actual creation of a Jewish homeland; Reuven and his father, listening to the news on the radio, are overwhelmed with joy, and although I consider myself shamefully apolitical, when the newscaster announces, “We have a State! After two thousand years of exile, we can go home again!” I cry, too; I have never felt “exiled,” and yet, in some odd way it feels good to have a “home,” to know a home exists. I remember that sixth-grade debate, and I am embarrassed not just by my eleven-year-old’s lack of understanding, but also by my lack of interest in even trying to understand, my lack of curiosity about the world, and I am surprised and grateful I feel so deeply about this, now.
But watching this film, I am finally — it’s about time, I am almost eighteen years old — awakened to the gender politics at play in these Jewish lives, a theme almost invisibly woven throughout the films I have seen. In the end, Golde was not really in charge of anything beyond what kind of soup to make; she had no say in the tearing apart of her family, could only cower and weep before Tevye’s decisive rage. Her household of strong-willed daughters, like Moses’s giggling sisters-in-law, or his own wife, Sephora, were kept far too busy cooking and cleaning—And who does Mama teach, to mend and tend and fix? Preparing me to marry whomever Papa picks? The daughters, the daughters! — to play any role in life beyond nurturing mother or supportive wife. The women of Christ’s Judea are backup singers, backup dancers, but other than Mary Magdalene (who was most likely not a prostitute, but a woman who left her husband and children to follow a different path in life), they are virtually absent from any significant event; all these women peer through curtains at the goings-on during temple services, are hidden away in the kitchen while the men celebrate the Sabbath with food and drink and intellectual debate, they wait, freezing, by the side of a road for the men to finish their prayers. At a wedding in The Chosen, the women are not merely separated by a rope, as in Fiddler, but by an actual wall, lest there be, what? Contamination? Temptation? Separate is not equal. Danny’s mother (no wig, but her head always so snugly wrapped in a white scarf it looks as though she’s undergoing chemo) is only ever seen cooking or cleaning or serving tea. At some point, Reuven begins crushing on Danny’s younger sister Shaindel, teasing her about reading a book:
REUVEN
Aren’t you supposed to be helping your mother in the kitchen?
SHAINDEL
Is that all you think a girl does? Cook and clean?
and of course he thinks that; we haven’t seen a woman in this entire movie do anything else. Danny, feeling he must dash Reuven’s hopes of a relationship with Shaindel, explains her marriage has been arranged since she was just a child, to the son of another rabbi:
REUVEN
Does she like him?
DANNY
I don’t know. I’ve never asked her.
Because it is not, of course, of any consequence how she — or Tzeitel, or Mary M. — might feel (despite the Hasidic honoring of feeling) or might wish to live her own life, not in the face of a Jewish Tradition! of patriarchal hierarchy, one that relies on those man-written religious texts as supporting evidence of the will of God.
This film is not intended to be a story of women, or of mothers and daughters. But as in other cinematic depictions of the lives of Jewish women, in their very invisibility, or in the visibility of their home-and-hearth roles, their story is still being shown. And it is a story of oppression-within-oppression, of limitation and squandered potential, one that leaves me with a sour undertaste, but also a relief, a gratitude that in my own irreligious, very un-Jewish upbringing, I was spared all that. I am glad to be separate from these “true brethren” of mine.