A Shattered Silence in The Chosen Essay Example

A Shattered Silence in The Chosen Essay Example A Shattered Silence in The Chosen Essay A Shattered Silence in The Chosen Essay Essay Topic: The Chosen Nobody likes to be given the â€Å"silent treatment†, but imagine having all of your young life be a long and grueling silence; irritation and aggravation are natural reactions to when one is ignored or has been given a response of silence. Danny is distraught, he beats himself up over why his father acts the way he does, but he still has the mind to believe that it is for a reason. Throughout his life, Danny has been given the response of his father’s silence, a mystery to many, for any situation besides the study of the Torah. These long silences from Danny’s father is strange and misunderstood by everyone who interprets it, but Danny soon learns why his father has raised him in a silent tornado of confusion, pain, and misery. Throughout Chaim Potok’s The Chosen, he illustrates how Danny and Reuven both struggle with silence in many ways and how it is a mystery to the both, brings pain into their lives, and the way silence makes one realize who they real ly are. The silence brings confusion into the large array of emotions, which the characters of The Chosen all have experienced in their lifetime making it a mystery of it being good or bad. We start off this novel with the unknown silence between Danny and Reuven; how they â€Å"lived within five blocks of each other and neither of us knew of the existence of the other.† (11) This gives the reader a way to understand not only the silence between the two boys, but the silence that Hasidic Jews and non-Hasidic Jews share due to their varying ideas and interpretation of the Torah. The boys share the silence of being unaware of each other because of these beliefs. Chaim Potok shows this confusion through Reuven: â€Å"Im all mixed up about you. Im not trying to be funny or anything. I really am mixed up about you. You look like a Hasid, but you dont sound like one. You dont sound like what my father says Hasidim are supposed to sound like† (86). Reuven is in silence for who Hasidi