The Chosen

If you want to know a lot about the Hasidic Jew and the Orthodox Jew, the novel by Chaim Potok will do it.  I learned a lot I did not know.  It is a short novel too.  What strikes me is that the Hasid and the Orthodox study Torah, and their Talmud commentary, not just with memorization but with argument back and forth between teacher and student or parent and child, so that the child can learn to defend what they believe.  Catholics don't do this.  We send children to Catholic schools and they are told what is true, but no arguments to defend it, no one taking an opposing or different view to make the student defend what they are told is the truth.  Plus, we don't read the bible.  So it is not hard for someone of a different faith, to argue us out of our view, by asking questions the Catholic cannot answer.  I don't think that Catholics so much leave the faith, as they never got it in the first place.  It never became theirs.  It was always the teacher's or the parent's.  We are not very good at arguing our faith or evangelizing because we did not come to believe in that method.  Anyway, "The Chosen" is a good novel.  It takes place in Brooklyn too.