Literal Sight In Chai Potok's The Chosen

Literal sight with the human eye and ideas about enlightenment and learning overlap in meaningful ways in The Chosen. Describe one way in which Reuven’s eyes were opened in Ch. 3-5, and briefly relate a similar experience in your life when you began to see the world anew.

The secret to life is that people change people. When a person meets a new person, they experience life through the eyes of another, learning more about the world, and in turn themselves through this lens. Chai Potok’s The Chosen, establishes this recurring theme from the beginning of the novel. Reuven has grown up accustomed to the stereotype of hating the Hasidic, who were a different type of Jew. Then Reuven meets Danny and begins to talk with him:

I looked at him, and suddenly I had the feeling that everything around me was out of focus. There was Danny Saunders, sitting in the hospital dressed in his Hasidic-style clothes…He was dressed like a Hasid, but didn’t sound like one. Also, yesterday I had hated him; now we were calling each other by our first names…I

Personally, I have had many an opportunity to be set outside my comfort zone. With my mother being a therapist and a professor, she constantly took me to conferences. Therefore, my eyes have always taken in all the world has to offer. But, this summer’s conference was even more so different. The Justice Conference in Chicago, had the theme of Love Thy Neighbor. Throughout the conference, they bent and twisted the different stereotypes set in our minds as to who society and the church claim our neighbor to be. Finally, on the last day, there was a twenty-one-year-old Syrian refugee from Aleppo named Mariela Shaker. Her story depicted the graphic violence and struggle going on no more than a plane trip away from the US. Luckily, her family remains unharmed {though still in Aleppo}, but that is not the story for most