The chosen people and their covenantal responsibility

The chosen people and their covenantal responsibility is a religious ideal that gives Jewish identity the dignity of royalty while binding its members to the laws of the Torah. In Devorah’s childhood, Zeidy teaches this ideal through clothing, ritual meals, and stories of Sinai. As she grows more questioning, however, she distinguishes the ancient covenant with God from a later pledge to a particular community, asking why obligations made by others should govern her life.

Royal Identity and Everyday Conduct

Zeidy frames Jewish chosenness as a standard of conduct rather than a privilege without demands. He tells Devorah to bear suffering with dignity, describing chosenness as a garment more royal than anything sold in a dry-goods store. The image answers the visible inequalities of her childhood: she wears hand-me-down clothes while other girls follow changing fashions. Religious dignity, in Zeidy’s account, is not measured by fashionable appearance or material comfort.

He develops the image through the idea that every Jewish girl is a daughter of a king. If a king’s daughter would avoid embarrassing her father by wearing torn or dirty clothes, he argues, the Jewish people should behave in a manner worthy of their Father in heaven. Their conduct matters because the world is watching them as representatives of divine majesty. The metaphor turns ordinary behavior into a public expression of covenant: a person’s choices reflect not only on herself but on the people and God to whom she belongs.

The lesson does not settle easily against Devorah’s family circumstances. She privately imagines asking whether a daughter should imitate her biological father, who walks aimlessly in stained shirts and talks to himself, but she holds back because she does not want to cause Zeidy further pain. Zeidy’s royal ideal thus meets a family life marked by distress, making the language of dignity both a source of aspiration and a difficult measure to live by. His own history also gives the teaching weight: he survived the war hoping to bring Jewish children into the world to replace those who had been lost.

Sinai and the Obligation to Observe

Shavuos gives the covenant a recurring, domestic form. The family eats cheesecake and cheese-filled kreplach, waits half an hour, and then has a meat meal. Zeidy explains the separation of milk and meat as one of the sacrifices involved in accepting the Torah. The sequence of dishes makes religious obligation tangible: a commitment remembered at the level of sacred history is observed at the family table.

Zeidy teaches that every Jewish soul was present when the Torah was given at Mount Sinai. In this account, the Jews accepted responsibility before knowing every consequence; their willingness to act before hearing all the details is a model of faith. Because every soul shared in that commitment, Zeidy says, rejecting any law would make a person a hypocrite. The covenant is therefore not merely an inherited story or a source of communal pride. It is a binding agreement that, in his interpretation, leaves no Jewish soul exempt.

Devorah tests this teaching inwardly. She wonders how old her soul must be to have stood at Sinai and whether it agreed because it wanted to fit in. Her uncertainty shifts the question from whether the covenant exists to what meaningful consent can be when the commitment is said to precede conscious memory. The same account that gives her a place in a sacred history also makes her question whether belonging and agreement are truly the same thing.

A Later Pledge and Inherited Rules

Devorah draws a distinction between the covenant made with God at Sinai and Zeidy’s pledge to the Satmar Rebbe. When the Rebbe announced plans for a community in Williamsburg, Zeidy pledged allegiance before knowing what those plans would entail. In Devorah’s understanding, that decision bound not only Zeidy but his family and future generations to the community.

The pledge also represents a change from the family’s earlier life in Europe. Devorah recalls that her family had not lived as extremists there: they were educated, had homes with wooden floors and Persian carpets, and traveled freely across the Continent. She attributes the later restrictions on English books and the color red to the Rebbe’s decision to isolate the community from the outside. This history makes communal practice appear not as an unchanged expression of the Sinai covenant, but as a later set of rules with its own history and authorities.

Devorah asks why she remains obligated to follow rules if she was not present when the community agreement was made. She also wonders whether Zeidy can expect her to follow the Rebbe as blindly as he did when, in her account, he was frightened and lonely and had nowhere else that felt safe. The contrast does not erase Zeidy’s faith; it exposes the difference between his pledge and the one he invokes at Sinai. For Devorah, the moral force of an inherited commitment depends in part on how it was made and whose consent it can claim.

Language, Education, and the Boundaries of Belonging

The boundary around chosen identity is enforced through language and reading as well as ritual. Zeidy warns that English can poison the soul and insists that Devorah speak Yiddish, which he regards as the language of her ancestors and of religious purity. Devorah notices that Yiddish itself combines elements of German, Polish, Russian, Hebrew, and other dialects, some of which had once been considered secular. Her question about why Yiddish has become pure while English is condemned unsettles the idea that a language carries an unchanging spiritual quality.

That distinction shapes her education. The brief English period at school is the government-mandated portion of secular instruction, and it is the class in which Devorah says she shines. Yet the school’s attitude toward its teachers reflects the same hierarchy: teachers from Borough Park are treated as less deserving of respect because they have more secular education and, in the school’s view, a weaker religious outlook. The official allowance of English instruction exists alongside suspicion of its influence, making access to knowledge both limited and morally charged.

Years later, a young boy in Williamsburg sees Devorah pushing a baby carriage in clothes he reads as too polished for a Hasidic woman and asks why a gentile woman is walking there. His older companion corrects him, but the child remains puzzled that a Jew could look that way. The encounter shows how communal difference becomes visible through dress, not simply professed belief. Across Zeidy’s lessons and Devorah’s experience, chosenness supplies a language of collective dignity, but also a demanding code whose authority, boundaries, and inheritance she learns to examine.