He breaks out into fits of rage for no apparent reason. Michael is fourteen years old, precocious, and very disturbed. The second conflict occurs within the heart of Michael Gordon, the son of Abraham and Ruth Gordon and the nephew of Rachel Gordon, Reuven and Danny's love interest. Reuven finds himself trapped between two worlds as a result. He is far more suspicious and even openly hostile to Professor Abraham Gordon, a liberal professor of Judaism famous for his attempts to reconcile modern Jewish theology with modernity. Kalman is incredibly orthodox and is highly suspicious of Reuven's father's method of historical criticism of the Talmud. He has an incredibly rigid, fundamentalist teacher named Rav Jacob Kalman, who survived the Holocaust and now teaches Talmud at Hirsch University. His studies in school are pushing him towards orthodoxy. First, Reuven finds himself torn between two worlds, a modern world and that of his traditional religion. There are two major conflicts within The Promise. The Promise expands on this relationship and introduces others, all against the backdrop of a flood of Orthodox Jews coming to America after World War II to rebuild their lives. The two main characters of the previous novel are Reuven Malter, an Orthodox Jew in the process of becoming a rabbi and his childhood friend Daniel Saunders, a Hasidic Jew who broke tradition by becoming a psychologist rather than following in his father's footsteps as a Rebbe. Chaim Potok wrote The Promise in 1969 as a sequel to his previous novel The Chosen.
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