ause a passage of a Bible commentary had proved too difficult for him to understand. David was about nine years old at the time. Davids father said to him " You want to understand everything immediately? Just like that? You have only begun to study this commentary last week. All beginnings are hard. You have to work at the job of studding. Go over it again and again (Potok 279). David learned in his journey that a man can not ignore the given to him by his life (Potok 131). People exist by the virtue of the help they give to one another. Helping people improves the helper person's life and keeps the helping person human (Potok 279). Our task is to understand, to memorize and to give back what we had learned. "All Beginnings are hard." Beginning is sustained through the painful and sometimes repetitious actions of the story. David Lurie is now a famous Biblical scholar, now guiding his young students on the dangerous tightrope path of iniquity. David Lurie traveled this path as a youth, where a misstep might mean hurtling into a bitter loss of faith. David is looking back at his own beginning. David Lurie is a studious, thoughtful child, whose state as a child of immigrants makes him more sensitive to European influences on American life and policy (Amazon). He is a precocious reader and brilliant student of the Jewish scriptures. The accidental aspect of certain things is heavily underscored (Huapt 232).In the Beginning, Potok's altered ego, the brilliant young yeshiva student David Lurie, undertakes to bridge the gulf between fundamentalism and secular humanism, including ugly aspects of Western anti-Semitism, even at the risk of losing the respect of his family, his friends, and all of his teachers but one (Buning).Moreover, this quest for identity and authenticity has been dramatically accentuated in our century by World War II and in particular by the Holocaust and the dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and Nag...
