Life & Wisdom Quote by Chaim Potok

A tiny corrective disguised as an aside, Potok's line is doing cultural triage. "In other words" signals he is mid-argument, translating a misunderstanding he has already watched take root: the reflex to read Judaism through a Protestant, especially Puritan, lens. By naming Calvinism, he picks a particularly sharp foil - a theology often associated (fairly or not) with predestination, austere moral accounting, and an anxious hunt for signs of being "saved". Potok is waving readers away from a courtroom metaphor for God.

The subtext is partly intra-American. In the U.S., religious language is saturated with Protestant assumptions: guilt as the engine of spirituality, private belief as the main credential, and a stark division between the elect and the damned. Potok, a novelist of Orthodox Jewish life, spent his career showing that Jewish tradition works differently: less obsessed with metaphysical sorting and more invested in practice, argument, community obligation, and the slow, human-scaled work of return and repair. Where Calvinism can feel like fate, Judaism in Potok's telling is covenant - binding, demanding, but relational.

The intent isn't to dunk on Calvinists; it's to block a category error. He is also defending Jewish complexity from being flattened into a convenient "Old Testament" stereotype: harsh law, harsher God, no grace. Potok's wit is that the sentence is plain enough to pass unnoticed, yet it carries a warning to interpreters: if you import the wrong Christian anxieties, you'll misread the entire story.