From the Kingdom of Memory (4 page)

My father had books in his grocery store. While waiting for customers, he would open one and read—and smile. I shall never forget his smile.

He was not alone in living with such passion for books; most Jews in my town, and in all Jewish towns, shared that passion. Idleness was the greatest of sins. You have nothing to
do
? a father would admonish his son: take a book—any book. You prayed
minchah
too early, you had to wait for
maariv
? Take a book. You have a headache? The Talmud offers you the best and cheapest remedy: study—and you will feel better. You cannot study? You are unable to understand Talmud or Zohar? Study Chumash and its accessible
commentaries. Read the work of Rabbi Chaim ben Atar—the friend of the Besht who waited for him in Jerusalem. Had they met, says Hasidic legend, the Messiah would have appeared to save his people—and all others. You are unable to study the Bible? Say Psalms. You could hardly find a Jew in the
shtetl
who did not possess a prayer book with Psalms.

A
S A CHILD
, I would spend my meager allowance on books … I remember the bookstores and their owners: Rabbi Avigdor Greenwald, whose brother was a rabbi in Cincinnati, and Reb Shlomo Weiss. I would buy more books than I could afford, but my credit was good … I did not deserve it. Many books were left unpaid—but it was not my fault. A certain event occurred and our lives were interrupted. When I left for that place, I had in my knapsack more books than food.

Strange: when I returned to my hometown, many years later, I found some of my cherished volumes, lying in dust together with thousands and thousands of books, in the Wizhnitzer House of Study, where I had spent days and nights learning and praying—and waiting for the coming of the Messiah.

May I offer a suggestion? Redeem those books—and all the others that are waiting to be redeemed in all the formerly Jewish towns and hamlets. Send students to locate them, collect them—and bring them back to Israel and the Jewish people, the Jewish pupils,
to whom they belong. It would help the students—for they would learn much about Eastern European Jewry, its glory and tragedy—and it would help the books. Those that students would find in my town alone would be sufficient to fill a library.

They will read, and their reading will become one more adventure—a source of excitement and wonder. And anguish too. One never knows what to expect in the next line, on the next page: another catastrophe? another warning? another miracle? To read means to open gates and go back to ancient times—and bring back ancient experiences.

My teachers taught me to question the text. To decipher it. To examine it from all angles, to peel away appearances and go to the essence—to the original meaning—but not straight away: one had to learn the superimposed structures as well. So when I would come home, my mother would not ask me whether I made an interesting discovery but, on the contrary, whether I had asked a good question.

The Jewish tradition of learning—is learning. Adam chose knowledge instead of immortality. If our forefather is Abraham and not Noah, it is because Abraham shared his knowledge with others, whereas Noah did not. When Jacob felt he was about to die, he blessed his children—and his blessings were teachings. Moses’s greatness? He could have kept the Law to himself but did not. Every Jewish person is commanded
to write down every word of the poetry in the Torah, and thus transmit it.

The most urgent commandment? A father must educate his children. He himself must do it, and not rely on Sunday school teachers.

I remember the first day I went to
cheder
, the first lesson in Chumash, the first obstacles I had to surmount in the Talmud. I remember the voice of my first teacher who taught me the alphabet; I remember his sadness when I read poorly. I remember my master who opened the gates of Talmud and the gates of the Zohar for me. Why has God used words as instruments of creation? Because all of creation lies in them. All of creation could be destroyed by them. And redeemed again.

Commentaries on the Bible, on the commentaries themselves; Hasidic tales of wonder and fear: I remember where I sat, what I did, what I felt when I discovered them. I also remember my first—and premature—encounter with apocrypha—with forbidden knowledge.

One
Shabbat
afternoon, in the house of study, I found a book which somebody must have hidden on the top shelf. I opened it: it was a book of commentaries on the Bible by a certain Reb Moshe Dessauer, better known as Moses Mendelssohn. An old Hasid looked at the book in my hands. What are you reading? he asked. When he saw the name, he took it
away and gave me a slap in the face that hurts me to this very day.

L
EARNING IS PART
of Judaism—and Judaism means learning. This is a command that all must follow—God included. The Talmud—and the Zohar—are full of stories about the Almighty teaching a course somewhere in heaven, with the
tzaddikim
as his disciples. Paradise? A great Yeshiva. What else? In our collective fantasy, the Yeshiva epitomized all sacred ambitions and lofty desires. When a Biblical—or Talmudic—hero disappeared, and we didn’t know where, we imagined him in a Yeshiva. When Abraham left Mount Moriah alone, where did Isaac go? To a Yeshiva. The best thing that could happen to a person was to enter a good Yeshiva—and find a good master—and learn a good page of Talmud. Torah therefore doesn’t mean only
mitzvot
, good deeds, but also the study of the
mitzvot
. And the Torah of Israel doesn’t mean the religion of Israel, but the study and the teaching of Israel. Hence the passion a Jew has for the Torah—it is physical. The way he holds the Torah. And kisses it. And clings to it: pure passion.

During—and after—each catastrophe, Jews wanted to know its meaning, its implications, its scope, its roots, and its place in history—or in God’s vision of history. Thus every disaster was followed by a surge of study, prayer, mystical quest, meditation, or scholarly
endeavor. The reading of the Torah was established by Ezra and Nehemiah after the first destruction of the Temple—after Babylonian exile became reality. The Talmud was preceded by the second destruction of the Temple. The Crusades moved our people to messianic experiments—as did the pogroms, though on different levels and under different guises. Collective pain produced works of contemplation, poetry, and philosophy. Why? We felt the need to understand. To turn experience into knowledge—and then, only then, knowledge into experience. Why should pagans say, “Where is your God?” was a question we used to address to God as well as to ourselves. Why, why are we to be singled out, always, for all woes? Why are we in a situation which allows other nations to mock us, ridicule us, saying, Where is the Jewish God? Out of so many questions, many hypotheses—if not many answers—were formulated. Mostly religious ones, involving the age-old concept of sin and punishment: we suffer because we have sinned. There was—there is—a logic in our trials. Why were we sent into exile? Because we have sinned. But then—if we have sinned, we should be humble. We were not; strangely we took credit for our very punishment. God punishes only those He loves, we were told. He must have loved us very much. And we were right in feeling pride. Not for having suffered, but for having felt the need, for having had the strength, to explore the history of that
suffering: for having managed to understand it—thus disarm and even conquer it. For having had the obsession to record that history in books.

When I travel, I am always afraid of running out of books. Half of my luggage consists of reading material and the other half of writing material.

If I had to describe hell, it would be as a place without books. What would life be without their appeal to our fantasy, without their power to change things simply by revealing their hidden message.

Both Hitler and Stalin understood the importance of books for the Jew. That is why they burned them in Germany and destroyed them in Russia. Stalin’s police went so far as demolishing the Jewish presses in Moscow, Kiev, and Odessa. His pathological hatred was vented on both the Jewish faith and Jewish culture: the Hebrew or Yiddish alphabet annoyed him, angered him, defied him—that is why he condemned it to death. Except … he did not succeed. Like Rabbi Hananya ben Teradyon, we can testify: yes, the parchments may burn, but not the letters—not the spirit—not the vision—not the soul of a people, a people committed to eternal values, and thus to eternity.

And yet, there has been a certain reluctance among some of the masters to write books. The Ari Hakadosh never wrote anything; nor did the Besht; as for Rabbi Nahman, he ordered his faithful scribe Reb Nathan to burn his writings and send them back
to heaven. Rabbi Bunam of Pshiskhe wrote a book entitled
The Book of Man;
it was meant to include everything concerning life and man, history and faith, past and future—a grandiose project whose stunning aspect was that the author wanted his book to consist of one page alone. So every day he wrote that page, and every evening he burned it.

As for the celebrated solitary visionary of Kotzk, he once explained why he refused to write books: Who would read them? he asked. Some villager. When would he have time to read them? Not during the week. Only on the Sabbath. In the evening? No, too tired. In the morning, then? Yes, after services. After the Sabbath meal. He would take the book—my book—and lie down on the sofa, ready and willing to see what I had to say about Torah and Talmud. But then the man would be so tired that, after glancing at the first page, he would doze off, dreaming about other things—and his book, my book, would fall to the floor. And for him I should write books?

But what about all those books that were not written? Our history has been preserved elsewhere, through other methods, too, we know that. In liturgical chants we learn more about the life and the lore, the anguish and the defiance of Jewish communities than in precisely edited volumes. In the
responsa
we discover more about the problems that agitated our brethren throughout centuries, in numerous places, than in documents. Jewish history may also be deciphered
on tombstones. On prison walls. Some chapters were written, like the Torah, with fire on fire. Read their descriptions and your sleep will be haunted by their mute despair, and by their determination to overcome despair. Or, in more recent times, read the chronicles from ghettos and death camps: read the
Sonderkommando
documents and your life will be altered.

Eventually, it is with regret that one leaves this place of meditation and memory—one leaves it, having been enriched, enhanced, and yet one does not want to leave it at all.

But then, you do not really leave a library; if you do what it wants you to do, then you are taking it with you.

The Stranger in the Bible

O
N THAT NIGHT
Abraham had a vision both magnificent and awesome. He heard God renewing His solemn promise that Abraham would not die without an heir. That his passage on earth, his journey among men, would be neither forgotten nor erased. And that the future would justify his past—for mankind would look at the world through his eyes. He, Abraham, would be the first of a line never to be broken, the founder of a nation never to dissolve.

And yet—despite God’s soothing, reassuring voice, Abraham hesitated; he wanted to believe but could not, not really, not entirely.

Abraham could not suppress his anxiety: so far God had promised him everything and given him little. How long could Abraham wait? Time was running out. He was almost a hundred years old. Thus, when
God told him not to worry—he began to worry. God said, I shall protect you and reward you. And Abraham answered, Yes—but I am still alone. So once again God revealed his future to him: You
will
have a son, he
will
be your heir—lift up your eyes and behold the sky; your children will be like the stars—innumerable; and eternal will be their splendor.

Strange, but Abraham still was not satisfied; he wanted more. He demanded proof: How shall I know that this land will be mine, stay mine?

God’s response is astonishing. He told him to take a calf, a goat, and a ram—all three years old. And a pigeon, and a dove. And prepare them for sacrifice. Abraham obeyed. He cut them into pieces and divided them into two lots, one facing the other. And he waited. And when wild birds of prey arrived and tried to devour the sacrificial offerings, he chased them away. Then the sun set, and Abraham fell asleep, his entire being heavy with anguish. And God said unto him, “Know, Abraham, that your descendants will be treated as strangers in foreign lands; they will be sold into slavery; they will be persecuted, tormented. But it will not last forever. For their oppressors will be punished. So, you see, you may die in peace.…”

By then the sun had vanished from the horizon and there was darkness from one end of the world to the other. Suddenly, out of the darkness emerged a smoking furnace and a flaming torch and they passed between the offerings. And God concluded His covenant
with Abraham: This land, He said, from the Nile to the Euphrates, will belong to your children and theirs.…