Recently I began a quest: to read all the books on our shelves. It’s a way to recall first encounters with the many volumes we own, and to see if I recover the same feelings I had when I first read them. Are we what we read? Let’s see.
I was inspired to do this by a book in which the author does the same thing. Not knowing where to begin, I started with the top shelf. Note: Our books are loosely arranged by genre, but more often by how they fit on the bookshelf!
In honour of World War I, I reread All Quiet on the Western Front and Timothy Findley’s The Wars. They remind us of a war, heartbreakingly futile, that helped to lead Europe into World War II.
Amos Oz’s biography, A Tale of Love and Darkness, gives the reader a unique entrance to the pre-state city and heart of Jerusalem, as well as its birth pangs. He depicts the interior world of a lonely child, the secrets of a family, the ultimate pain and silence of his mother’s death.
Don Quixote broke my heart.
Some books no longer resonate with me. They go to the book sale.
One example – Solomon Gursky Was Here. When I first read it, I was amused. It was a picaresque assault on Canadian Jews, collectively and individually. This time? I found it uselessly cruel. The foibles and tragedies of its characters did not entertain, they embarrassed, and I felt ashamed, for them and for myself.
On the other hand, John Irving’s A Prayer for Owen Meany is a keeper. While I still found that its underlying motif of redemption is overtly Christological, it remains a magical read.
But the final read I want to talk about is, in fact, a recent acquisition.
Introduction to the Bible, by scholar of Bible and Talmud Christine Hayes, is one of the open Yale courses from that august institution (yalebooks.com/oye). Drawing on a wide range of modern biblical scholarship, Hayes opens up the texts to our modern minds, starting with the stories in Genesis, with clarity and deep respect for traditional as well as contemporary approaches.
Some of our greatest heroes have always seemed remote to me – Abraham, Moses – too grand to be human. Not so the story of Joseph, a great novel in its own right, the conflicted Jacob, the all-too-male King David. These become more, well, believable, not in their historicity, but in the way the texts give us insight into their characters, their historical and political situations, their great moments as well as their failings and faults.
The canny Jacob, even the invisible Isaac – all come to life when we give them a chance to breathe again, viewed through modernity’s eyes. It truly makes them grow in stature rather than diminishing them.
A fresh read of Abraham and Ishmael: we look at the text through other eyes – Abraham’s constant love for Ishmael as his firstborn shines through all of his “tests.” Maybe Isaac knew this, to his sorrow.
David was a complex and canny man presented with all his failings. Did the chronicler of his reign want us to remember him as a paragon? Or, more likely, as a man seriously flawed, but strong enough to unite a quarrelsome bunch of tribes. Yet, finally, he is presented as the person who invested the kingship with power that, when turned to idolatry, brought ruin on the state.
Still we love him. Because (and this is not in Hayes’ book) he gives us hope.
But beginnings, I talked about beginnings. While I work my way through our library this year, I keep coming back to our foundational text, whether Hayes or – a totally different challenge! – Aviva Zornberg’s books on Genesis and Exodus, read for each parshat hashavuah (the parshah of the week). Our Bible demands we continue to look at it through a world of various eyes. Every time, a new beginning.