One of my readers recently asked me a probing and rather disturbing question: “Do you think we are still the people of the book?”
Like a good Jew, I need to answer a question with a question – more than one, actually. First, what is meant by “we”? Readers of The Jewish Press? The young people I saw in Tel Aviv last week with tattoos – girls with bare midriffs and silver studs in navels, noses, tongues, even eyebrows?
Are we talking about thriving Jewish communities in the Diaspora that have established yeshivas and kollels, or do we mean some communities where intermarriage tops the 50 percent mark? Are we talking about our magnificent youth in the IDF or those who go off to the Far East post-army and find their spirituality in ashrams and Buddhist temples?
After we’ve decided who is we, we’llhave to figure out what we mean by “book.”Is it “Book” with a capital B, or do we simply mean we’re still reading as opposed to saturating our minds with TV, videos and computer images?
And if by “Book” we mean our Torah (or more explicitly the Tanach – Torah, Nevi’im and Ketuvim), what stage in our lives are we referring to? Because people change. When I was a young girl, the books I revered were not our holy volumes. As someone brought up in Australia before there were such things as Jewish day schools, my reading included writers like Shakespeare and Dickens, poets like Wordsworth, Shelley, Byron, Keats, Yeats and Brooke.
Those were the writers I wanted to emulate – literary geniuses who could create words of power and majesty and beauty. It took many decades before I realized that beauty without knowledge and truth is meaningless and dangerous. No one can deny that the words of the German poet Goethe are beautiful, yet look at the German people who paid homage to his words.
The beauty did not prevent the evil that grew out of that culture. I am still humbled by great British writers, but it was only after I did deep research into history for my novel The Pomegranate Pendant that I fully understood the cruelty of the English in Palestine during the British Mandate period. Their superior culture did not prevent them from treating the Jews of Palestine more cruelly than the Ottomans had.
From a literary standpoint there are great writers in Europe today, but anti-Semitism still thrives there. Even some of our most acclaimed Israeli writers – AB Yehoshua, Amos Oz, David Grossman – cannot be described as People of the Book, for their names invariably appear in petitions that favor our enemies over Jewish victims of terror. Their writing is magnificent, but for what purpose is it being used?
I can’t answer a definitive “yes” to the question “Are we still the people of the book?” – but there are reasons to be optimistic. In many Western universities, especially in North America, there are professors of Jewish studies, a subject now accorded a prominence and respect undreamed of even a decade ago. It may not be a substitute for traditional Torah study, but it is important.
I have lived through two of the most awe-inspiring events in our history: the horror of the Holocaust and the miracle of the creation of Israel. The Jewish state’s birth pains were agonizing, but Israel became a reality and we are privileged heirs to this dream. It’s a tragedy that because of ongoing war and attacks, the cream of our youth are constantly asked to put their lives on the line to defend our homeland – yet they do so without complaint, taking on this burden as a responsibility and a duty.
I don’t have statistics at hand on the number of publishers of Jewish books today or of their readers, but I am sure both figures are impressive. In the past 25 years I have written nine books and I’m amazed when I realize they all have Judaism at their core – even the children’s books. And I’m someone who was born into an assimilated Jewish family but was fortunate to have found the treasure of our heritage and traditions before it was too late.