I dreamed that I stood near a large bonfire and watched the flames consume my once-favorite book. Piles of the same book were stacked one on top of the other and the fire spiraled around the pile, browning the papers and bending the edges until each book turned into a charred clump of ashes. Burned scraps of paper fell like snowflakes around me and the sparks danced in front of my eyes. The book was the Ritva in its many editions, large and small, new and old printings. The entire collection of the Ritva’s work, his complete commentary on the Talmud, was being eaten by the most destructive force I had access to. I felt a kinship with the flames, as if they were an extension of my arm, my own far reaching breath, eating and vomiting the words.
When I awoke I was in my bed, where I’d fallen exhausted the night before. My half-finished lab report lay spread across my desk. My clothes, scattered over my chair, looked like a modernist sculpture in the dim lighting of the room. A thin white line, as if painted across the room, was formed by the sliver of sunlight entering through the small opening between my window curtains. I stepped across the line of sunshine, removed my clothes from the chair and closed my lab notebook. In my mind, the dream still vivid, I saw once again the flames dancing around the Ritva.
A friend once told me he wanted to set his entire collection of sacred Jewish texts on fire out of rage for their wrongful ideas. That would be wrong, I told him. Burning a book shows a lack of faith in human reason. If you believe a book to contain wrongful ideas, you must believe that you can refute them by reason; the material destruction of them would then be unnecessary. Additionally, the history of burning books is enough to give you pause before committing an act historically reserved for the repression of reason and critical thinking.
That I would entertain a thought like that caught me by surprise. In my dream I didn’t simply burn the book, I enjoyed it, reveling in the destruction of a text I once held sacred. In my dream, as I watched the book go up in smoke, I felt as though I was being replenished with oxygen and felt free to fly. Yet I couldn’t reconcile my emotions in the dream with the convictions I held when I was awake. Clearly, the dream revealed the dark side of my mind and I was determined to discover its origin.
The Ritva, a comprehensive commentary on the Talmud whose title is the acronym of its author’s name – Rabeinu Yom Tov ben Avraham Asevilli – was my favorite amongst the early Talmudic commentators. His concise explanations and direct approach made his commentary a masterful accompaniment to the brief words of Rashi and the elaborate and convoluted approach of the Tosafists. In Yeshiva I was known as “The Ritva Guy.” When I sat down each morning for the start of our four hour study session, I would sit with a coffee and a Ritva, the two essential components for a successful study session. I was so good at being “The Ritva Guy” that our Talmud instructors, scholarly men who had the most obscure bits of Talmudic commentary at their fingertips, would introduce a dispute between Rashi and Tosfos on a given text and then turn to me and ask, “Shmuel, what would the Ritva say?”
Now, sitting at my desk, these memories, too, from the distance of time, seemed like a dream. I remembered the bookshelf on which the Ritva was located, the twenty or so steps to the bookcase from my seat in the study hall. I even remembered the exact way I retrieved it, planting my index finger on top of the spine and pulling forward while pressing down so that the volume emerged from among the tightly packed texts. I would make my way back to my study table, head held high with the Ritva under my arm as my friends nodded when I passed. I was “The Ritva Guy.”
In the vernacular of the yeshiva, a book and its author are referred to by the same name. When referring to the book one might say, “I studied the Ritva.” When referring to the author you might say, “The Ritva died many centuries ago.” The author’s work becomes his name. When you quote the book you quote the person at the same time. The man’s life is reduced to his work, and in return his life is extended with the book’s shelf life. As a Yeshiva student you feel you know these men who wrote the books you use, because the books are what you believe these men were meant to do and what their lives amounted to. In one conversation you might transition from the Pnei Yehoshua, the book, to the Pnei Yehoshua, the man, they both come down to the same thing, how much of the word of God he studied and disseminated.
I’ve sometimes wondered why religious families, even those whose members are not particularly scholarly, often have large collections of religious texts. The answer, perhaps, is that although they might not use the book for study or reference, they consider the books more than mere texts. The books are symbolic representatives of their authors, heroic and saintly figures mummified in timeless words and ideas. A religious text for a religious person isn’t simply a medium developed by print technology to transport ideas from one mind to another. It is the purified form of what is most valued of the author’s life.
Three years have passed since I last studied the Ritva. My personal library has since been transformed, with biology and math textbooks, out of print plays, poetry collections, classics and bestsellers taking the place of my yeshiva books. These books say more about me, my likes and my studies, than they do about their authors. If I were to discuss one of these books and then discuss their author I would have two different conversations, unlike my yeshiva books, where the author and the book was one, living and breathing in my everyday discourse.
I would never want to burn any of my new books, and that’s the sad part. I will never feel that simultaneous connection to a book and its author. The desire to burn a book, to destroy it, comes only when its very existence is imbued with personal meaning. If I argue against the ideas of a secular book, I have rendered the book meaningless, and it becomes only a collection of refuted claims.
A religious text, however, regardless of how much one debates its content, still lives. It lives beyond its days and immediate relevancy, and so do its writers and readers. We are the people of the book because we made books people, we turned books into historical figures that remain alive with us. I can argue with them, debate their meaning, refute their claims, but they will live on.
My dream of watching the Ritva burn didn’t come from the desire to silence ideas, it came from the desperate desire to terminate a relationship. My desire to destroy countered the old desire to connect, a connection that evolved over years of studying the Ritva, the book and the man, or the man that I knew in the form of a book.
As I dressed, I looked at the pile of books on my desk and remembered that according to Jewish law one may not be naked in the presence of religious texts; the irony is that I was more emotionally naked in the presence of my religious texts than I will ever be in the presence of all my secular texts.
I placed the books I would need that day into my bookbag, and drew open the curtains. The sun spilled over the rest of the room and made the dream of last night seem less real. I took one last look at my bookshelf. The books I didn’t choose sat lifeless, resigned to another day of gathering dust, hoping that perhaps tomorrow I will choose them and give them life. And perhaps I will, but I will never have the desire to burn any of them. I don’t love any of them the way I loved the Ritva, the book that sat on the bookshelf twenty steps away from me for the five years I was known as “The Ritva Guy.”Printable Version