By Yisrael-Dovid Rosenberg, Layout Editor
A wall of seforim. That is the first thing you will see upon entering my house. Hundreds of books line the far side of the living room. And that’s what my family likes to call “the overflow.” The full library is in our basement.
For context, my father is a rabbi and the library is his. Before I was even born, my parents converted our garage into a study for my father, but with so many books and so little space left for people, little study was ever done inside the room. Instead, books of Torah tend to migrate out of the library and have taken over our house as a whole.
As much as my mother might try to prevent it, the seforim creep up the stairs and climb onto all free surfaces. First they cover the couch, then they are moved to a cart my mother purchased to contain the seforim that are relevant for the Shabbos or holiday at hand, and then to the side table not intended for seforim at all. Of course, they also cover the dining room table all week and are only removed when the time comes to prepare the table for Shabbos. All of this is my father’s doing, in preparation for his shiurim (lectures) and drashos (sermons) in our shul.
I grew to love the sliding shelves on the library’s back wall and the sign of love of Torah that it all represented. I went through the sections with my father and learned how he organized the library so I could navigate it myself. Whenever friends would come over, I would be sure to show off my father’s collection and they would enjoy perusing the room and its wide variety of volumes on every Jewish topic you can imagine.
Buying seforim is a hobby of my father’s. “This was on sale for just $3! I had to order it” is not an uncommon refrain in my home. An author is selling some of their seforim online? Why don’t we take a look. Someone is shipping seforim from Israel that can’t be bought in America? Better check. There’s nothing more dangerous than going to a seforim store with my father. Forget about the YU Seforim Sale! My mother regularly half-quips that soon there won’t be any room left for people in the house. It’s not hard to see how the library grew and grew.
My father, through his example and his encouragement, has transferred a love of seforim to me as well. My room has become not so different from the rest of the house. I am blessed to have filled more than one bookcase with seforim of my own. When I took Rabbi Dr. Edward Reichman’s Jewish bioethics class in Yeshiva University (as an MTA student), I kidnapped much of my father’s medical halacha section to fill a shelf in my room. And it has become a bit of a custom that when my father receives a double of a particular sefer, I wind up with the duplicate copy.
We recently had a flood in our basement. Thank God that the damage was only to property. But the hassle has been tremendous, and my mother is a heroine for dealing with every step of the renovations to that floor of our house. Thankfully, relatively few of the books in the library were damaged. But the whole room needed to be recarpeted. And that meant taking down the bookcases and packing up the whole library. So, for about five months, our house was devoid of its library. My father lost access to his books on Purim and Pesach and Tisha B’av. I could tell that he was quietly saddened that he didn’t have the same wide array of tomes that he usually does to prepare for the holidays.
Today our basement is newly renovated. The library is rebuilt (though, alas, without the sliding shelves) and looks nicer than I ever remember it looking. The seforim, however, are still packed away in boxes that have been deposited around the entirety of the basement. With those boxes stacked about four high, column after column, there is a lot of work yet to be done. But as with learning where everything was in the first place, reorganizing will help me gain the knowledge of what seforim we have and where to find them in the future. Hopefully, this will give me a greater appreciation of their Torah content and its value.
The medieval halachic authority Rabbi Asher ben Yechiel, otherwise known as the Rosh, writes that nowadays, the mitzvah to write a Sefer Torah is fulfilled by commissioning the writing of seforim of Torah specifically so that one can study them and teach them to their children. That is done in spades in my family. Our library is our true treasure.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Yisrael-Dovid Rosenberg