By Tamara Yeshurun, Opinions Editor
I adore the YU Seforim Sale. It’s a buffet of knowledge, ripe with covers to judge-a-book-by. This year, I realized that every time I visit the sale, I only hover around the English book section, making a beeline for the Jewish thought and history books (and chortling at the self-help section, alas). Even when I purchased a copy of Megillat Esther it was mainly for the musings of Rav Soloveitchik in English.
I am thankful that my Hebrew is pretty strong. It’s not perfect, but it’s solid enough that there is no reason that I should routinely ignore entire sections of rich brown binding with gold lettering. So this year, in addition to three delectable English books, I made the (perhaps superficial) decision to head up to the second floor and buy an Emes L’Yaakov. Feeling like a total imposter, I found myself lugging it to the Stern College for Women Beit Midrash for Tuesday Night Live (TNL) that week.
I sat at a table for a ridiculous amount of time, waiting for the book to open itself. I took a long, leisurely phone call. I conducted a Google search on Rav Kaminetsky’s life. I looked at the sefer (book) and it looked at me, as one hour, then two passed (that’s not even an exaggeration).
Then, with ten minutes left of TNL, and a pit in my stomach, I creaked open the beautiful gray, silver-embossed cover. Finding a pasuk (verse) that intrigued me, I began to read the nekudot-less (without vowels) Hebrew commentary. The first time I read the paragraph, I had only translations in mind. Then I tried to reread it, for comprehension, but found my throat strangely constricted, and my eyes inexplicably moist.
I was on the verge of tears, but it wasn’t because of the content. It was the scent. I kid you not, the smell of the book was making me weepy (…and there goes my credibility.) The fragrance of fresh pages swelled into my consciousness, awakening memories of sefarim stores in Jerusalem, reminding me of the person I was four years ago in seminary: somebody who felt ownership and pride in her textual skills, and for whom the concept of opening a Hebrew sefer didn’t take a truckload of mental exertion.
I know, I know, there is nothing wrong with English. Knowledge is not worthless for being written in a language other than Hebrew. There are troves of Jewish wisdom to plumb in Arabic, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian and Dutch. We are far removed from the shock of the Alexandrian Septuagint or the outrage against Moses Mendelssohn’s German translation of the Hebrew Bible. The language most accessible to us Americans is, understandably, English. And I’m a sucker for the dialectal tumult of the human condition presented in elegant English prose.
But as informative and tremendous as the world of scholarship is, with all of its interpretations, overviews, histories, categorizations, arguments and questions about Judaism, that’s just it: it’s all about Judaism. Those works are, by nature, two or three degrees removed from the actual substance of the books that our ancestors pored over, safeguarded and passed down to us. When I opened the Emes L’Yaakov I remembered that I am a participant, not a spectator. Even during generations when it fell out of spoken use, Hebrew remained alive as the language of learning, in the form and substance of our relationship with the Creator. Of course, there will always be a degree of removal from any text. Every person’s learning is filtered through the uniqueness of their personality and historical position. But learning about Torah isn’t the same as learning Torah. It just isn’t.
So, if you are also somebody for whom the act of textual Torah learning has drifted into a theoretical concept, or it feels like you just “aren’t that person” anymore, I want you to know that even simply opening up a sefer was enough to weaken the mental barrier for me.
“For the word is very close to you, in your mouth and in your heart, to do it” (Devarim 30:14).
I am by no means where I would like to be. I am inconsistent, halting, and my attention span is weak. I want to get better. It’s going to take time, and it will take a huge mindset shift where feelings of accessibility and self-efficacy are concerned. But luckily for us, these books will always be in print, and they’re pretty timeless.
And if all other motivation fails, the smell of the pages is pretty irresistible.
Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tamara Yeshurun