Pop 89: Take and Re-Read
By Madonna Hamel
I’ve known for quite some time now that I own far too many books, and I will never be able to read them all before my time is up. And yet, I find their company comforting. I also believe it’s better, in this day and age of AI, online fudging, and the erasure of texts, to keep valuable information at home on my shelves, between covers, confident they will still be there when I wake in the morning.
And while I am aware that some knowledge cannot come from books but from lived experience and bodily awareness—and that such embodied knowledge is one of the best arguments against the proliferation of AI—I still believe that reading is an essential means of getting in touch with one’s own soul and the souls of others.
A couple of nights ago, I was with some old friends, and we decided to take turns talking about our favourite books. I felt like that nerdy kid in school, her arm shooting into the air, begging to be picked first. When my turn did arrive, I could not limit myself to just one. Who can? But when the question got narrowed to “name a book you recently re-read,” the answer was simple: Chaim Potok’s In the Beginning.
I don’t re-read fiction because of the aforementioned fact that I have more books than I have years left. But when I saw a copy of In the Beginning on a thrift table for 50 cents, it brought to mind my youth and my fascination, thanks to Chaim Potok, with all things Jewish. So I took the book home with me and dove in.
I knew the novel was a coming-of-age story as told by a Jewish boy growing up in Brooklyn on the eve of the Second World War. And I remember young Lurie coming across a photograph of his father and other men in the woods, holding guns, and that he is constantly told to forget about “the photograph you never saw.”
Lurie also happens to be a brilliant interpreter of Torah. His studiousness gets him picked on by neighbourhood bullies, as does his propensity for fevers due to a childhood illness. He lay in bed for days, delirious, as the world around him merged with the Torah stories he was studying and the “photograph he never saw.”
What I didn’t remember was how dense with scripture and scholarly debate the book was. When my friends asked what stuck out for me when re-reading the book almost 50 years later, I said: “Honestly, I was impressed with my twenty-year-old self, that I was so fascinated by Lurie’s pursuit of truth. It’s a book heavy on theological disputations and minutiae. It takes some serious concentration. But all I remember is I loved it and couldn’t get enough.”
And I wasn’t the only one. The book was hailed as “a major record of a journey of a soul” when it came out. And a few years ago, when I participated in one of Matthew Anderson’s pilgrimage walks across Saskatchewan, we were joined by Archbishop Don Bolen. When I mentioned Chaim Potok as one of the memorable authors of my youth, he exclaimed: “Me too! I skipped a class once so I could finish one of his novels.” (It might have been My Name Is Asher Lev, about a Jewish boy who found himself painting giant portraits of Christ on the cross.)
When Lurie broke the news to his teacher that he was leaving his Brooklyn neighbourhood to study secular scholars, his teacher replied:
“I am not bothered by questions of truth. I want to know if the religious worldview has any meaning today. Bring yourself an answer to that, Lurie. Take apart the Bible and see if it is something more today than the Iliad and the Odyssey. Bring yourself back that answer. Do not bring yourself back shallowness. Study Kierkegaard and Otto and William James. Study man. Study philosophy of religion.”
His teacher also warned him:
“Everyone will be wondering what sacred truths of their childhood you are destroying. Merely to destroy—that is a form of shallowness, Lurie. Do you understand?”
Those were my first years in university, when I jumped from major to major—first Creative Writing, then Political Science and Sociology, and eventually English Literature. I was restless and eager for something to ring true. And though I seemed to be constantly falling in love, it wasn’t a mate I was looking for; I wasn’t interested in reading romances and happily-ever-afters. Potok wasn’t on my syllabus, but I was always reading extracurricularly. I was, like David Lurie, on a desperate hunt for truth—not relative truth, not truths, not your versus my truth, but undeniable Truth. I didn’t realize that then, but I do now.
When I think about it, there are a few other books I’ve reread: the Bible, for one, which is actually a collection of books; my daily 12-step reader, worn and dog-eared after 21 years of guidance and consultation; the poems of Sufi and Billy Collins; and The Collected Sermons and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., who, although a Baptist preacher, was equally versed in Shakespeare, John Donne, Gandhi, and Leo Tolstoy—to name a few.
I believe I still read books to seek truth and to bridge gaps—not to “destroy.” Pope Francis insisted that “literature proves essential for believers who sincerely seek to enter into dialogue with the culture of their time, or simply with the lives and experiences of other people.”
In 386 CE, in a garden in Milan, a despairing St. Augustine heard a child's voice tell him to “Take and read” a section of the Bible. What he read changed his life, and he went from a lost and philandering soul to the author of the first autobiography: The Confessions, my next re-read.