“These books are really records of the religious imagination, Arthur. […] They say things in these books that no one dares to say anywhere else. I feel comfortable with these acceptable heresies. God originally as sacred emptiness; ascents to God that are filled with danger, as if you were going through an angelic minefield; creation as a vast error; the world broken and dense with evil; everything a bewildering puzzle, and the sexuality in some of the passages. I like the sexuality. I especially like the ambiguities. You can’t pin most of it down the way you can a passage of Talmud. I can live with ambiguity, I think, better than I can with certainty. Doubt is all that’s left to us, Arthur.” — Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights (New York Fawcett Columbine, 1983): 292
Tuesday, Jan. 21 These hospital journals are beginning to look a little bit like high school book reports. I spend my days reading while we’re waiting for results from a biopsy; while Debi works on the laptop. I scribble an outline on a legal pad, and when she goes home to feed the cats, I take over the laptop to churn out a rough draft.
Nothing high-tech about it, but it works.
So last night, I finished “The Book of Lights,” a 1981 novel by Chaim Potok, a 20th century Jewish author who grew up who grew up in New York City, in what he called a strict “Chassidic [ultra-Orthodox] world without the beard and the earlocks,” but later became a rabbi in the less cloistered Conservative tradition and opted for a secular career as a novelist and professor at Penn.
Potok has aptly been called a Zwischenmensch, a Yiddish (and German) term for a “between-person” who has to negotiate different cultural spaces at the same time. Johan van Wijk of Driestar University, in the Netherlands, puts it succinctly when he says Potok was a “writer, a poet, a painter, a philosopher and a Rebbe [Chasidic spiritual leader] without a congregation.” I have tendencies toward Zwischenmenschlekeit myself, and I’ve been reading through his backlist off and on for a couple of years. By serendipity, “Book of Lights” came from an online bookseller the first day I was in the hospital.
It’s described (by Wikipedia) as the story of Gershon Loran, a Jewish chaplain in Korea whose experience “challenges his thinking about the meaning of faith in a world of ‘light’ from many sources.” In a pivotal moment, he visits Hiroshima with Arthur Leiden, a rabbinical school classmate whose father helped create the atomic bomb. The setting is just after the Korean war, and the contrasting sources of light are the atomic bomb and the Zohar (Hebrew: Book of lights), a classic text central to the Jewish mystical tradition known as the Kabbalah.
Heavy stuff, not an easy read. But it certainly challenges my way of thinking. Two main reasons:
- I grew up in the immediate post-World War II period a few miles from the plants that processed U235, a hot isotope of uranium, and put together the warhead for the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. By my time, the mid-1950s, the focus was more on “Atoms for Peace” and medical research involving radiation therapy, but around Oak Ridge the moral ambiguities of the nuclear era hovered not far in the distance like background radiation.
- For a variety of reasons, I identify with Potok’s main character, Gershon Loran, even though his faith journey and mine are quite different. He’s a recent yeshiva seminary graduate; he comes into contact with other faiths — the East Asian traditions of Korea and Japan — and he comes to see the same kind of beauty, the same sense of the presence of God, in them that he’s coming to understand in his study of the Kabbalah. A Zwischenmensch, in other words.
“The Book of Lights” was based on Potok’s experience as a chaplain. It brought him into contact with American service members of other faiths, and with the Asian religious traditions. For a kid from the Bronx who grew up in a very conservative Jewish environment, it was a life-changing experience. In later years, he would recall:
I remember when I was very, very young, being taught by my father and my teachers that paganism was intrinsically an abomination. I came to Japan and to Korea and saw pagan loveliness I never dreamed I could see. The sheer beauty of that pagan world overwhelmed me. Although it was manmade loveliness, its beauty was created by the human hand for the purposes of worship. I learned to appreciate the loveliness of God’s world in a pagan land.
(The quote is from Wikipedia. I don’t pretend to be as scholarly as Potok’s characters.) In 1982, not long after the book came out, Potok told an audience at Penn State that a visit to Hiroshima when he was on R&R in Japan was a life-changing experience.1 In fact it formed the “model,” as he put it, for his stories of young Jewish intellectuals coming to terms with a modernist, secular world. At Penn State, he recalled the moment he stood at the blast site, now a lovely memorial park (pictured above) but then still barren and sterile:
I remember standing there and remembering how I felt as a teenager when I heard for the first time about the dropping of the bomb. Very glad, the truth to tell, that the bomb had been dropped because I knew somehow the war would be over. That was my initial response, and then frightened, feeling somehow that our species had turned a corner in its development, and nothing would ever be the same for us again. (191)
This is entirely relatable. I was too young to remember the end of WWII, but as a boy I heard the stories of defense workers at nearby Oak Ridge who poured out of their housing units cheering and banging pots and pans the day the bombing of Hiroshima was announced. (“Atoms for Peace” came later.) But I’ve always felt the moral ambiguity of the postmodern era began during that terrible summer of 1945.
In Potok’s novel, a pivotal scene is set in Hiroshima as Gershon’s friend Arthur recites the mourner’s Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead, at the Hiroshima blast site:
Gershon listened to the awesome words of the prayer for mourners — the public sanctification of the name of God the affirmation of meaning in the very presence of the most unassimilable of darkness — and a coldness of terror brushed against the back of his neck. His heart began a wild beating. Arthur was reciting the words in English, reading from the prayer book in his hands.
“Magnified and sanctified be the name of God throughout the world which He hath created according to His will. May He establish His kingdom during the days of your life and during the life of all the house of Israel, speedily, yea, soon; and say ye, Amen.
“Amen,” someone answered, and Gershon looked up with surprise and realized that he, Gershon, had answered, and he continued the required response, “May His great name be blessed for ever and ever.” Without a listener’s response, the Kaddish was meaningless, the response was the soul of the Kaddish, its living center. (p. 334)
In this context, the liturgy becomes a kind of benediction and, I am convinced, an answered plea for redemption. I found it deeply affecting, because so many people I knew who had worked at “the project” in Oak Ridge during the war felt the same kind of ambivalence Potok spoke of at Penn State. In later years, about the time of the Nuclear Freeze movement, I wrote an article for Christian Century titled “James Agee, the Bomb and Oliver the Cat.” (Agee wrote the lead story for Time magazine, and Oliver was a childhood family pet.)2 Agee wrote:
The sudden achievement of victory was a mercy, to the Japanese no less than to the United Nations; but mercy born of a ruthless force beyond anything in human chronicle. The race had been won, the weapon had been used by those on whom civilization could best hope to depend; but the demonstration of power against living creatures instead of dead matter created a bottomless wound in the living conscience of the race.
And this, in one of the most remarkable pieces of deadline writing I’ve ever seen:
The promise of good and of evil bordered alike on the infinite— with this further, terrible split in the fact: that upon a people already so nearly drowned in materialism even in peacetime, the good uses of this power might easily bring disaster as prodigious as the evil. […] When the bomb split open the universe and revealed the prospect of the infinitely extraordinary, it also revealed the oldest, simplest, commonest, most neglected and most important of facts: that each man is eternally and above all else responsible for his own soul, and, in the terrible words of the Psalmist, that no man may deliver his brother, nor make agreement unto God for him.
Potok’s other themes affect me more directly, more personally. I first encountered him as a grad student in English, and his novels featuring young Jewish scholars torn between competing religious, academic and cultural values spoke to me. So I’ve read most of his backlist at one time or another. (I blogged about it HERE not long ago.) But the mysticism in “Book of Lights” was entirely new to me. And I’m sure a lot of it went over my head. In fact, I’m embarrassed to admit this, but the Wikipedia page on Kabbalah was too detailed for me to wrap my head around.
So I found an article by Rabbi Menachem Posner, managing editor at Chabad.org, that was more my speed. Titled “What Is Kabbalah? A basic introduction,” simply describes it as “the received wisdom of theology of Jewish practice built upon teachings handed down through the generations from Sinai. It is sometimes described as Jewish mysticism.”
Adds Posner: As Halacha [the law] comprises the body of Judaism, Kabbalah is its soul.” The tension between law and mysticism is one of Potok’s primary themes in “Book of Lights,” as Gershon is torn between professors of Talmud (the law) and Kabbalah in seminary, but he’s drawn to what he considers the “acceptable heresy” of academic study of the Zohar, a basic 13th-century kabbalistic text. Early on in the novel, one of Gershon’s professors tells a class:
It is the heart of Judaism, the soul, the core. Talmud tells us how the Jew acts. Kabbalah tells us how Judaism feels, how it sees the world. We are Western secular beings today, rational, logical, yes, and so we are embarrassed by Kabbalah, which is irrational, illogical. But the tradition was not embarrassed; for nearly two thousand years it was not embarrassed. Great talmudists were also great kabbalists. 22
As you’d expect in a story about a student of Kabbalah, “Book of Lights” is full of quotations from the Zohar and other mystical texts, going back as far as the prophet Ezekiel in the Hebrew Bible (or Old Testament). Many refer to elaborate metaphors for different states of being that are entirely outside my frame of reference, and they went over my head. Others reminded me of esoterica in early Gnosticism, a related 2nd-century Christian heresy that purported to confer secret knowledge on its believers (also way over my head). Posner explains:
[…] Kabbalah is concerned with the inner meaning and function of our Divine service on a cosmic scale, using metaphysical metaphors and concepts. In addition, by learning and contemplating Kabbalistic teachings, a Jew fulfills the mitzvahs of knowing G‑d, loving G‑d, awe of G‑d, and more.
Since these teachings can only be transmitted through highly abstract metaphor, they lend themselves to misinterpretation, and were thus taught only to a select few throughout most of Jewish history.
Yet, there’s much in Gershon’s study of the Zohar, and its application to the daily life of a wartime chaplain wrestling with the terrible ambiguities of the last century, that I found attractive. For all its mystical 13th-century metaphors for the creation of the world, it gets very real. Among its basic concepts Posner includes:
- G‑d is within everything and everything has a purpose. When you have interacted with any part of G‑d’s creation and used it for a good cause, you have elevated the Divine spark within it and brought the universe one small step closer to its perfection.
- To bridge the gap between finite and infinite, G‑d emanated a world of harmony and Divine oneness we call “Atzilut.” This acts as the interface between G‑d and us so that we can relate to Him. The instructions for this interaction are in the Torah, as taught by our Sages in the form of halacha.
What’s not to like about that? It’s so much like my own quiet struggles to seek the presence of God — to find an “acceptable heresy” (as Gerson puts it in “Book of Lights”) — in my own Christian faith tradition, I find myself taking refuge in the Zwischenmenschlikeit.
Notes
1 Potok’s lecture was. delivered on campus; I was studying journalism at Penn State that year, so I could have attended the lecture if I’d known about it. A missed opportunity? Or another correspondence? I’m kind of a zwischenmensch myself.
2 Here’s a full citation: Peter Ellertsen, “James Agee, the Bomb and Oliver the Cat,” Christian Century 31 July 1984: 709-11. I quoted Agee, in part, in a discussion of postmodernity, faith, hope, subatomic particles and other matters in a lecture I prepared in 2000 that turned out to be kind of an apologia for vita mia. “Faith, Hope and Poetry: Science and (Pre-)Postmodern Ways of Knowing in the Writing of Kathleen Norris,” Last Lecture Series, Springfield College in Illinois, March 9, 2000 https://ordinaryzenlutheran.com/faith-hope-poetry/.
Links and Citations
James Agee, “The Bomb,” Time 20 Aug. 1945 https://time.com/archive/6600001/the-bomb/.
Chaim Potok, The Book of Lights (New York Fawcett Columbine, 1983).
———, “My Life as a Writer,” Schwab Auditorium, Penn State, Oct. 18, 1982, Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity Through the Lens of Tradition, ed. Daniel Walden (University Park: Penn State University Press, 2013).
Menachem Posner, “What Is Kabbalah? A basic introduction,” Chabad.org https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/170308/jewish/What-Is-Kabbalah.htm.
Johan van Wijk, “Chaim Potok. A Life as Zwischenmens,” The Round Table: Partium Journal of English Studies, Partium Christian University, Oradea, Romania, April 2011 http://theroundtable.partium.ro/Current/Cultural/Johan.van.Wijk_Chaim_Potok_A_Life_as_Zwischenmens.pdf.
Daniel Walkden, “Chaim Potok, A Zwischenmensch (“between-person”) Adrift in the Cultures,” Studies in American Jewish Literature, No. 4 (No. 4,1985) https://www.jstor.org/stable/41205615.
[Revised and uplinked, Jan. 30, 2025]
Ordinary Time 