(THE FOLLOWING POST CONTAINS SPOILERS. IF YOU THINK YOU MIGHT READ POTOK’S THE BOOK
OF LIGHTS YOU MAY NOT WANT TO READ THE BELOW).
Ever since I read The Chosen and The Promise, Chaim Potok (1929-2002) has been one of my favorite authors. As
has been noted by literary scholars “All of Chaim Potok’s novels vividly depict
the study of sacred texts as central to the Jewish tradition.”[1] Instead of Torah and Talmud, the texts which
interest Potok in The Book of Lights (1981) are the medieval Jewish mystical
writings called the Kabbalah. The novel's title is derived from a central mystical text, The Zohar. The actual title of the work, the Sefer
ha-zohar, means “the book of lights.”
Light is very important in Jewish mystical theology. “Kabbalists believe that the universe was
created by a light ray that poured into containers, some of which broke, thus
causing evil to enter the world. Pieces
of light are everywhere. When the
spilled light is gathered up by humankind, people will become immortal. For kabbalists, the two-thousand-year
dispersal of the Jews is to prepare the world for the Messiah who will come
when the lights are recovered.
Kabbalists naturally would be fascinated by light, for God said “Let
there be light,” just after creating the heaven and the earth. Before light the earth was “without form, and
void” (Genesis). Like mysticism, light
is incorporeal. But as particle and wave
it has substance, motion, and power.”[2]
As with the protagonists of Potok’s earlier novels, The
Chosen, The Promise, and In the Beginning,
the main character of The Book of Lights is a young rabbinical student
who lives in the Jewish section of Brooklyn, New York. Gershon Loran is a lackluster student of
Talmud but becomes excited about the study of Kabbalah. The novel opens in the early 1950s when
Gershon is a student in a seminary. Gershon’s parents were killed in a cross fire
between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem in 1937 when Gershon was eight years old. Orphaned, Gershon has been reared by his aunt
and uncle. His uncle owns a run down
Hebrew bookstore and his aunt has never recovered from the death of the couples’
only son during World War II.
The Book of Lights has many more literary devices and
metaphors than Potok’s earlier novels.
Gershon’s aunt and uncle live in a ramshackle apartment building. Gerhon’s uncle acts as the building
supervisor and collects rents for the unknown absentee landlord. “They lived in a sunless ground-floor
apartment in an old five story redbrick building where his uncle collected the
rents for the owner no one ever saw. The
house was the talk of their Brooklyn neighborhood. There was something wrong with it, something
had gone awry from the beginning.” This
suggests a metaphor for the world where “something had gone awry from the
beginning,” and suggests the role of the Jews as God’s chosen people who serve
the unknown absentee Creator of the Universe in his broken world.
One night, on the roof of the apartment building, Gershon
has a mystical experience which he believes is God revealing himself. Throughout the novel, Gershon has visions of
people and places and seeks to recapture the experience of the night on the roof
when he touched the stars and all things seemed to be one.
Gershon is sent to an Orthodox yeshiva where he has a
lackluster academic performance. After
graduation from the Yeshiva, Gershon enrolls in a non-orthodox theological
seminary. Gershon is a competent student
of Torah and Talmud but his academic career does not take off until Jacob
Keter, an expert in Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism, arrives to teach at the
seminary.
Gershon’s roommate is Arthur Leiden. Arthur’s father is a famous
physicist who worked on the development of the atomic bomb. Arthur’s mother is a noted professor of art
history. Arthur has chosen to be an
observant Jew and to study to be a rabbi in apparent rebellion against his
parents who are secular Jews. Arthur
drinks too much and is often unprepared for class. Gershon is dating Karen Levin who is studying
for her doctorate in philosophy at Columbia University. Karen’s father is a noted rabbi, and Karen
makes it clear to Gershon that she does not intend to be the wife of a “pulpit
rabbi.” Nevertheless, Gershon and Karen
continue to see each other.
Due to a lack of Jewish chaplains in the armed forces,
seminary administrators make it a requirement for ordination that all graduates
serve two years as a military chaplain. However,
Gershon’s military service is delayed for a year when he wins an academic
scholarship, endowed by Arthur’s parents and named for Arthur's dead brother, which enables Gershon to do graduate study on
Kabbalah with Professor Keter. Finally,
his year of graduate study over with, Gershon reluctantly joins the army.
Worship in a Shinto Temple
Sent to Korea as a chaplain just after the end of the Korean
War, Gershon is a great success as an army chaplain. He is well respected by both the officers and
men, and gains a reputation as a good chaplain.
In Asia, Gershon’s perspective is considerably broadened. He realizes that there may be other ways to
God than Judaism. During a trip to Japan, Gershon and another
soldier watch people pray at a Shnto shrine:
“In the indoor shrine at the end of the street, people
crowded before an altar on which stood an image. Candles burned in tall black metal
candelabra. Women stood with their hands
together, praying. Children prayed
softly. Before the altar was a
railing. An old man stood at the
railing. He wore a hat and a brown coat.
He had a long white beard, a flowing beard that lay upon his chest and seemed
possessed of a life of its own, like a waterfall. It caught the soft lights of the candles and
glints of the sunlight that came through the door of the shrine. In his hands he held a prayer book. His body swayed back and forth, back and
forth, as he prayed. His eyes opened and
closed behind rimless spectacles that flashed and flared with the lights of the
candles and the sun. Gershon looked at him.
Had he seen him somewhere before?
He could not remember.
“Do you
think our God is listening to him, John?”
“I don’t
know, chappy. I never thought of it.”
“Neither
did I until now. If He’s not listening,
why not? If He is listening, then-well, what are we all about, John? That’s my thought for tomorrow. It think we ought to go back to the hotel.”
The day
was Friday, Gershon’s Shabbat began with dusk.
He remained by himself in the room; John went out for a walk. He sat in an easy chair, reading a work by
Chaim Vital on the kabbalistic thought of Isaac Luria. He put it aside after a while and took up the
second of the two books he had brought with him, a volume of the Zohar. He began to read the commentary to the Torah
portion of that Shabbat, the section that tells of the Revelation at Sinai.
He
read, “When a man spreads out his hands and lifts them up in prayer and
supplication, he may be said to glorify the Holy One in various ways. He symbolically unites the ten sefirot,
thereby unifying the whole and duly blessing the Holy Name.” He read this and thought of the Japanese he
had seen praying in the shine.”
Hiroshima after the Bomb
For a while, Gershon is the only Jewish chaplain in
Korea. Finally, a new Jewish chaplain
arrives, Arthur Leiden. Arthur
desperately wants to travel to Japan and especially want to visit the cities of
Kyoto and Hiroshima. After first going
to Hong Kong, where they meet a Muslim lawyer and his daughter, Gershon and
Arthur arrive in Japan. Arthur wishes to
see Kyoto because his mother was instrumental in saving the city and convincing
the army not to drop an atomic bomb on it due to all of its ancient art
treasures. He wants to see Hiroshima due
to guilt that his father helped to build the bomb which killed thousands of
people. At the shrine to the dead of
Hiroshima, Arthur says the Kiddish, the traditional prayers for the dead. Near the end of the novel, Arthur is killed
in an airplane crash attempting to return to Japan.
Kyoto
After leaving the army, Gershon returns to the United States
after visiting Arthur’s parents he spends time with Karen who has accepted a
job teaching philosophy at the University of Chicago. Gershon tells Karen that he cannot go with
her and that their marriage will have to wait. Gershon then travels to Israel to continue his
Kabbalah studies with Jacob Keter. At
the end of the novel, Gershon is sitting
in a garden in Jerusalem, waiting. We
can infer that he is waiting on God.
The Book of Lights is a very deep and involved novel. This
discussion only scratches the surface of the riches of this book. The atomic bomb is itself a kind of divine light and, like God, the physicists who created it also unleashed evil. Gershon’s first name is a variation of the
name Moses gives to his son which means “stranger.” Gershon’s last name, Loren, is an acronym for
a navigation device. Gershon is a stranger seeking God but he is navigating in the right
direction. Arthur’s last name is also
symbolic. Leiden means suffering in
German. Karen, the student of philosophy
who rejects the life of her rabbi father, is the secular humanist who demands
certainty.
Chaim Potok (1929-2002)
The Book of Lights is the kind of novel that demands a lot from
the reader. It is well worth it. Shalom.
Works Cited
Soll, W. (Spring, 1989). Chaim Potok's Book of
LIghts: Reappropriating Kabbalah in the Nuclear Age. Religion &
Literature, 111-135.
Sternlicht, S. (2000). Chaim Potok: A Critical
Companion. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press.
