Posted by Lisa Laree to Beer Lahai Roi
I have lamented before about how difficult it seems to be to find time to just READ BOOKS. I have blogging friends that I follow who read an amazing number of books...several per month...and I am jealous. I am a fast reader, and I love reading...why do I have such trouble finding time to sit and read?
Because the little tyrant in my brain screams that I should be doing something else. Something...productive. As if I didn't have a house to clean and a budget to balance and laundry to do and a Bible to study and a journal to reflect in and people to pray for and fabric to sew and and and and...
All of it good and necessary. So how can I just sit down and read?
Well, reading is good and necessary and I just finished the second of Chaim Potok's books written from the first-person perspective of a young man named Reuven Walter. I read the first book in January and thought I had blogged about it...but I can't find it so either I didn't write about it or I wrote about it on Facebook or some such thing.
So...a flashback as to why I read them at all, since I can't just link to the post I thought I wrote.
On our second or third weekend trip to Gorham's Bluff (7 or 8 years ago) I found The Promise amongst the books in our room (there are books EVERYWHERE at GB; one of the reasons I love the place). I skimmed through it while we were there and found myself wondering about the characters...the story line had a familiar feel to it...and I finally traced it down to a movie I had seen a wee bit of decades ago, with Robby Benson playing the son of a Hasidic Rabbi who did not speak to him and figured out that the book was a sequel to that story. I didn't really get all the details because I only had like, a day, to read the book amongst the hiking and swimming and eating but one thing really stood out to me...the incredible minds of the characters in the book. Brilliant scholars. But, like the doofus that I was, I didn't make note of either the author or the name of the book and I kinda forgot about it.
Fast forward to January of this year; I was searching Amazon for, I think, the soundtrack for The Chosen series and the first book popped up. I read the synopsis and realized that, omigosh, this is the original story about Reuven and his friend the Hasidic Rabbi's son. So I ordered it, and then sat up until the wee small hours one cold night and read it through. Highly recommend, and I wish I had written about it back in January because I want to focus on book two today.
Because, after reading the first book, I found I wanted to go back and read the second. I dunno why I didn't just order them both at the same time...I think it was the weight of all the other unread books sitting about that kept me from finding it and adding it to the shopping cart at that time...but I finally did order it last month and re-read it over the past three or four days.
I am going to be forever peeved at the books in the set being in different formats but I took what I could get, lol.
Once again, I was amazed at the scholarship of the characters....their ability to recall obscure references in multiple sources in order to explain difficult passages in the texts they were studying. I at once felt ignorant and unlearned and rather stupid because I knew I could not converse with anyone on any subject at such a level and also rather jealous of the opportunity to have such discussions. But in actually reading through the story I found much more in the conflict recorded, which seemed to be paralleled to an unreal degree in today's world.
Reuven struggles...really struggles...with his theology, finding himself lodged squarely between ultra-conservatives who look at any new approach as heretical and threatening to people of faith, and the ultra-liberal folks who had abandoned all belief in God but felt the traditions and practices were important. Although Reuven doesn't particularly talk about his own faith, he clearly states that he doesn't like the conclusions and cannot agree that God is a nice archaic idea...even though he personally likes and admires the people who are promoting those conclusions. He has a harder time reconciling the faith of the ultra-orthodox folks with their rigid and even angry behavior; there are people in that camp he honestly doesn't like much. There are also others in the ultra conservative camp he likes very much, even though he can't understand their legalistic traditions and behaviors.
Sound familiar? Timely? The book was written in 1969.
I found myself identifying strongly with Reuven's struggles, for all that I am nowhere near his brilliance. How does one influence people to love God and his Word...when there are folks who decry the very existence of God on one hand, and people who perceive any questioning and honest seeking for answers as heresy on the other? If the second group is all too willing to condemn, cut off and reject people in the first group...and maybe even those in between...how can there ever be any bridge crossing that gap?
Potock writes, in the form of an 'aha' moment that Reuven has:
...the months of seesawing between the two worlds had finally ended for me this night with nothing but an awareness of how deep the separating chasm really was and how impossible it seemed to bridge it -- unless you were...rooted deeply enough in one world to enable you to be concerned only with the people of the other and not about their ideas.
That paragraph actually jerked me out of the story and I re-read it over two or three times as an abstract thought, apart from Reuven's dilemma. Am I rooted deeply enough in my faith to be concerned only with people who disagree, without being hung up about their ideas or beliefs? Because ultimately it is the PEOPLE who matter.
There was another thought that I found in the text...and I wondered if I were just seeing it there because of my particular viewpoint or if it was something the author intended all along...but another character has a struggle that parallels Reuven's, but from the opposite viewpoint. He was raised with tradition but no god. The traditions of religion but no faith or substance to it. His parents didn't understand his conflict...they were "enlightened" enough to reject the medieval fairy tales so of course their son would not struggle with them. And...he didn't. But he could find no real meaning to his life and he couldn't understand why his parents would subject themselves...and him... to the rejection of the people who felt attacked by the promotion of religion with no god. I saw in that the pointlessness of religion without God. Morality and tradition by themselves cannot carry anyone through the difficulties that will come at some point in every life. It takes a surety that God exists and that he actually does care for every person...a flat rebuttal to the troubled young man's mother's viewpoint.
And, of course, that's the answer to bridging the gap. Intellectual answers won't do it.
It needs Holy Spirit. Which was, understandably, missing from the narrative.
But it only needs a nudge to take that revelation a bit further...be concerned with the people, and let Holy Spirit take care of their ideas.
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