Reading and Love
February 11, 2022
Congregation B’nai B’rith, Santa Barbara CA
Today is my mother’s 89th birthday and in her honor I want to share with you tonight some of what my mother taught me, when I was young, about the sacred act of reading.
I was five years old, my brother David was four and Sharon was two when our parents took us to live in London, England for a year. While they were waiting for their belongings to arrive, they had with them exactly one children’s book, Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. So The Wind in the Willows became our family Bible. And Mole, Rat, Badger and Toad became as close to us as members of our family.
Eventually, other books arrived, and my mother, who had been a children’s librarian before I was born, introduced us to the classics. Winnie the Pooh. Charlotte’s Web. The Phantom Tollbooth. Make Way for Ducklings. Just So Stories. Blueberries for Sal. Bear Party. Good Night Moon. Harold and the Purple Crayon. Madeline. Babar. The Story of Ping. The Story of Ferdinand. Mary Poppins. We heard these stories from our mother’s mouth, three of us children sitting together with her on the sofa, her arms around us, the scent of her perfume in our nostrils. Our mother loved us by reading to us. She loved us also by feeding us, and by dressing us, and by kissing us goodnight and by millions of acts of sacrifice and devotion.
But tonight I want to speak of reading and love, which we learned from our mother, and have sought to pass on to our children and our students.
When we were in elementary school, my mother trained to become a Junior Great Books facilitator. In those days, Junior Great Books was an afterschool program, for kids who loved reading so much that they wanted to get together after school and spend more time reading and discussing. The stories were not juvenile. They were stories written by famous authors, and were carefully chosen by the national staff of the program. These were Great Books. And my mother and her friend and co-facilitator Bobbi would sit at our kitchen table for hours, preparing for their sessions. The goal of all those hours of preparation was to come up with good questions. Questions to which my mother and Bobbi really wanted to know the answer. Questions to which they did not know the answer. It’s harder than you might think.
As facilitator, my mother would wrestle for hours to come up with good questions, and for the kids in the group, she had just one rule. When you offer an answer, back up your answer with evidence from the text. That is how her demand became implanted in my brain: “where do you see that in the text?”
Even though Junior Great Books was not in any way a Jewish institution, I’d say the wisdom of the approach is deeply Jewish. It recognizes that when we read together, with a group or with just one other person, the text is the thing we have in common. Each one of us has our own unique and individual life, but when we read a text together, we enter into a shared world. And when we share our deep, honest, open questions with each other, then we begin to really learn about each other. We enter into relationship with each other. Love happens.
After my mother had worked for some years as a Jr. Great Books facilitator, she became the regional coordinator of the program, and a time came when someone asked her if she would lead book discussions with the prisoners in the Rochester jail. She said yes! So there she was, a very small suburban housewife and mother, going into the jail and guiding some fairly scary looking men through discussions. Always demanding: “back up your opinion with evidence from the text.” After a number of months, it happened one day that she was in the room with her group of prisoners and the guard stepped out of the room. My mother was having the prisoners take turns reading and one of the men refused to stop reading! My mother told him he had to let the next person read and the man actually threatened her. Still she insisted that he let the next guy read, and he backed down. She is small, but fierce. If my mother was in our Agnon zoom reading group, with that collection of high-powered intellectuals, I honestly believe that she would demand that people back up their comments with evidence from the text. For my mother, reading together is an act of worship. Reading is the way we love one another.
My mother has managed to transmit her intense relationship with reading to her children. I will share one story of the central way that reading has shaped my own life. When I was twenty-one, a young woman from England came to visit my family in Rochester, and had dinner at our house. The next day I was driving back to Boston and she was heading to Cape Cod so I asked if she would like to spend the seven hours from Rochester to Boston in the car with me. That young woman was Marian.
We ended up spending several days together in Boston, and became friends. I honestly don’t remember most of the things we talked about, but I do remember one conversation in particular. We were talking about Greek mythology and Marian began to speak about the story of Theseus, the young man who went off to fight the Minotaur. According to the legend, Theseus told his father that if he survived his quest, he would return with white sails on his ship. But that if he were dead, the sails on the ship returning without him would be black. He did survive, but in the joy and excitement of his triumphant return, he forgot to change the sails to white. Seeing the black sails on the ship returning, the grieving father threw himself off the cliff into the sea. Now here is the point of this story. As we were talking about the story, Marian got choked up and told me how deeply the story affected her. That is the moment I fell in love with her. In our family, we love each other by reading together.
In our siddur, the Jewish prayerbook, the prayers that precede the Shma in both the evening and the morning service both begin with the word ahava, which means “love.” Both prayers begin by speaking of God’s love for us, but then suddenly shift to speaking of Torah, the book at the heart of our religion. These prayers teach us the deep truth that for a Jew, one way we experience God’s love is by reading a book together. A mother reads a book to her child, and the love flowing between the two of them is that child’s first experience of God. Two friends read a book together, and God is speaking to them both in the empty space between them.
Here are the words as they appear in our CBB prayerbook:
The Torah was first given by mother to child, and then again by a man to his friend.
Love and language come into the world together.
In text and commandment, passed down with love by parents and teachers,
We have heard and have learned Your word.
Over the past couple of months, as my mother approached her 89th birthday, she and I have begun a new ritual, after I join her for dinner in her apartment at Vista del Monte. We read together. Actually, I read to her, and lately we have been reading The Wind in the Willows. I have been taken aback by how sophisticated that book is, how difficult the language is, and how deep and powerful the emotions are that Kenneth Graham manages to conjure. It is hard to believe that this book is written for children. I have been reminded of how much children are able to absorb, and how happy they are to sit and hear a story told with love, even when there is much they do not understand.
But most moving of all has been the experience of reading the words of Wind in the Willows to my mother, who first read them to me exactly 60 years ago. Hearing her voice, my mother’s voice as a young woman, coming back through the cries and whispers of my own voice, reading the same old words which have not changed in 60 years. Welcoming Mole, Rat, Badger and Mr Toad back into our family, and realizing that they really never left.
I wish my mother a very happy birthday tonight and I thank her for teaching me the way that love and reading come into the world together.
Shabbat shalom.