Last week I was finally able to make a kind of "pilgrimage" to my favorite non-Jewish place in the country where I've been living since the end of September 2023 - the Russian bookstore in the capital. I last visited it about seven years ago, and ever since then I had been dreaming of returning. At long last, I had the chance to do so thanks to some rather incredible "Divine choreography."
Only after leaving this bookstore and walking through the largest English bookstore in the city did I notice how differently the books in these two places seem to radiate. It reminded me once again of something I've been sensing for quite some time - the physical presence of printed books. With all due respect to ebooks, which I also love, buy, and read, only printed books radiate a certain energy simply by being physically present.
I also realized a parallel between the books on these shelves and the flowers in family gardens. Both absorb the energy of the people who care for them. When I pass a family garden, I can often guess the atmosphere of the household - and when I later meet the people who live there, I usually see that my intuition was right.
But books have, so to speak, an even stronger "life of their own", though they are not biologically alive. What is written inside them - and all the "shoulders" on which each book stands - also shapes the energy they carry.
I sensed this already back in Jerusalem, when I rearranged my personal library. For lack of space, I had divided my books between the living room and the bedroom: academic books in the former, Jewish books in the latter. But after I left academia, I reversed their locations. Since I spent most of my day working from home, I began to feel very clearly the difference in the energy I received from the books that surrounded me in the living room, where I worked.
Before leaving Jerusalem, I had to make a very painful decision about which books to bring with me. From my carefully chosen library of about 1,200 books, I first gave away roughly 500 - mostly academic ones, as you might imagine. The remaining 700 consisted of about 200 dictionaries and 500 Jewish books, mostly Chassidic. I spent an entire month asking myself which 100 books to send.
These books have surrounded me since I moved here a little more than two years ago. Paradoxically, I feel more energy from this small, distilled library than I did from the larger one in Jerusalem. Precisely because I have less, each book matters more; each one receives more of my attention, and in return each one gives me something back - the accumulated energy of thousands of years of Jewish tradition, radiating quietly from their physical presence.