By YEHIEL GRENIMANNPainting by Pepe Fainberg(photo credit: PEPE FAINBERG)
CHAIM POTOK’S 1981 book “The Book of Lights” plays with metaphors of fire and light. His main character, Gershon Loran, a rabbinical student, then a chaplain with the US Army in Korea, is preoccupied with their enigmatic nature. He engages throughout the novel in the study of Kabbalah: the Zohar, the 13th century work embodying Kabbalistic teachings, can be translated as the “Book of Light.”Through his character’s musings, Potok highlights the nature of fire and light as sources of both creativity and destruction in the world. Fires burn in Brooklyn, destroying old buildings; fire destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Fire also keeps Loran alive in the freezing winter of Korea, even on Shabbat, thanks to his non-Jewish assistant who relights a fire extinguished on Shabbat, a fire the young rabbi cannot rekindle because of the biblical injunction against doing so on the holy day.The fires of the atomic bomb dropped in Japan a decade earlier had created a terrible phenomenon of destruction, which Potok calls “death light.” Those bombs had unleashed enormous human destructive potential – in a sense the ability to reverse the process of creation. The world was created with God’s words “Let there be light” and there was light. Now man was able to use that light to destroy his world. That potential is still with us.The prohibition against burning fire on the Sabbath: “You shall kindle no fire throughout your settlements on the Sabbath day” is one of the very few explicit statements in the Torah about how to observe Shabbat.The sages learned 39 categories of creative work forbidden on the Sabbath from the opening juxtaposition in the Vayakhel-Pekudei Torah portion of a general statement regarding not working on the Sabbath and the detailed instructions for building the tabernacle that follow. According to Tractate Shabbat of the Babylonian Talmud: “Again they sat and pondered: Regarding what we learned, the principal categories of labor are 40 less one – to what do they correspond? – Said R. Hanina b. Hama to them: To the forms of labor in the Tabernacle.”But why was fire singled out in addition to that general prohibition? As we see above, Potok was grappling with the idea that this wondrous source of light and heat is also dangerous stuff.The medieval Biblical exegete Sforno, for instance, regards the function of fire as a precondition to all forms of creative work. “Even though kindling fire is on the whole destructive, nevertheless, since it makes all, or most, forms of work possible, it is forbidden on Shabbat.”The Israeli Torah scholar Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg in her 2001 book “The Particulars of Rapture – Reflections on Exodus” comments: “The paradox is arresting. Fire is destructive: therefore it should be permitted on Shabbat. But fire is necessary for many forms of creative work: therefore it is forbidden. The ambiguity of fire – destructive and creative – is intimated here.”Another story often compared to the building of the Tabernacle is that of the sin of the golden calf. Here, too, the dangerous, ambiguous nature of fire appears.When Moshe asks Aharon about what he has done, he answers as follows: “I said to them: Whoever has gold take it off! They gave it to me and I hurled it into the fire and out came this calf!” This is not what the Torah describes only a few verses earlier as having actually happened. It does, however, reflect on the possible magical power of fire – the power to create but also to destroy.The texts hint, too, of another kind of fire or light, as does Potok in his novel, that of the dangers of human passion in the service of “higher goals.” Potok’s character sees this passion in the idealism of American scientists, and understands that the consequences of this passion are destructive.The Torah itself can also be a consuming fire, as I have too often seen in my human rights work here in Israel and in the occupied Palestinian territories, and it can be used, or rather abused, for false worship (avoda zara) as in the story of the golden calf. Screaming young settler mothers, carrying babies, blocking the tractors of Palestinian farmers working their own land, and religious justification of the daily humiliation and control of Palestinians in Israeli controlled areas are examples of this abuse.I pray that we succeed in our religious and secular lives as Jews, as individuals, as communities and as a nation, to find the balance between the fiery passion of faith (inspired by the glory of divine light) and the necessary discipline of halakha, and the moral and ethical teachings of the generations.And the aim of that balance is to fulfill the Biblical injunction: Choose life! Rabbi Yehiel Grenimann heads the Rabbis for Human Rights’ Occupied Territories Department, and is the author of the 2011 novel ‘Far Away From Where?’
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