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Brent, Khazeh, and others interested in this thread, Allah’u’Abha! You’re discussion may possibly be my favorite topic in relation
to the Writings and in all the religious texts with which I am familiar.
The posts on this thread make me so happy to see Baha’is engaging the
idea of the Book (bitter and otherwise). To begin my offering on the
topic of the Book, I have chosen to listen to the powerfully moving music of
the Jewish-Yemenite singer Ofra Haza while I write. The significance of
this choice will become clear in what I have to say. What I have to share is deeply informed by my own tribal roots as a
Jewish-American woman and as a literature professor. The very idea of the
Book has informed my being from the moment of my conception from my father who
was a German-Jew. My thoughts on the topic of the Book are also informed
by my work in Native American Studies and folklore/oral tradition. Let me begin with a brief historical overview. For the vast
majority of the sacred traditions of the world with their respective
Manifestations of God, the Word of God was transmitted to the
Manifestations’ peoples orally in the form of chants, prayers, songs,
stories. My people, the Hebrew people, were one of the first peoples’ of
the world to receive the Word of God in the form of a Book. Even before
the Torah (the Pentateuch or the first five Books of the Hebrew scriptures),
Moses brought to us the Tablet bearing the Ten Commandments from God. For
every Jew (religious or otherwise, practicing Jew, Baha’i, member of
another faith-based tradition, or secular), our lives and history have been
deeply informed by this Book (always bitter, but also always
joyous)—bitter because of the sacrifices and sufferings that come with
human life in the world and in our spiritual growth; joyous because of the same
and our wondrous connections to our Lord, Adonai (our Creator Whose Essence is
fundamentally unpronounceable and, thereby, unknowable—as evidenced in
the unpronounceable tetragrammaton YHWH). This Book? There is nothing else that I am capable of saying
right now. Let me share some of the words of one of our greatest Jewish
poets, the Egyptian Edmond Jabes. Then I will conclude with a few words
of my own. And please note that what follows are the lines of poetry, and
they need to be read accordingly. “Eternity of the book, from conflagration to conflagration . .
.” (_The Book of Margins_ 38) “To fear God,” he said, “is, in short, to fear the
Book.” (_Book of Margins_ 55) “All books answer the questioning of a single one” (_BM_
80). “Making a book could mean exchanging the void of writing for writing the void” (_BM_ 106).
[even typing this makes me cry, so many generations of filling up the perceived
emptiness of God’s voice with our own voices so as to not hear the
silence that we feared was there but, in fact, never was—two thousand
years is such a long time to survive with the pain from the illusory perception
of God’s silence, of the Book once open but then closed, written but unfinished
and not continued] “The book’s glance: glance of closed eyes.” (_BM_
116) “The book,” he had noted, “does not open from left to
right of from right to left, but from top to bottom: one page in the sky, one
page in the dust.” (_BM_ 122) “In the wake of a book already old, yet still present. In
the wake of a book’s cry of pain.” (_BM_ 142) “The believing Jew cannot go toward God except through the
Book. But his commentary on the original Text is not a commentary on the divine
Word, only on human words dazzled by the latter like moths by the lamp.
It annotates the frenzy of the moth, not the blinding light.” (_BM_ 174) “ . . . about being faithful to a word from the desert, which the
Jew made his own because it had come out of all our crumbled words, and about
being faithful to an absolute, mythical book, which every book tries in vain to
reproduce.” (_BM_ 175) “For the book does not seek refuge outside its words, but in
them, hiding in their heart of hearts. So that the book always leads to a
book that remains to be discovered.” (_BM_ 188) “Yukel, how many pages to live, to die, are between you and
yourself, between
the book and leaving the book?” (_The Book of Questions I_ 43) “. . . do I know, in my exile, what has driven me back through
tears and time, back to the wells of the desert where my ancestors had
ventured? There is nothing at the threshold of the open page, it seems,
but this wound of a race born of the book, whose order and disorder are roads
of suffering.” (_The Book of Questions I 25) “Silence of a universe spread out—and over how many
seasons. From now on, all words stand behind the word which
smothered us. Where no letter can speak, the word becomes passage of the
absolute. The desert is ours, with its choked thirst. To
be Jewish is to have left home early and arrived nowhere.” (_The Book of
Questions II_ 439) “O night of our fleeting nights, ocean of our plowed oceans, in
your infinite black the Book of Eternity is written, pursued by our unseaworthy
books.” (_The Book of Resemblances 1_ 57) “God dies in the shelved book and is resurrected in the book that
is opened.” (_BR I_ 57) “It is also a book that closes the book.” (_BR 1_ 58) “And Reb Sullam: ‘What is a book but a bit of fine sand
taken from the desert one day and returned a few steps farther
on?’” (_BR 2_ 1) “Quotation marks are marks our nails have scratched on the wall
of our misery. Our walls were books. Did not Reb Mosri say:
“O that your forehead, eyes, and hands would merge into the wall.
Then you could read God’s petrified words that can only be deciphered
from inside. And you would find the words of our old books with their
wholesome freshness. Your tears would momentarily restore the original
color to their letters faded over the centuries.” (_BR2_ 95) “(They secretly passed the
book around, and everybody read his own history in it, as one reads the absence
of stars in a winter sky.)” (_BR2_ 95) “There are never any books but for one book. There
are never any words but for one word. What fades is but trying to rejoin
the light; what kindles, to rejoin the dark.” (_BR3_ 83) “(‘The practice of the
book is a promise of renewal. The universe metamorphoses from one reading
to the next, so that you read only what expected to be read’ .
. .)” (_BR3_ 88) [For those who are interested, in addition to these cited books, I also
recommend Jabes’s _From the Desert to the Book_, _The Book of Shares_, _A
Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book_, _The Book of Margins_,
and the Edmond Jabes reader _From the Book to the Book_, among his other books.
Most were written in French, remarkably well translated into the English by
poet Rosmarie Waldrop.] [Also, please note that in most of Jabes’s work in English, the
Book of God is not capitalized opening up even greater poetic ambiguity, so we
should not assume that an uncapitalized “book” definitionally
refers to human writing. Again this is the work of a poet.] I have presented papers in the past on the topic of the Book of God in Jabes,
and also in Judaism and the Baha’i Faith at semiotics conferences.
Perhaps one day, I will resurrect one of those papers and revise it for
publication. Ahh, so much interesting work to do. . . . so long as our
words do not egocentrically become mediating barriers that divide our selves
from that Book in which, God willing, our words (lived, spoke, written) and,
thereby, our names appear. My regards to all, Susan Dr. Susan
Berry Brill de Ramirez, Professor of English Department
of English, [EMAIL PROTECTED];
(309) 677-3888; fax (309) 677-4560
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- RE: What is the bitter book? Brill de Ramirez, Susan
- RE: What is the bitter book? Sandra Chamberlain
