Exhuming a book: unburying a dictionary

When the going gets tough, the tough should retain their values and not trade them for easier or more expedient interpretations.

an image from the facsimile copy of the Sarajevo Haggadah at the Robarts Library

When I buried the book in the video below, I initially was thinking about the Jewish practice of giving ritual funerals for holy books and then burying them in sacred ground. Of the mystical, numinous, antinomial sense of the book. Although this book is a dictionary.

But now I’m thinking about exhumation, of the recovery and preservation of books. Of this book. What it means to unbury it: to bring it to light again, to rescue or resurrect it. Not to forget its words or allow them to be absorbed in the earth as worm word salad.

I don’t want to forget the meaning of words. I don’t want a tradition, my tradition or any other, to forget the knowledge and values it has come to from hard thinking, feeling and experience. From the collective wisdom of many. When the going gets tough, the tough should retain their values and not trade them for easier or more expedient interpretations.

I feel that too many have done this and turned aside from compassion and empathy for the other, the “stranger. If those who claim the bible as their holy book are looking for guidance (as for me, I look for decency, morality and wisdom wherever I can find it) I think of what it says in Leviticus,

When a stranger sojourns with you in your land, you shall not do him wrong. You shall treat the stranger who sojourns with you as the native among you, and you shall love him as yourself, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.

I’m certain this guidance is not conditional. (And as we consider this, let’s set aside for the moment who is from a different land, or who is not estranged from a land, and so on. Let’s say a stranger is someone who is not you, or your family or your immediate community.)

That holy book, buried or unburied, says that we should treat the other with empathy and compassion. (Not, for example, withholding food to punish a people for not locating, exhuming and returning bodies fast enough from under the devastation and rubble of a prolonged bombing campaign. It does say in the Passover Haggadah, “Let all who are hungry come and eat.”)

I do like that my unburied book has become a place that sustains growing things. It has integrated its katabasis journey under the earth, it has learned from the world.

The unburied book speaks of the possibility of values and ideas surviving even the most abject of circumstances. I think of the books hidden in ghettos during the Holocaust: The Paper Brigade that smuggled books into the Vilna Ghetto to keep them safe. Or Dervis Korkut, the Muslim librarian at the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, who at great risk to his life, hid the beautiful medieval Sarajevo Haggadah from the Nazis by concealing it in his pants.

The book exists to testify to the possibility of books. To the possibility of considered thought and emotion. Of writing down ideas and values so that they can be subject to scrutiny, examination, and rigorous evaluation. So that we can go back and remember what we thought, what we hoped for. We can think about who and what we left out, who and what we did not consider or who and what we have forgotten about. A book exists to testify to the possible. The steady reminder of our best selves and the best of what our cultures have learned and valued. We can compare what we have expediently forgotten or twisted or enlisted as a result of fear or trauma.

When we are scared or troubled, when we feel threatened or a risk, we can return to what we have learned and thought carefully about in the best times, knowing that worse times may come. When I’m driving in winter and snow is falling and I can’t see where I’m going, perhaps my car begins to skid, I look for the lines drawn on the road in better weather to help me know where the road is.