The Book of Lights by Chaim Potok

First published: 1981

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1950-1957

Locale: Brooklyn, Manhattan, Boston, Philadelphia, Korea, Japan, and Jerusalem

Principal Characters:

• Gershon Loran, the protagonist, a Jewish chaplain in Korea
• Arthur Leiden, his roommate in seminary
• Jacob Keter, a professor of Jewish mysticism

The Novel

The Book of Lights is divided into three sections. The first details the seminary days of Gershon Loran and Arthur Leiden at Riverside Hebrew Institute in Manhattan. The second section follows Gershon in his year of chaplaincy duty in Korea right after the war. The third is a moving account of the visit to Kyoto and Hiroshima by Gershon and Arthur who are now reunited.

After his parents were killed in terrorist cross fire in Palestine in 1937, Gershon was taken in by his aunt and uncle. His aging uncle, afflicted with emphysema, attempts to run the decaying apartment house in which they live. The surrounding Brooklyn neighborhood is itself decaying, and there are frequent fires. Gershon is reared in pious Judaism but chooses to attend the nonorthodox Riverside Hebrew Institute. There he is introduced to the academic study of Jewish mysticism by one of his professors, Jacob Keter. Gershon’s plodding, unorganized ways as a student give way to a fervency in his exploration of what Keter called the feeling side of Judaism.

Arthur Leiden becomes Gershon’s roommate at the institute. Arthur, a Harvard graduate, had fled his studies in physics for the rabbinate. He is disorganized, taciturn, with something strange inside waiting to explode. Arthur comes to depend on “dear Gershon” for help in his studies.

Gershon comes to the institute at the outbreak of the Korean war; even after the war has ended, there remains a great need for chaplains for American military personnel stationed in Korea and elsewhere. Indeed, as a condition of graduation, those in the institute are required to make themselves available to the chaplaincy corps. Gershon, without understanding why, volunteers to serve in the army. Nevertheless, his entrance into the service is delayed a year because the institute awards him the first Leiden prize.

The award is named after Arthur’s brother, who was killed during World War II. Gershon learns that Arthur’s father, Charles Leiden, had worked closely with Albert Einstein and other scientists in the development and testing of the first atomic bomb. In retrospect, Gershon realizes that during their seminary days together, Arthur had been haunted by the destructive death light which his father had helped unleash. Arthur had recommended to his parents that Gershon be the first recipient of the Leiden prize.

The award provides a year’s deferment from the service, and Gershon spends the time in study of the Jewish cabala with Jacob Keter. Central to that collection of mystical writings is the Zohar, a series of books describing God and his creation in terms of emanations, the pure radiance of God.

Gershon, after his year of study with Keter, becomes the only Jewish chaplain in Korea, for a time assigned to a medical unit north of Seoul. The debilitating snow and intense heat of Korea provide stark contrast to the sheltered environment of the institute, but for Gershon the experience is a transforming one. Though he continues to study cabala and frequently visits with Keter in visions, his chaplaincy is an active one. He becomes sensitive to his men and is well liked. His management skills and frequent trips to serve other units result in front page write-ups in Stars and Stripes, a boost in the morale of the medical unit, and Gershon’s eventual transfer to division headquarters. There, he learns that chaplain Arthur Leiden has arrived in Korea.

Arthur is desperate to get to Japan, to visit Kyoto and Hiroshima. When the navy refused to provide Arthur with a security clearance (he had signed some left-wing petitions in college), he managed to get accepted by the army. Arthur prevails upon Gershon, and early in 1957 they travel together to Hong Kong and Japan. Arthur is struck by the beauty of Kyoto, its temples and gardens, yet he is filled with darkness when the two enter Hiroshima and stand before the saddle-like monument to those killed in the blast. Arthur searches for words, something to say to atone for the destruction which his father’s work helped bring about. One morning, Arthur stands before the monument and reads from the Psalms, reading of forsakenness and pleading for God’s restoration.

Events move rapidly. Both men return to Korea, but soon Arthur is on board another plane bound for Japan. The plane crashes on takeoff, and Arthur is killed. Later, as Gershon ends his tour of duty in Korea, he visits Arthur’s parents in Boston. They are thankful for Gershon’s friendship with Arthur, and seem themselves to be haunted by the death light. It is here that Gershon learns the secret of Arthur’s love of Kyoto: His mother, an art historian, had indirectly persuaded the government to spare Kyoto, the first intended target of the atomic bomb.

Soon Gershon finds himself in another garden, this time in Jerusalem. He has flown to the home of Jacob Keter, there to study with one of the giants, there to encounter the God of lights.

The Characters

The Book of Lights is the story of two young men and their navigation through an evil and crumbling world. Indeed, when author Chaim Potok brings Albert Einstein onstage to honor the first recipient of the (fictitious) Leiden award, Einstein observes that “loran” has something to do with navigation (it is an acronym for Long Range Navigation) and that in his studies Gershon Loran has set an example for others to follow.

Gershon has long sought the Light that could somehow encompass the death light. At sixteen, he witnesses a dog giving birth on the roof of the family’s old apartment building. Such fecundity triggers an ecstatic vision: Gershon feels for a moment as if he could touch the sky, the very stars. The promise of this moment is fulfilled when he begins to study cabala in seminary; his mystical visions are given legitimacy within the Jewish tradition.

Korea changes him further. His feelings of abandonment, of the randomness of events, are no less strong, but he returns from the service with a new strength. He has learned and suffered much in Korea, but he has survived. His studies in the Zohar, he realizes, provided a curious refuge for gathering the resources within himself needed for facing a demanding chaplaincy. Inwardly, he had done battle with the voices from the other side, the voices that called for him to give up hope and dreams in a broken century.

Gershon finally understands that those voices are not foreign to the Jewish mystical tradition; somehow the voices of despair and the voices of hope are all intertwined. This realization does not explain away evil, yet it means that in the midst of conflict and contradiction, God’s radiance still shines. Personal choices can still be significant.

Jacob Keter, a widower, one of the giants of Jewish mysticism, is Gershon’s mentor. Keter, over six feet tall, mostly bald, incisive, humorless (like Gershon), is a secular Zionist. He explains to Gershon that while the Talmud shows Jews how to act, it is the cabala that tells how Judaism feels, how the world is to be perceived. In one of Gershon’s visions, Keter talks with a Talmud teacher, explaining that cabala was full of poetry and contradiction, giving Judaism its drive and creative genius. It is significant that in the Zohar there are ten emanations of God; the first is called “Keter,” the Crown, from which all other emanations flow.

Arthur Leiden is consumed by his past. He abandons a brilliant career in physics because he is afraid that any advances he might make would only lead to more destruction. His Boston accent, his suaveness and handsomeness, all belie the struggle in Arthur to atone for that in which his parents participated. Mysticism is not for him; cabala is nothing but magic charms and numerology. He seeks a solution in political activism—from signing petitions to trying to organize Korean students to protest the militarization of their country. Yet Arthur is stalked by a vision of his own: the vision of the death light when the bomb was tested at Alamogordo, New Mexico. Arthur calls himself the offspring of killers. He insists that those who died are owed something by those who produced the bomb, but he can discover nothing in himself to bequeath. Arthur’s death merely quiets his frantic voice; it does not atone for the evil.

Critical Context

The Book of Lights grew out of Potok’s experiences as an army chaplain in Korea in the late 1950’s. Though the author originally intended to trace the boyhood of his protagonist in flashbacks, other books intervened to tell the stories: The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), and In the Beginning (1975). Earlier themes developed in those novels appear in The Book of Lights, such as anti-Semitism, textual criticism and Jewish tradition, and narrow fundamentalism’s inability to come to grips with the modern world. Yet here Potok goes beyond controversies within various Jewish traditions to confront the death light that has been let loose upon the world. Real world events no longer filter into the story from newscasts in the background; now the players themselves are brought onstage. Albert Einstein and former president Harry S Truman visit Riverside Hebrew Institute. If this device is not entirely successful (the two men appear larger than life in a kind of television walk-on), nevertheless Potok has avoided a simple formula piece. His descriptions of life as a Korean chaplain are sympathetic and detailed, as are his pictures of academic and Asian cultures.

Potok has written a moving story of the way of practical mysticism. It might perhaps be noted that the author’s father was a Polish émigré, and that Potok’s previous novels have dealt with the conflict of Orthodox Hasidic Judaism and modern Jewish scholarship. According to a noted cabala scholar, in eighteenth century Poland one man provided a link between the development of the Hasidic tradition and that of the cabala: one Abraham Gershon. Gershon Loran is perhaps the fruit of that marriage.

Bibliography

Hock, Zarina Manawwar. “Authority and Multiculturalism: Reflections by Chaim Potok.” Language Arts 72 (April, 1995): 4. Hock discusses Potok’s use of multicultural themes to expose attitudes toward current social issues. She demonstrates how his fiction reflects the battle between traditional and new sources of conduct.

Potok, Chaim. “The Invisible Map of Meaning: A Writer’s Confrontations.” TriQuarterly 84 (Spring, 1992): 17-45. Potok discusses the major theme that runs throughout his works, that of cultural conflict and the influence this conflict has on the direction of an individual life. Potok describes his first encounter with mainstream Western literature and shows how this experience shaped his subsequent writing.

Potok, Chaim. Wanderings: Chaim Potok’s History of the Jews. New York: Fawcett Books, 1990. Potok’s compelling history of the Jews re-creates historical events and explores the many facets of Jewish life through the ages. Although this work does not address Potok’s fiction, it does provide insight into Potok’s ethnic heritage, which has a direct bearing on his writing.

Walden, Daniel, ed. The World of Chaim Potok. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985. This rich resource on the writing of Chaim Potok features critical essays, as well as reviews and a bibliographic essay. It provides valuable insight into Potok’s fiction that can be extended to the entire body of his work. Includes an essay on The Book of Lights.