Why books make you foolish: Lessons from Harry Potter.

'Never trust something if you don't know where it keeps its brain'. In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets *SPOILER* Arthur Weasley reprimands his daughter Ginny for allowing herself to be lured into writing to an invisible stranger within a diary who turned out to be the young Lord Voldemort. Voldemort ended up possessing Ginny and were it not for Harry and Ron's heroics, would not have lived to tell the tale.

In studying Jewish texts we often don't know the brain behind the books or particularly care, either. If we study a work of halacha, a view and discussion is presented detached from life, background and personality of the people who wrote it. Some argue that this doesn't matter, it is the points that count. But to me it does - particularly when we take life lessons from the books. 

How do we translate words from a page into daily life that we experience at every given moment? If we take the words too literally we can find them utterly disconnected from anything that we experience in our own lives and it is this problem that I believe lies at the heart of much rabbinic and religious leadership today - an inability to understand two domains simultaneously: The penetrating, careful and loyal engagement with our religious texts and a deep understanding of real human life; the ability to see both domains as crucial to a vibrant religious existence.

What do I mean? In Judaism our books are the source of our wisdom. Many sermons will start along the lines of : 'It says in Sefer/book x, Gemarah y etc.' But quoting a book will never enable us to gauge the human life element lying behind the words. We know that life is ever-changing, dynamic, complex and can not be reduced to a list of words. How God relates to our ups, downs and hurts can't be read to us dispassionately from a list of sources, irrespective of their sanctity.

I have noticed the disconnect between 'book world' and 'real world' when rabbis or speakers make a generalising joke about women or gay people for example, which makes many of the congregants cringe uneasily. Jokes and attitudes that were acceptable twenty years ago are off-colour today. To be truly respected by people you have to understand how they think and feel. 

It may not bother them in the slightest, 'The rabbi was controversial today? Oooh what did he say? etc.' But it shows something is missing in that we have placed religion in a compartment reserved for the texts associated with it - as long as he can tell us if our pans are kosher we'll keep him, as long as he gives a good gemarah shiur etc. The book is there but where is it's brain?

The issue here is that it shows that the rabbi, who represents Judaism, is a figure who isn't associated by his community as possessing a mature understanding of human beings or society.

Too often it seems that the connection between a deep understanding of ourselves, of our place in the world and our relationship with God through the Torah is hidden rather than magnified by teachers educated in the (usually) Yeshivish world of books. Quotes - tick. Knowledge of religious material - tick. Wisdom? Insight? That's for the psychologists, for the famous scientists, maybe  a particularly kind of one-in-a-million rabbi who writes famous books and does world tours. Or alternatively, 'Go and look in a mussar book for that or listen to Kiruv rabbi x!'. 

Sources, sources. We love our sources. Text-based shiurim are contrasted to airy-fairy fluff. But sources are only as insightful as the one reading them, and  the extent they can grasp the concepts and relate them to the broader understanding of where the source is coming from. There is so much 'Rabbi x said this Rabbi y said that' that we act as though the whole life of that person can be summarised by a line that they may have written (probably misquoted and out of context) in a book somewhere. 

But we know that if we were in the same position and that's all people thought about our lives we would be very disappointed. It would be like building a profile of ourselves from our text messages or tweets. Sometimes its better to put the books down before we lose ourselves too much in a world built entirely of them. Otherwise we may end up speaking to Voldemort and not even realise it.