Like Gan Eden

Achad Ha-Am (born Asher Ginsberg) was raised in a Chasidic family and educated in a cheder. But he was also drawn to the world of the Jewish Enlightenment (Haskalah), as well as to Russian and European literature. Though he gradually moved away from traditional Jewish life, he never left it entirely. In an uncharacteristically revealing article, “Ketavim Balim” (A Tattered Manuscript), he revealed the tension that this meeting of two worlds created for him, when he wrote in 1888:

During those long winter evenings, at times when I’m sitting in the company of enlightened men and women, sitting at a table with treif [non-kosher] food and cards, and my heart is glad and my face bright, suddenly then—I don’t know how this happens—suddenly before me is a very old table with broken legs, full of tattered [sacred] books (sefarim balim), torn and dusty books of genuine value, and I’m sitting alone in their midst, reading them by the light of a dim candle, opening up one and closing another, not even bothering to look at their tiny print . . . and the entire world is like the Garden of Eden.