Now finishing his second year as a Wesleyan faculty member, Assistant Professor of Religion Elisha Russ-Fishbane currently teaches two classes: RELI372: Jewish Politics, Jewish Power, and RELI286: The Examined Life. He received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2009; before joining the Wesleyan faculty, he was the Tikvah Postdoctoral Fellow at Princeton University.

Russ-Fishbane’s current work focuses on the interaction and intersection and of Jewish and Islamic cultures, and he recently finished writing his book, “Judaism, Sufism, and the Pietists of Medieval Egypt: A Study of Abraham Maimonides and His Circle,” to be published next year. In a conversation with The Argus, Russ-Fishbane shared the intricate and intimate romance he has with books.

 

The Argus: What’s on your bookshelf?

Elisha Russ-Fishbane: At first, the thought occurred to me that “What’s on my bookshelf” is maybe the wrong question to ask, because the books that are on my bookshelf are not the books that I’m reading right now. If you want to know what I’m reading, what’s bothering me, [and] what’s on my mind at the moment, the question, I guess, would be “What’s on your desk?” or “What books are on your night table or wherever else you keep your books?” But then the truth is, as I thought about it, the books on anyone’s bookshelf are a collection of stories about the many lives that we each have as a part of our life story.

One of my greatest pleasures is to wander the stacks of libraries. To surprise myself, sometimes I’ll pick something random [as a] a starting point and then figure out what my eye turns to nearby in that section—what I’m interested in exploring at that moment. But [there is] something amazing about the American tradition of libraries that is very different, at least from the European one, which typically has a closed stack tradition, where you have to know what you are looking for. In the American system, most of the time, there is this open stack philosophy, where you can browse, and you can be surprised. When I was in college, I used to like to stay in the library after hours even after it closed and spend the night with whatever books came to my attention. There is something magical and almost majestic about the surprise of the books that can come your way when you are in a library of that size.

But the library of an individual is nothing really other than a whole series of stories about that person’s life. There is a wonderful story, or maybe a private reverie that was published as a story, written by Walter Benjamin, a German Jewish intellectual who wrote an essay called “Unpacking My Library.” Really, the essay is [about] what happens when you move and you have to pack up your books. Each time you pack up your books, you have to look through them and over them, especially the ones you haven’t looked over in a long time. And it happens when you unpack your books, even more, because then you really have to think about where to place them again.

But what happens when you look over old books is you are reminded of the story behind each book. I know that we are now living an increasingly digital age. My oldest son, who is an avid reader, is already really excited about the idea of getting a Kindle, or a Nook, or something like that. And I’m a really big supporter of literacy in all forms—audio books, e-readers, whatever. But there is a very different experience that you have with a physical book. First is the feeling of a book that has been loved—the smell, the touch. There is a kind of romance that you have with the book. When you open a book and you want to get to know what’s inside it, and you keep coming back to it. [One] of the great joys of the classics is that you don’t want to leave [the book] alone, you want to keep coming back to it.

In fact, there is a wonderful tradition, or ritual, in Judaism, which has all really has become, at least in the rabbinic manifestations over the centuries, a great deal about culture of learning. One of the great rituals I really enjoy [happens] after you complete a tractate of Talmud….You say, “Will return to you, so-and-so tractate. And we hope that you return to us.” And, in fact, [this] is repeated in this almost magical way three times. And something about a book that you fall in love with, whether [the book] is something you spent a long time reading or you something that you didn’t but are completely absorbed by in the moment, keeps drawing you back.

 

A: It sounds like you view a book as almost a person.

ER: A book is very much that kind of a friendship. In a way, our relationship with books is very much [like] our relationship with people. Some books, we read because we are obligated to read them, while we have so many different people we have to forge relationships with that are not part of our initial calculus. And then there are those surprising and wonderful moments where we encounter someone or a book that doesn’t let go of you and that reminds you of something primordial about this relationship that was meant to be. Like a good friend, you don’t let it go very far, or [it is not] very long until you come back to it.

Lately, a lot of the books that I like to read for just pure enjoyment are actually not adult books, [but] children’s stories. I have kids just at that age where they love a good story. And we like to go for a walk, and, “Aba,” [“father” in Hebrew], they call me, “tell us a story.” And I’ll kind of tease them and say, “When we go for our next walk.” It kind of gives me time to prepare for a story. But I have bookshelves at home where I collect books of stories for children, not picture book stories, just to give me ideas. Through these stories, I like to give them a window into classic Jewish stories. They go to a Jewish school, and a lot of what you learn in any kind of school, you don’t learn always the colorful stories that excite you.

And then there are whole worlds of books that are not here—my Jewish books that are mostly at home.

 

A: Are those for studies or personal enjoyment?

ER: It’s a little bit of both. Because the work that I do as a scholar utilizes those kinds of books.

 

A: Could you tell me a little bit about your work?

ER: Yes. My scholarship combines the libraries of Judaism and Islam. [On the leftmost set of bookshelves in my office] I have books on Jewish subjects and [the next set] on Islamic subjects. And these [books of the rightmost shelves] are, funnily enough, from the library. Keeping them in one place to make sure I remember to return them at one point. And [the fourth set] are books from different periods of time.

Before I got into Judeo-Islamic studies [after college], I spent a year in Rome. When I was in Rome, I lived a significant period of time in couple of different monasteries. These are books that take me back to those days. It was also in that year when I was in Rome that we as Americans experienced 9/11. And it shook me very deeply. I knew that my trajectory would ultimately land me in a classroom [because] I wanted to be a teacher. But I was very much interested in so many different things. And it was that moment I realized I wanted to dedicate my scholarship to a project of Jewish-Islamic reconciliation.

So I ended up going to a graduate school, working in that area [of] intersections of Jewish-Islamic cultures. My book that I just finished and that is going to be published by Oxford University Press next year is a book on [the] Jewish-Sufi movement in Medieval Egypt. It captures my interest in the ways Jewish and Islamic communities and cultures overlap. That is an ongoing interest of mine. A lot of books on my bookshelf are Sufi books; there are a lot of stories about how I found these books. That’s the kind of literature I work with [on] a regular basis. [Most books are in] Arabic, and some [are in] Persian. On the Jewish side, you might expect a lot of Hebrew, [but] a lot of what I work with is Judeo-Arabic, which is an Arabic language in Hebrew letters [with] a bunch of Hebrew and Aramaic expressions peppered throughout the language.

And yet the books I have at home are traditional Hebrew books—a rabbinic library, for lack of a better term, [including the] Talmud that I referred to before and a bunch of commentaries, because I like to have them at my fingertips at home. One of my reading practices, which is maybe not so typical as others we talked about, is a practice of reading that is common in Jewish communities: [reading] some of that formative Jewish literature on a daily basis. My grandmother used to always tell me which prophet she was reading that week. But in the things that I read slowly each day, this is a different kind of reading. The medieval Catholic tradition used to call [this kind of reading] Lectio Divina, or “Divine Reading,” which is interpreted to mean a reading that is meditated—a slow reading.

 

A: So, in that specific case, would reading be more of a spiritual practice than an intellectual process?

ER: Yes, very much so. And that goes to what I also love to do: to read and recite classical Hebrew poetry. This is often not a matter of reading but recollecting. I like to memorize these poems and then recollect them and often put music to them. So a different type of relationship to the books. I always make sure that my poetry books are not too far away. And then, I guess you can say that the meditative reading that I was talking about before is a lot like reading poetry. You read it for its nuances, for a slow, careful absorbing.

 

A: It seems like you have various relationships with many different books. How many bookshelves do you have?

ER: I don’t know; my kids like to count the books, but I leave that up to them. [One of my sons] came to [my] office last week, and he [was counting] the books. I remember distinctly as a child I did the same thing to my father’s books. My father was a scholar of Judaic studies [as well], and I used to lie on the floors of his study and count his books. And there is something magical about those moments. Not just about the books but about the fact that my father was home in his office at the same time. I sort of associated scholarship as combination of both a life absorbed by reading [and] the flexibility that a teacher’s job gives to read sometimes in the office and sometimes at home. One of my greatest pleasures now is when my children hang out in my office and check out the books—whether they are counting them or telling me which books they want me to read next. There are all sorts of pleasures that repeat themselves around books.

 

This article was edited for length.

that is common in Jewish communities: [reading] some of that formative Jewish literature on a daily basis. My grandmother used to always tell me which prophet she was reading that week. But in the things that I read slowly each day, this is a different kind of reading. The medieval Catholic tradition used to call [this kind of reading] Lectio Divina, or “Divine Reading,” which is interpreted to mean a reading that is meditated—a slow reading.

A: So, in that specific case, would reading be more of a spiritual practice than an intellectual process?
ER: Yes, very much so. And that goes to what I also love to do: to read and recite classical Hebrew poetry. This is often not a matter of reading but recollecting. I like to memorize these poems and then recollect them and often put music to them. So a different type of relationship to the books. I always make sure that my poetry books are not too far away. And then, I guess you can say that the meditative reading that I was talking about before is a lot like reading poetry. You read it for its nuances, for a slow, careful absorbing.

A: It seems like you have various relationships with many different books. How many bookshelves do you have?
ER: I don’t know; my kids like to count the books, but I leave that up to them. [One of my sons] came to [my] office last week, and he [was counting] the books. I remember distinctly as a child I did the same thing to my father’s books. My father was a scholar of Judaic studies [as well], and I used to lie on the floors of his study and count his books. And there is something magical about those moments. Not just about the books but about the fact that my father was home in his office at the same time. I sort of associated scholarship as combination of both a life absorbed by reading [and] the flexibility that a teacher’s job gives to read sometimes in the office and sometimes at home. One of my greatest pleasures now is when my children hang out in my office and check out the books—whether they are counting them or telling me which books they want me to read next. There are all sorts of pleasures that repeat themselves around books.

This article was edited for length.