Professor Yehudah Mirsky
Spotlight
In the Bible, the area of the Mikdash (the ancient Holy Temple) is sometimes referred to as Eretz Hachaim, the Land of Life - because you are connected to God but also because you are connected to the Jewish people – past, present, and future. And that connection is the Bible's vision of the meaning of immortality. I'm one of those who spent years in the old Library, who loved it, as a kind of only-in-Jerusalem Beit Midrash , legendary scholars sitting next to high school kids, Haredim and non-Jewish scholars, all together, juxtapositions that were moving and comical all at once. Like many old timers, I was kvetchy and crochety about the new building. Who needs it? The first thing to tell me that I was wrong about that was seeing the throngs of young people, men and women, students and soldiers, Jews and non-Jews, secular and religious, making the new Library their regular venue for study and learning. And then, over time, I began to feel what I briefly described above. That in this beautiful, august, inspiring, yet deeply comforting structure, at once pulsating with more ideas than you can imagine and yet so quiet that you can actually sit and think, there's a current of something deeply and truly alive. When I'm in the Library building, I really feel like I am in the best way dissolving into all of Jewish history and body and spirit like a drop in an ocean.
Professor Yehudah Mirsky is a scholar of Jewish Thought and an established reader at the National Library of Israel
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