THE BOOK OF QUESTIONS (Le Livre des questions)

Miscellany by Edmond Jabés, 1963-73

The Book of Questions is the masterpiece of Edmond Jabés. Written from 1963 to 1973, this magnum opus encompasses the Jewish experience in its essence. It is a text that is extremely difficult to read, especially in translation, offering the reader discontinued and disparate sets of short stories, quotations, monologues, dialogues, poems, aphorisms, dedications, some graphisms, and isolated sentences. There is no evident plot or development, simply the presence of recurring voices and addressees. The addressees bear such symbolic names as Yukel, Yaël, Elya, and Aely, all variations on the name of God, or El, the heading of the last book: (El, or The last book ). This heading is explained by a quotation from the cabala: "God, El, to reveal Himself, manifested Himself by a period."

A poet of exile and the desert, Jabés tries to create a space of meditation rather than a continuous telling. The only place where man can find solace is in "The Book," the one each of us is invited to write in our own silence. Jabés's text is, by definition, an open book where all can find their own space. The search for silence as a source of knowledge and the power of silence to create a space of creativity for the reader is at the heart of this writing. As music is the silence between notes, so the blank space between the words is the true story. Like the Jew, defined by his millennia of wandering with no rest or peace, reading here is defined as a long search for meaning that can only be guessed at rather than secured as a certainty. Always fluctuating, the word cannot be trusted to transfer meaning adequately, and to stop at its graphism is to limit oneself to a superficial reading of the world. Words are simply indexes of something else, and only by dismantling our reading habits can we be made aware of their fragility. We are thus invited to create another, more personal version of the world.

The question is by far the most prevalent means by which Jabés confronts the world and the word. While a question may be expressed in words, the answer does not necessarily require expression; the essential answers concerning the human condition and our relation to the world do need to be expressed in words but can be felt intimately in the soul. Indeed, the attempt to express them is only restrictive. The question is important, but the silence of the answer is more revealing and, ultimately, a path to the discovery of the self. Jabés asks the questions; we, the readers, answer, each in our own way. The text is only a starting point, the very beginning of a long process of self-improvement.

While the word "El" is present throughout the text, it refers ultimately to silence and is used as a focal point for meditation that is, in many ways, deeply atheistic: God is present in His negation. Man's search must progress through questions; as such, the exegetic study of the Torah, a deep hermeneutic process without definite answers, provides the best example and guide. Transcendence can exist only in the word; the questioning of God is the essential questioning of the Word: thus the Book is the World.

Just as the most elaborate rabbinical commentaries barely skim the meaning of the Torah, so our understanding of the word/world is barely a shadowing of "The Letter." Yet like the rabbis who remain totally devoted to the Book, we must spend our existence in a feeble and limited attempt to grasp, in an intuitive way, the way of existence. The Book of Questions uses the traditional enthymemic system of Jewish heritage: the mind is invited to wander among the words and allow imagination to flower so long as it preserves a connection with the primal text. That link can be very loose and may not obey rational logic. This approach allows for the free association of images and concepts and encourages us to think across time and space and unite what seems to be distant. In that movement we can join the elders of the tradition and, ultimately, the prophets and patriarchs. From this perspective Jabés's books become an anthology of Jewish thinking and mysticism and a guide for fruitful meditation.

—Alain Goldschlager