The Compulsion of Words

Twice in my life a compulsion gripped me to finish a book, to race ahead and be done with it for some reason I didn't understand.

This first happened when I read John Hersey's "Hiroshima," about the atomic bomb attack on Japan. I finished this book late on the night of Sept. 9, 2001.

The second happened today, when I slogged through the last 150 pages of Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code." Ordinarily this type of book would take me two weeks to read; it had a level of mechanical mystery that moved the plot forward, but the writing and concept did not inspire me in the way of, say, "A Conspiracy of Paper" by David Liss. Yet I decided to shorten the reading cycle on an obligation-free Saturday and so I kept pushing forward.

I finished it around 6:15 pm, and a half-hour later I was signing in at the local Jewish Community Center for "Tapestry: A Community Celebration of Jewish Learning." I had no idea what classes I would take. Most were filled, so I selected two from those that remained open. The first was on Kabbalah. The second was on "The Jewish View of Human Sexuality," presented by the rabbi from the local Young Israel.

At the beginning of the session he announced, "I'm going to talk about something from the book 'The Da Vinci Code.'" This stunned me; I had finished the book barely an hour earlier. And I hardly expected an Orthodox rabbi to discuss a book on esoteric practices and the (fictional) hidden history of the Catholic Church.

The rabbi discussed Talmudic passages on sex, dealing with the big preconception (Jews don't have sex through a hole in a sheet), obligations, the commentaries against sex standing up (which reminded me of the joke that Southern Baptists don't have sex standing up because somebody might think they were dancing), and my favorite Talmudic story about the Garden of Eden (before Eve arrived on the scene, Adam had sex with all the animals, and found them lacking).

Near the end of the class the rabbi handed us copies of pages 308-309 and 445-446. I won't give the book away, but the passages indeed connected to the theme of the class. With the book so fresh in my mind, the lesson had a vivid immediacy. Read the book, and you'll never look at the Star of David the same way.

Still, I have to wonder at what strange cosmic force pushed me along on Saturday, page after page, until I finished. Some actions lie beyond rational thought.