Evenings and early morning are the best times to go. Instead, it should be treated like a human body. When a holy book "dies," it is buriedβnot burned, not shredded, perhaps upcycled, but definitely not dumped. A genizah is a receptacle for these elderly sacred objects, purgatory before descending beneath the dirt and ascending to the Great Library in the Sky. Historians know much of what they know about Jews and others of antiquity because of the uninterred contents of dust-jacket bins and manuscraptoriums of yore, and now many miles of ancient text are being scanned back to life digiternal.
I still remember our assistant rabbi barreling down upon a patch of sandy soil among the North Florida pine by the playground and pool behind our shul, upending the earth, filling the crater with reams of old paper and prayer-imbued ritual objects, and finally patting down the dirt of a new, holy hill. Anyone who wanted could fling in a shovelful just like at Jewish funerals. In Jerusalem, many neighborhoods have a genizah. Just gotta look hard enough.
Some sit beside the road, like those used clothing charity drop-boxes in strip mall parking lots, painted plain blue with official-looking metal signs in Haredi areas or in the more eclectic Nachlaot adorned with elaborate murals of the Old City and cartoon diagrams delineating proper use of this treasure box of infinite possibility. I come from a long line of leisure-time pack rats. Before that, collective family memory is sort of a blur. Even the origin of our last name is shrouded in mystery, the only known explanation having been given by a family patriarch who was known to tell tall tales and elaborate joke stories.
Perhaps the Fleets dug deep in Florida, and further weighed themselves down with sprawling collections of stuff, in an effort to establish something permanent. We were, presumably, religious Jews in the Old Country. Now, the family lives a thoroughly American Jewish life. Thanksgiving dinner is as sacred as the Passover Seder. And so, to collect is to connect to something beyond. It establishes personal ritual. Whereas my grandfather gathers old coins and has probably never gotten rid of a single pair of shoes, and my dad keeps crates bursting with restaurant menus in the garage, my weakness is books.
Once a rabbi-friend of a friend needed help moving from one end of Nachlaot to the other, and while schlepping stacks of boxed books, he offered, and then delivered, a nearly complete set of lightly used volumes of the Talmud. He had several sets. Of course, my shelves were already full. But these were free. A thin layer of scrapped pamphletry lines the bottom.
