Dayenu, as we say. But there is even more to those astounding lines in Nehemiah than the choice of Torah over Temple. What we find is a radical step toward democratization: toward the democratic ideals that generations of later Jews would not only embrace but die without, and also die to create — and whose present endangerment many are protesting in the streets and squares of their cities and countries. In those few lines of Nehemiah, we find a rejection of a hierarchical system based on hereditary power in the hands of the few, toward the town square, where all men and women are offered the chance to participate, to listen, learn and understand the teachings for themselves. It might be argued that from that day on, all that is required to live as a Jew are words. No more, and no less.
I am a writer in a long line of writers, among my people and all people who have been writing these last few thousand years. And I write, just as I read, because I believe that in the realm of literature we are, each of us, free. Free to imagine, to invent, to change our minds, to travel through time, across space, to feel and experience the full breadth of ourselves, and to do what I don’t believe can be done in any other realm, medium or dimension: to step into the mind of another. Feel what it is to live inside another and, in the process, enlarge ourselves beyond the borders of selfhood, into the vaster fields of mutual understanding and empathy. As such, literature is fundamentally democratic but for one major caveat: To access its freedoms, we must be taught to read, value and engage with literature.
At the crossroads where we now stand, among the many other things at stake, is the future of reading, writing and literature, and all of the expansive freedom they have afforded us.
In my lifetime, I have watched the demolition of the capacity to read and engage with books. Not just of our children, who have been the unwitting guinea pigs of growing up inside cellphones, but among all of us human beings. We have lost not just our ability to concentrate on deciphering long passages of written language; we have, I believe, begun to lose our attachments to the meaning of words and sentences, which we once trusted to carry the precious freight of communicating who we are — to ourselves and to each other. The blatantly, proudly senseless speech of our current leaders is not the cause, it is merely the most extravagant example of what happens when an entire culture — increasingly, the monoculture of the world — gives up on, and ceases to be capable of, the struggle to funnel meaning into language — to translate themselves, their thoughts, and their ideas into words that others can read and share. Writing and reading are not effortless. But, without that effort, we will slide deeper and deeper into inchoateness, darkness, violence, diminished freedom for all and a diminished state of human being.
This month, hundreds of thousands of students are graduating across the United States, from colleges and universities where it is the lifework of countless professors to ensure they have access to the freedom that comes with becoming a reader, being able to write for oneself, and partake in a culture of literature and ideas. Which, to me, is deeply heartening.
And I do believe that history is long, and that where there is destruction, there is also the potential for tikkun, for repair. For thousands of years, we have been finding words for ourselves, we have been writing our own story and, in the process, have done something far more radical than expressed ourselves: We have invented ourselves. We have asked the essential question: Who are we, and what kind of people do we want to be? And it is, I believe, only as readers and writers, only as people educated in the bonding of language and meaning, that we have any hope of rising to the occasion of an answer.
(Nicole Krauss is a novelist and a 2025 Guggenheim fellow. This op-ed is adapted from a speech the author gave on May 13 while receiving an honorary doctorate at Ben-Gurion University.)
Travel Between The Pages 