Canter Bridge

It is well to temper one’s definition of tedium with humility. In the absence of this discipline, we all too hastily dismiss as boring and irrelevant aspects of reality that from other angles may appear enthralling and pertinent.

Or, at the least, worthy.

In the latter chapters of Exodus, the text revels in descriptive detail. Chronicling the accoutrements of liturgy, it becomes something very much like a technical manual. Legions of readers, eyes glassed over, leap over such passages as though only with embarrassment can such airless rooms be acknowledge to be part of the house.

Unless, that is, one is an architect, or a craftsman, or a skilled restorer of old things. Or a chronicler, or a specialist in the worship arts, or a curator of national treasure. Or a Jew clinging with determined grip to anything that speaks of the better days of one’s people.

Then, suddenly, a casual reader’s ennui before these unyielding lines is seen for what it is: the myopia that comes from too much shelter, too little curiosity, or the arrogance of relevancy.

When one has lived a very deep drama, every token of the battle becomes an icon, a memoir, a treasured element of one’s legacy.

One is not quick to leap over such things, to get beyond them, to move on to the really interesting stuff. That is like neglecting the grave of one’s grandmother because she was not a dancer.