Chaim Potok in The Book of Lights has adapted his by now standard structure to the story of yet another mild Jewish insubordinate. In each of Potok's previous novels, a representative of Jewish tradition comes into conflict with some incursion of modernity—psychology, comparative philology, art—and makes the perilous move to the other side. His present hero moves from the accepted province of talmudic law to the Kabbalah, the source of a more mysterious, and currently more fashionable, light.
Gershon Loran, the central character in The Book of Lights, is a troubled rabbinical student at the Riverside Hebrew Institute—a thinly-veiled fictional version of the Jewish Theological Seminary—in the early 1950's. He is torn between the required study of Talmud and an attraction to Jewish mysticism. The book includes certain staples of Potok's fiction: a friendship between the hero and a young man from a different sociopolitical stratum, in this case the son of a prominent physicist who has been involved in the development of the atom bomb; and the guiding presence of a mentor…. The historicity of the novel is selective, with current attitudes and cultural trends superimposed on events of three decades ago.
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