Living in Israel makes it somewhat difficult to buy and read English language books. Even before Corona, buying a real paper book and shipping it out from the States or the UK could take a month. Kindle promised to change all that. Amazon Kindle is a series of e-readers, devices that enable users to browse, buy, download and read electronic books, newspapers, magazines and other digital media via wireless networking to the Kindle Store — pretty much instantly.

I bought a Kindle over a year ago and I must have read twenty or more books on it. It is very convenient and certainly instant, but I realized after a while that there is something lacking in my reading experience. Having a real book, picking it up, seeing it age and spilling coffee on its pages — create a relationship with the reading matter of the book itself. The way we interface with the objects in our lives has an impact on our intellectual experience. The form influences the content.

When I cast my eyes over my bookshelves, I sense a visceral relationship with the physical books there, and I feel in some way more connected to the content of their pages.

What remains from the Kindle experience of reading is somehow more abstract, more distant, and cold. It is not just the lack of a good cover. I do not have the same connection to the material of the book because I did not have the physical experience of touching it, opening it, cracking its cover and remembering it whenever I see its spine of my shelf.

The Sefer HaChinuch (Mitzvah 16) asks a famous question about why we need so many mitzvahs to remember the Exodus. One entire volume out of four of the Shulchan Aruch — Orach HaChaim — is devoted to the minutiae of every aspect of the observance of Pesach. Says the Chinuch, surely to remember our leaving Egypt all we should need is to eat a bit of matzah each year. He then outlines a key principle of human psychology: Feelings are created by actions. Our actions influence the way we feel about something. A mitzvah is a physical embodiment of a spiritual reality. The experience of the spiritual reality can only be “kindled” by physical experience.

Tu B’Shevat