CHIAYI CITY, Taiwan — Before I begin this article, I’d like to ask my readers here to first do this: Search on Google for “Lamed Vav.”
Now as some of readers here might know, Adam Kirsch is one of an America’s top literary critics who wrote The People and the Books: 18 Classics of Jewish Literature.
You see, Steven Pressfield, at the ripe wonderful age of 76, has written a Jewish cli-fi novel titled 36 Righteous Men, and Hirsch reviewed it for the Jewish magazine Tablet.’
While Christian novelists have had their hands full writing all kinds of cockamamie mysteries and thrillers about the Vatican and the Louvre and religious prophecies left and right, it’s a whole new ballgame for Jewish novelists now.
Do most readers of San Diego Jewish World have anything to compete with the likes of novels by Dan Brown (”The DaVince Code”)?
“A handful of arty novels about golems” is about it, Adam Hirsch quips in his book review.
But then he asks: “Surely readers deserve at least one book where the hero unravels an ancient Jewish mystery and staves off the end of the world by shooting an RPG at the devil to knock him back through the portals of Gehenna? Right?”
Well, now readers have one: Enter Steven Pressfield’s 36 Righteous Men.
Turns out that Pressfield published his first novel, The Legend of Bagger Vance, when he was in his 50s — and, according to Hirsch, he “writes fast-paced, stripped-down prose that is regularly interrupted by lovingly technical descriptions of computers, cars, and weaponry.”
The story Pressfield tells goes something like this:
There’s a Jewish private eye trying to unravel a strange case that he is assigned to: a series of murders where the victims are found choked to death and with the letters ”LV” stamped into the flesh, Hirsch explains. In this case, LV does not stand for the French fashion brand Louis Vuitton, but for something else: ”Lamed-Vav.”
In Hebrew, the mythical numerical value of the LV letters is 36, and they refer to an ancient Hebrew legend that in each generation of Jews, there are 36 ”just men,” the “lamed-vavniks,” on whose merit the existence of the entire world depends.
If Tom Hanks gets cast as the main character in a future movie version of Pressfield’s novel, he might say something like this in his trademark Hollywood voice: “In a passage of messianic speculation in Tractate Sanhedrin, the rabbis say that the world has no fewer than 36 righteous people in each generation who greet the Divine Presence. But the catch is that no one seems to know who exactly these people are: So they are called ‘tzadikim nistarim’ in Hebrew, the hidden righteous ones. And even the tzadikim themselves, in some tellings, don’t know that they belong to the group.”
This novel has Hollywood written all over it.
The story takes place in the near future, in the year 2034, and as Pressfield imagines it, all of the LV victims are, in one way or another, fighting against climate change. Yes, human-caused global warming.
“Goodness is no longer a religious concept, but an ecological one,” Hirsch, the master quipper, quips again.
Count me in. I’ve ordered this book today.
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Dan Bloom is a freelance writer and inveterate web surfer based in Chiayi City, Taiwan. He is a climate change activist who may be contacted via dan.bloom@sdjewishworld.com