In the beginning....

Earlier this week, as I was going through my books to see which I felt needed a place on our new winter home’s bookshelves, I came to the shelf with Greek and Roman classics. Plato…Aristotle… Sophocles..and of course the playwrights.

These books have moved with me from place to place in the more than 40 years since my Great Books class at the University of Michigan, but, sadly, most have not been opened since I first placed them on the shelves in Larchmont.

Would I really need them again?

Then this morning at Larchmont Temple’s Chevra Torah, studying B’reishit and the story of creation, there they were, right in front of me again. Reading about Maimonides, I learned he was a student of Aristotle and struggled with his principles. And then Elizabeth recalled Plato’s concept of the human condition, in which (wo)men see only shadows in the cave and know nothing of the real world.

I realized I do need to read them again. So Plato, Aristotle and the rest of them are now in a carton, already enroute to our new home. I promise it will not be 40 years before I crack them open again.