HOW READING SAVED ME

By Danielle Passno ASSISTANT HEAD OF SCHOOL / DIRECTOR OF TEACHING AND LEARNING

My mom came to visit me the summer after my first year of teaching at a boarding school outside of Nashville. It had been a decidedly hard year for me personally, and my family was worried. While browsing in a bookstore, my mom picked up a book I’d never heard of and handed it to me with a passing comment: “It’s beautiful.” I held My Name Is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok, wondering how my mom—a deeply evangelical Christian who was the executive vice president of the largest christian ministry in the world—had ever come across a novel about Hasidic Jews. She bought it for me, and I read it as soon as she left town. The only other book that has had as profound an impact on me is the Bible. In the pages of this story about a Hasidic Brooklyn boy who is grappling with his identity and faith, I found a mirror I never would have thought I could in someone who didn’t share my religion or gender or sexuality. Our lives were worlds apart in every way and yet his struggle helped me through my own. (Continued next page.)

The power of the written word How reading saved me

when we read, we are taken on a journey of constructing meaning—both in our lives and the lives of others. From stories to historic accounts, we read through the lens of our own upbringing, our own lives. Our reading is inextricably bound to how we’ve been taught to make sense of the world, and through reading, we make judgments about whether what we currently believe holds weight. Reading, thus, becomes an essential act of development, and if we are to develop in strength, our reading must be varied.

I have an earlier memory, of when my mom made a different decision. I was younger at this time, still in grade school. She came home from work with a religious text for the sole purpose of warning me against it. I was forbidden to read it, but she wanted me to recognize it in case I was urged by others to read it. I believe her fear of this text centered on one particular friendship I had with a boy—his family prominent in the religion that revered this book as sacred. My mother’s firm warning about the corruption hidden within the text did not serve me the way she intended, for I believed her wholeheartedly. I vowed to never be fooled by that text, or any other for that matter, and in doing so, I entrenched my own beliefs instead of learning to interrogate their veracity, leaving me with a smug view of my faith as being inarguably right. The knock-on consequence is that my faith took far too long to deepen. Rather than becoming wiser in the faith, rather than developing my own arguments for why I believed what I believed, I waded in immaturity.

It was not until I was flung from the nest into a more diverse environment that I was faced with questions I could not answer, and suddenly I was alone without a family system to support me. Those were painful years as I wrestled alone, my faith fracturing simply because it had always been my parents’ and not my own. I was unprepared to grapple with changes occurring in my life or the lives of my friends because I had been given a single stream of books that told