Our Significant Jewish Books column, inspired by UAHC President Rabbi Eric H. Yoffie's Reform Movement Literacy Initiative, challenges all Reform Jews to read at least four books of Jewish substance a year. In each issue we recommend two or more titles representing the best of Jewish literature, both fiction and nonfiction, selected in cooperation with the UAHC Department of Adult Jewish Growth.
It is our hope that you will read at least one of these selections on your own or with others in a synagogue study or book group. Connect with thousands of other Significant Jewish Books readers by accessing the Adult Jewish Growth website, where you'll find a discussion guide, a list of the previously selected Significant Jewish Books, and more.
The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon
by Richard Zimler
"Never send your illuminations with a courier who doesn't recognize himself in his mirror from one day to the next," Abraham Zarco warns his twenty-year-old nephew, Berekiah, shortly before Abraham is murdered. In this novel of mystery and intrigue, set in Lisbon during the infamous massacre of 1506, Berekiah frantically searches for his uncle's killer. In the course of his sleuthing, he discovers the secret lives of people he has known all his life--Jews and New Christians--who live in the turbulent plague-ridden city under the shadow of the Inquisition.
During the week of Passover in 1506, violence breaks out in Lisbon against the Conversos, Jews who had been forcibly converted to Christianity. The bloodthirsty mob, egged on by fanatical Dominican friars, savagely attacks Jews on the streets. In the midst of this chaos, Berekiah finds his uncle's body in the cellar of their home. At first, he assumes that Abraham was a victim of the mob. But circumstances surrounding the murder--the trap door to the cellar was closed and its rug carefully replaced--soon lead Berekiah to suspect people closer to Abraham, those who knew of his clandestine activities. By day, Abraham was a manuscript illuminator working on commissioned art; by night, he collected Jewish religious texts to smuggle out of Portugal, thereby sparing them from the flames. The manuscripts were hidden in his geniza, a secret hiding place in his cellar. His helpers in this enterprise were called "the threshers." Berekiah believes one of them murdered his uncle.
Together with his Muslim friend, Farid, a deaf-mute adept at judging character, Berekiah tracks down all the members of the threshing group as well as others who may have known about their activities, all Jewish converts to Christianity: Father Carlos, a New Christian priest; Simon Eanes, the fabric importer; Samson Tijolo, the vintner; Diego Gonçalves, the printer; Miguel Ribeiro, a wealthy nobleman who only recently discovered his Jewish origins; Rabbi Losa, now a dealer in Christian religious objects; Enrico Damas, a treacherous arms dealer and spy for the king. Each suspect in turn reveals a tale of human courage, cowardice, or fear, reflecting the motivations for betrayal in a community where everyone lives behind masks.
Berekiah has lost his faith in God and humanity, but the teachings of his uncle, a renowned kabbalist and mystic, guide his actions at every turn. Taking on the role of "the last kabbalist of Lisbon," the angry young man assumes responsibility for his family as he guides them out of Portugal to the safety of Constantinople.
The Talmud and the Internet
A Journey Between Worlds
by Jonathan Rosen
Taken together, these seeming opposites--the Talmud and the Internet--are surprisingly useful paradigms for making sense of modern Jewish identity. In this spirited and original book of reflections, Jonathan Rosen, former cultural editor of the Forward, uses the metaphor of the Internet as a conceptual tool for understanding the Talmud. Both are products of, and in some sense, responses to a disrupted, fragmented world. "The Talmud offered a virtual home for an uprooted culture, and grew out of the Jewish need to pack civilization into words and wander out into the world," he writes. "The Internet, which we are continually told binds us all together, nevertheless engenders in me a similar sense of Diaspora, a feeling of being everywhere and nowhere. Where else but in the middle of Diaspora do you need a home page?"
Rosen grounds his reflections in personal experience and family history. "This book began as an elegy for my grandmother, who died three years ago and who wasn't much interested in either the Talmud or the Internet," he acknowledges. Woven throughout his meditations are the legacies of two grandmothers--his American-born grandmother, who died in New York at the age of ninety-five, and his Viennese grandmother, who was murdered in the Holocaust shortly after his father's bar mitzvah. Rosen explores his own identity in light of these powerful ancestral memories. "How do I inhabit my murdered grandmother's world without losing myself in a tragedy I did not experience?" he asks. "How do I live inside the comfortable life my American-born grandmother bequeathed to me without feeling I am somehow betraying history, ignoring the larger voices of suffering outside?" Contemplating both the Talmud and the Internet provides apartial answer: "I know that in some unfathomable, Talmudic fashion," he writes, "one reality does not displace the other but lives inexplicably alongside it."
Perhaps there is no need to reconcile the fragments in our lives, Rosen argues, but to embrace fragments of wisdom wherever we find them. Strangely enough, the Talmud, a worldview from antiquity, can provide a model for living in the Internet age. "One can live in the modern world not, as T. S. Eliot did, by grimly pitting his modern brokenness against a fantasy of perfection but by realizing that mastery, that wholeness, has always been a fantasy, as the Talmud has acknowledged all along," he asserts. "In writing this book, I realized that what interests me is learning to embrace contradictory forces: ancient tradition and contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and hope."
Bonny V. Fetterman is literary editor of Reform Judaism magazine.
Previously Selected Significant Jewish Books
The following books were previously selected as part of the UAHC Significant Jewish Books program:
As a Driven Leaf, by Milton Steinberg (Behrman House; also on audio from Jewish Contemporary Classics)
Back to the Sources: Reading the Classic Jewish Texts, edited by Barry W. Holtz (Simon & Schuster)
The Book of Jewish Values: A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living, by Joseph Telushkin (Bell
Tower)
A Book That Was Lost and Other Stories, by S. Y. Agnon (Schocken Books)
Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves, edited by Rachel S. Mikva (Jewish Lights Publishing)
Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory, by Deborah Lipstadt (available from Penguin USA)
Finding a Spiritual Home: How a New Generation of Jews Can Transform the American Synagogue, by Sidney Schwarz (Jossey-Bass, Inc.)
Finding God: Ten Jewish Reponses, by Rabbis Rifat Sonsino and Daniel Syme (UAHC Press)
The Fixer, by Bernard Malamud (available from Penguin USA)
The Healer of Shattered Hearts: A Jewish View of God, by David J. Wolpe (Henry Holt & Co.)
Jewish Meditation, by Aryeh Kaplan (Schocken Books)
The Jewish Moral Virtues, by Eugene Borowitz and Frances Weinman Schwartz (Jewish Publication Society of America)
Jewish Power: Inside the American Jewish Establishment, by J. J. Goldberg (Addison-Wesley)
JEWS: The Essence and Character of a People, by Arthur Hertzberg and Aron Hirt-Manheimer (HarperSanFrancisco)
A Journey to the End of the Millennium, by A. B. Yehoshua (Doubleday)
The Last of the Just, by André Schwarz-Bart (Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.)
The Periodic Table, by Primo Levi (Schocken Books)
Pirke Avot: A Modern Commentary on Jewish Ethics, by Leonard Kravitz and Kerry M. Olitzky (UAHC Press)
Rachel Calof's Story: Jewish Homesteader on the Northern Plains, edited by J. Sanford Rikoon (Indiana University Press)
The Red Tent, by Anita Diamant (Picador USA)
The Sabbath, by Abraham J. Heschel (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)
The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness, by Simon Wiesenthal (Schocken Books)
Taking Hold of Torah: Jewish Commitment and Community in America, by Arnold M. Eisen (Indiana University Press)
Turbulent Souls, by Stephen J. Dubner (William Morrow & Co.)
Who Wrote the Bible? by Richard Elliott Friedman (Simon & Schuster)
Wisdom of the Jewish Sages: A Modern Reading of Pirke Avot, by Rami M. Shapiro (Bell Tower)
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