blogs/brentspodek

One of the few upsides of a summer in which so many plans have been canceled is there is plenty of time to invest in some reading. So, with that in mind, please allow me to share an entirely non-comprehensive, non-ranked list of some of the books that have been most important for me in my ongoing spiritual journey.

1. A Bride for One Night, by Ruth Calderon. Calderon is an eclectic modern thinker, a secular Israeli, a former member of Israeli Parliament and a guest at BHA. She rewrites talmudic tales as richly imagined fictions, breathing new life into ancient characters, such as as the woman who risks her life for a sister suspected of adultery; a humble schoolteacher who rescues his village from drought; and a wife who dresses as a prostitute to seduce her pious husband in their garden.
2. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, by Michael Chabon. The only novel on this list, this book imagines an alternative history in which the State of Israel was never created and following World War II, Jewish refugees were crammed into a narrow strip of Alaska. It is a mystery novel and alternative history, all at once. 
3. Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. This is not a “Jewish” book per se, but it is an intense and beautiful mediation on the reality of growing old in a human body. One of the people I respected most in this world included a clause in his living will that stipulated that he did not want to be treated by a doctor who had not read this book - I can imagine no greater praise than that.
4. The Price of Whiteness: Jews, Race and American Identity, by Eric Goldstein. A fascinating and illuminating look at how European Jews became “white” in America.
5. Radical Judaism, by Art Green. This is an articulation of a Judaism that incorporates understandings of the world from the spiritual realm and the scientific realm, bringing a neo-hasidic lens to help see the miracles of the natural world. 
6. Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity, by Abraham Joshua Heschel. Heschel is the pivotal figure who bridged pre-war Eastern European mysticism and the changing American values of the 1960s. This is a very accessible collection of his essays, organized and edited by his daughter, Professor Susannah Heschel. 
7. This is Real and you are Completely Unprepared, by Alan Lew. Informed by both Zen training and rabbinic ordination, Lew explores the possibilities of repair and growth through the fall calendar cycle, beginning with Tisha B’Av all the way through Simchas Torah. Absolutely essential reading for the High Holiday season
8. God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony Between Science and Spirituality, by Daniel C Matt: Danny Matt is one of the most important living scholars of Kabbalah; his 20 year project of translating the Zohar has transformed the field. In this book Matt draws on both science and theology, fact and belief, cosmology and Jewish mysticism to share a powerful understanding of the origins of the universe as expressed in the language of science and the language of mysticism.
9. Exodus and Revolution, by Michael Walzer. Walzer, who is best known for his studies of Just War theory, looks at how the Exodus story has been “read” by political actors and revolutionaries as the blueprint for their utopian visions. 
10. The Beginning of Desire, by Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg. Zornberg is a psychoanalyst and literary scholar who re-reads the book of Genesis to explore our biblical characters in ways that illuminate the text and my own heart. 

These are just a few of my favorites; I have many, many more books to share, but 10 seemed like a good number for a list. If you do read any of these books, please let me know - I’d be very happy to talk with you about them!