Operation Bookmark: A confession

My friend Michael Cohen, when he was rabbi of the Israel Congregation in Manchester Center, Vt., used to place random books of Jewish interest in the sanctuary’s seat backs, right next to the prayer books and one-volume Torahs. The idea was to provide options for the kinds of worshipers who were not ready to plug in for the entire Shabbat service and might otherwise stare into space until the kiddush. And who knows — perhaps the man in the back row reading the Herzl biography would be moved by the melodies to join in with everybody else.

Confession time: I always have “supplemental” reading with me when I go to synagogue. It’s not a volume of the Talmud, which I sometimes see other congregants poring over. Sometimes it’s a book; other times, articles and essays I have printed off the Web. My one rule is that the subject matter has to be “Jewish,” a term vague enough to cover history, fiction, philosophy, Israel affairs, and (I know this might be a stretch) a biography of Sammy Davis Jr. I’m not oblivious to what goes on around me. I put the reading matter aside when the service demands a high degree of concentration. But when I’m deeply engaged with what I am reading, the beit midrash — house of study — and beit Tefila — house of prayer — merge into one.

The same can be said about Shavuot, a holiday often overlooked even by those who consider themselves active in synagogue and Jewish life. Its theme — the giving of the Torah at Sinai — can be interpreted in many ways: the birth of the Israelites as a free people or their acceptance of the commandments. But more and more it is marked as a celebration of Jewish learning, especially by those communities that hold an all-night study session called a tikun leil Shavuot.

The mystics who developed the tikun in 16th-century Safed devoted the night to study of Talmud and Kabala, but lately synagogues have included a range of topics and texts (although probably not Sammy Davis Jr.). The whole thing culminates in a crack-of-dawn service, where even I, after a night of close reading, am barely tempted to do anything but pray.

I’m not trying to encourage anybody to tune out of services and tune into a good book. But let’s say, for argument’s sake, that you were looking for recommendations of lively, thought-provoking reading over Shavuot, the kind of books that could challenge you and connect you to Jewish tradition through a variety of doorways. Here’s a taste of my reading list over the past year or so.

The Life of David
by Robert Pinsky
Nextbook and Schocken are collaborating on a series of pocket-sized books called Jewish Encounters. The books look for a good or provocative match between subject and author (in this case, Israel’s poet-king and a former U.S. poet laureate). Pinsky’s “biography” of David draws on the Bible as well as later commentaries and the Psalms, helping readers see the various fragments of David’s life and legend as a coherent epic about the rise and fall of a warrior, artist, lover, politician, and flawed hero.

The Jewish Century
by Yuri Slezkine
Ten years ago J.J. Goldberg wrote Jewish Power, and many Jewish readers were aghast that he would acknowledge that such a thing even existed. Slezkine does Goldberg one better, embracing the often anti-Semitic charge of Jewish influence in all things modern. Slezkine isn’t conspiracy-mongering; rather, as a professor of history at UC Berkeley, he suggests that Jews were both harbingers and pioneers of all the adjectives we associate with modernity: “urban, mobile, literate, articulate, intellectually intricate, physically fastidious, and occupationally flexible.” It is also the story of the price Jews — those he calls “Tevye’s children” — paid for embracing modernity.

Operation Shylock
by Philip Roth
Years before Israeli novelist A.B. Yehoshua set off a firestorm by claiming Diaspora Judaism was a dead end, Roth explored every aspect of the debate in a series of books culminating in this one. Shylock delves into the divide between Israelis and American Jews more deeply than any book ever has. No one is safe, neither American Jews who invest so much of their intellectual energy in a far-off country to which they will never move, nor Israelis who belittle a Diaspora that serves as the wellspring of so much Jewish scholarship and creativity. No matter how you define yourself as a Jew, Operation Shylock will upset you.

Schlepping Through the Alps
by Sam Apple
Roth sounds too heavy? Try this odd little memoir by a 20-something writer who spent a summer with Austria’s last Yiddish-singing half-Jewish wandering sheep herder. Tagging along with this thrive-over outcast, Apple considers Austrian-Jewish history, the Holocaust, the fate of Yiddish, and his own Woody Allen-like neuroses. Like Roth, Apple is a riot; also like Roth, he makes you think.

Jewish Food: The World at Table
by Matthew Goodman
Anyone who says bagels and lox are a superficial way of embracing Jewish culture has not read Goodman’s columns in the Forward. Goodman is the kind of writer who can provide a recipe for Bombay Coconut and Green Mango Soup, and along the way tell the history of India’s Bene Israel community and all the complexities and contradictions of Jewish life on the subcontinent. Or consider this treatise on Moroccan Meatballs: “The full import of these meatballs now begins to come clear. Meatballs represent, in a real sense, the momentary capacity of the poor to become rich: to overcome the strictures of poverty and turn the rudest of fare into something delicious.”

That should get you started. But please, don’t get me into trouble: When the sermon starts, hide the books.

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