Connect with us

RSS

How a book by a ‘Zen Rabbi’ became a High Holidays classic

(JTA) — Every few years I put out a call asking what people will be reading in preparation for the High Holidays, and usually one book tops the list: “This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation,” by the late Rabbi Alan Lew. 

Published 20 years ago this month, “This Is Real” is an attempt by Lew, a Conservative rabbi trained in Buddhist practice, to get perhaps jaded readers to see the period that includes Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur and Sukkot as a time for deep spiritual introspection — or, as he writes, a time to “move from self-hatred to self-forgiveness, from anger to healing, from hard-heartedness to brokenheartedness.”

If that sounds like the gospel of “self-care,” you’re not far off. Lew, who died in 2009 at age 65, came of age during the self-actualization movement, a serious attempt by psychologists to get people to live up to values that transcend their desire for wealth and status. By the time cosmetics companies, crystal sellers and lifestyle influencers took hold of the concept, it was derided as selfishness disguised as a spiritual journey. 

But Lew’s book grounds concepts of “self-discovery, spiritual discipline, self-forgiveness and spiritual evolution” in normative Judaism. “This Is Real” never strays far from a traditional Judaism that saw the period of prayer, reflection and repentance surrounding the holidays as a time for a moral wake-up call. 

That hybrid of the traditional and the much-maligned “New Age” continues to appeal to readers. Jewish educator Joshua Ladon, writing in the 2020 anthology “The New Jewish Canon,” calls the book “the handbook for American Jewish High Holiday survival,” comparing its influence to Rabbi Harold Kushner’s mega-bestseller “When Bad Things Happen to Good People.” Synagogues host book groups to discuss the book in the run-up to the holidays; the book’s publisher, Little, Brown and Company, issued a paperback version only in 2018, suggesting its hardcover sales had remained strong for 15 years. 

Ilana Sandberg, a rabbinical student at JTS, recommended Lew’s book last month in a video for the seminary

She first read the book in the fall of 2020 as she was preparing to lead High Holiday services at Brandeis Hillel for the first time as the rabbinic intern, and considers the late author her “spiritual hevruta,” or study partner, in the lead-up to the holidays. The book, Sandberg says, is about “accepting this idea that we are ever-changing beings and there really is a possibility for change, for renewal as we go through the cycle of the year.” 

Lew was spiritual leader at San Francisco’s Congregation Beth Sholom from 1991 to 2005. Raised in Brooklyn and New York’s Westchester County, he was underwhelmed by the suburban Judaism of the 1950s and ’60s and, like many Jewish seekers of his era, turned to Zen Buddhism — at one point considering becoming a lay priest. 

“It was in a Buddhist monastery, meditating, that I realized who I really am. I am a Jew,” he wrote in “One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi,” a memoir he co-wrote in 2001 with his wife, Sherril Jaffe. “A Jew can use the practice of meditation to illuminate his or her Jewish soul.” 

Rabbi Alan Lew appears on the cover of “One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi,” a memoir he co-wrote in 2001 with his wife, Sherril Jaffe.

A poet and sometime bus driver, Lew was 38 when he enrolled at the Jewish Theological Seminary, the training ground for Conservative rabbis. In 2000, he founded Makor Or, a Jewish meditation center housed at his synagogue.

In “This Is Real,” he writes about the meditative aspects of High Holiday prayer. “When we sit in meditation with other people, breathing the same air, hearing the same sounds, thinking thoughts in the same rhythms and patterns, we experience our connection to  each other in a very immediate way,” he writes.  

But Lew’s version of the High Holidays is hardly passive or even gentle: Preparing for the holidays, as he suggests in the title, is hard and daunting work. The dreamlike opening sequence describes the “journey” of the High Holiday period as “fraught with meaning and dread.”

Ladon wrote that Lew’s book represents “the possibility of American Judaism, full of vitality and transcending boundaries.” Perhaps because of, or even in spite of this, it was mostly non-Orthodox Jews who replied to my recent social media post asking about their attachment to “This Is Real.”

“I’m really moved by the way that Lew takes the traditional images of the Holidays — the wake-up call of the shofar, the books of life, death and the undecided, the opening of the gates — and retells them in a way that they speak directly to my personal existential discomfort,” wrote Jonah Mendelsohn, an actor and writer who has been reading the book with fellow members of SAJ, a Reconstructionist synagogue in Manhattan. “The book has me facing my own insecurity and self-judgment in a way that isn’t always comfortable, but pushes me to change.”

Karen Paul, a fundraising consultant and former executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based Tikkun Olam Women’s Foundation, said a friend gave her a copy of the book the year her husband died from glioblastoma. 

“Lew’s comforting and relatable stories were precisely the roadmap I needed to begin to reshape my future,” she told me. “My favorite parable in the book is the day that the rabbi had to be on one side of the park for a [funeral] and the other side of the park for a birth. This is the dialectic of life, which, if we listen for it, applies to all that we do.”  

Rabbi Rachel Barenblatt of the Reform Congregation Beth Israel of the Berkshires in North Adams, Massachusetts, recommends the book for “folks who might not self-identify as seekers, but who are interested in approaching the holidays in a deeper or more informed way.”

“When I first read it, it changed how I experience this two-month window of time, and I love opening that up for those whom I serve,” she wrote me. “How can we harness this season to fuel our inner work so that we can emerge ready to grow and become and try again?”

But she, like others, notes that “This Is Real” isn’t without his flaws. She suggests that Lew “had some blind spots, notably around gender.” (Last year, Jewish blogger Shari Salzhauer Berkowitz criticized his “heterosexual, male” handling of the sexual dynamics in Ki Tetze, the Torah portion that includes instructions for soldiers taking women captives as “wives.”)  

The book also has admiring references to Rudy Giuliani — the New York City mayor turned RICO defendant — and Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach — the songwriter who faced posthumous allegations of sexual misconduct — that read differently than they did 20 years ago. 

Barenblatt suggests pairing his book with a “contemporary and feminist text” such as Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg’s recent book “On Repentance and Repair.”

Lew’s style — he glides between poetry and memoir, allegory and darshanut, or Torah commentary — isn’t for everyone. Many prefer Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s anthology “Days of Awe,” first published in English in 1948, a collection of mostly primary texts related to the High Holidays. Philip Goodman’s various anthologies for the Jewish Publication Society take a similar approach. The 1999 essay collection, “Beginning Anew: A Woman’s Companion to the High Holy Days” by Gail Twersky Reimer and Judith A. Kates is a corrective to books that ignore the central place of women in the liturgy. 

Many of these books seem intended for readers who are looking for inspiration in synagogue when their attention begins to flag. Lew invites you to read his book as a coherent narrative of a nearly three-month process from destruction (Tisha B’Av) to joy (Sukkot).

But for some readers, it is also a book to be dipped into and sipped from.

I have never finished this book,” Pittsburgh Rabbi Mark Asher Goodman admitted last month in a column recommending books for the High Holidays. “I read four or five pages. I stop and ponder over the meaning of existence and God and human growth and obligation and fallibility. Lew is poetic and instructive and guru-esque but also deeply personal; you feel you know him. The book’s title is perfect, and yet the book really will prepare you for the High Holidays, even if you, like me, never actually finish reading it. One might argue that this book, if properly read, is never finished.” 


The post How a book by a ‘Zen Rabbi’ became a High Holidays classic appeared first on Jewish Telegraphic Agency.

Continue Reading

RSS

Antisemitic Incidents Spiked in UK After Bob Vylan’s ‘Death to the IDF’ Chants at Glastonbury

Police officers block a street as pro-Palestinian demonstrators gather in protest against Britain’s Home Secretary Yvette Cooper’s plans to proscribe the “Palestine Action” group in the coming weeks, in London, Britain, June 23, 2025. Photo: REUTERS/Jaimi Joy

There was a recorded rise in antisemitic incidents in the United Kingdom the day after the English punk rap duo Bob Vylan called for the death of Israeli soldiers at the Glastonbury Festival in June, according to the Community Security Trust (CST), a nonprofit charity that advises Britain’s Jewish community on security matters.

CST on Wednesday published a new report detailing antisemitic incidents recorded from January to June 2025. The report stated that the highest daily total for such outrages in the first half of 2025 was 26 reported on June 29, 16 of which took place online.

On June 28, Bob Vylan vocalist Pascal Robinson-Foster led thousands in the audience to chant “Death, Death to the IDF,” referring to the Israel Defense Forces, during the band’s set at the Glastonbury music and arts festival in Somerset, England. The performance was livestreamed by the BBC.

CST said the 26 incidents reported to the charity on June 29 involved “anti-Jewish responses” to events at Glastonbury, and CST’s statement on X that described Bob Vylan’s anti-IDF chants as “utterly chilling” and “an expression of mass hatred.”

The second worst day for “anti-Jewish hatred” in the first half of the year was May 17, when 19 incidents were recorded just a day after Israel announced the expansion of its military operation in the Gaza Strip, according to CST’s new report.

“In all of these incidents, anti-Jewish language, motivation, or targeting was evident alongside the rhetoric linked to Israel or Zionism,” CST said. “Both of these cases [on June 29 and May 17] illustrate how sentiment and rhetoric towards Israel and Zionism influence, shape, and drive contemporary anti-Jewish discourse, online and offline, often around totemic events that grab mainstream public attention.”

Because of their anti-IDF comments, Bob Vylan was dropped by their talent agency, as well as festivals and concerts worldwide. The duo also had their US visas revoked, and police in the UK launched an investigation to see if the band’s anti-IDF comments are a criminal offense.

The BBC apologized for broadcasting Bob Vylan’s “offensive and deplorable behavior” in their Glastonbury performance, during which Robinson-Foster also complained about working for a “f—king Zionist” and chanted “Free, free Palestine.”

According to Wednesday’s report, the CST recorded 1,521 antisemitic incidents in the UK from January to June of this year. It marks the second-highest total of incidents ever recorded by CST in the first six months of any year, following the first half of 2024 in which 2,019 antisemitic incidents were recorded in the aftermath of the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, terror attack on Israel.

Fifty-one percent of all antisemitic incidents in the first half of this year “referenced or were linked to Israel, Palestine, the Hamas terror attack (on Oct. 7, 2023) or the subsequent outbreak of conflict,” CST noted. The group also recorded 73 antisemitic assaults in the first half of the year – with an additional three physical attacks categorized as “extreme violence” – and 572 cases of online antisemitism.

Continue Reading

RSS

Members of IDF’s New Ultra-Orthodox Brigade Complete Combat Training

Members of the Hasmonean Brigade during their beret ceremony at the Western Wall on Aug. 6, 2024. Photo: Screenshot

The first set of troops from the Israel Defense Force’s new ultra-Orthodox Hasmonean Brigade completed seven months of basic and advanced training on Wednesday morning, when they received their dark blue berets during a ceremony at the Western Wall in Jerusalem.

“The army and the Torah go together, shoulder to shoulder. One strengthens the other, ” Knesset Foreign Affairs and Defense Committee Chairman Boaz Bismuth wrote in a post on X, congratulating the troops. “I bless the ‘Hasmonean’ Brigade – the first ultra-Orthodox brigade in the IDF, which completed its training course today and, in an emotional ceremony at the Western Wall, received their beret. Only together will we triumph.”

Opposition Leader Yair Lapid also congratulated the troops, saying that “there is nothing more Jewish than defending the land of Israel.”

Israel’s Minister of Innovation, Science, and Technology Gila Gamliel added in a post on X that troops in the Hasmonean Brigade are “paving the way for combining faith with courage.”

“You are a symbol of dedication, mission, and contribution to the nation, and you light the path for all of us toward Israel’s unity,” she added. “Your brigade is proof that one can preserve identity while defending the homeland.”

The beret ceremony on Wednesday morning was attended by Shin Bet director and Maj. Gen. David Zini, who was crucial in the creation of the brigade, and brigade commander Col. Avinoam Emunah. Fifty ultra-Orthodox troops did a “beret march” that started in the hills of Jerusalem and ended at the Western Wall Plaza in the Old City of Jerusalem before the start of the ceremony. They blew shofars and sang songs calling for the rebuilding of the Jewish Temple, according to Israel’s Arutz 7.

Members of the brigade live a Haredi lifestyle both inside and outside the army and are given special accommodations, such as at least an hour of learning Talmud every day. Around 2,700 Haredim, or ultra-Orthodox Jews, have joined the army over the past year, according to Israeli media reports.

Continue Reading

RSS

UK’s Royal Ballet and Opera Cancels Israel Production After Staff Members Protest

The Royal Ballet perform in a general rehearsal of “Dark with Excessive Bright” at the Royal Opera House in London, Britain, Feb. 9, 2024. Photo: REUTERS/Toby Melville

The Royal Ballet and Opera has canceled a performance of Giacomo Puccini’s “Tosca” at the Israeli Opera in Tel Aviv scheduled for next year after 182 anti-Israel RBO staff members signed an open letter protesting the planned performance and the organization’s support of Israel.

“We have made the decision that our new production of ‘Tosca’ will not be going to Israel,” RBO Chief Executive Alex Beard said in an internal message to staff, cited by The Guardian. He also reportedly mentioned the open letter signed anonymously by RBO staff members that was sent to him and the board on Friday.

The website of the Israeli Opera no longer includes any references to the RBO, but performances of “Tosca” are still listed for July 2026. The Royal Ballet and Opera is based at the Royal Opera House in London’s Covent Garden and is supported by a cast of more than 3,000 employees, according to its website.

In an open letter published by Artists for Palestine UK on Monday, RBO staff members said they “reject any current or future performances in Israel” and are committed to “withholding our productions from institutions that legitimize and economically support a state engaged in the mass killing of civilians.” They further condemned RBO’s decision to have a production of “Turandot” by Giacomo Puccini at the Israeli Opera this year. “The decision cannot be viewed as neutral. It is a deliberate alignment, materially and symbolically, with a government currently engaged in crimes against humanity,” said staff members – including dancers, singers, musicians, and backstage crew.

They then claimed that the Israeli Opera offers free tickets to Israel Defense Forces (IDF) soldiers. The RBO “is clearly making a strong political statement by allowing its production and intellectual property to be presented in a space that openly rewards and legitimizes the very forces responsible for the daily killings of civilians in Gaza,” the letter stated.

Staff members demanded that the RBO “withholds our productions from institutions that legitimize and economically support a state engaged in the mass killing of civilians.” They also condemned RBO’s “silence on Israel’s genocidal conduct” and expressed solidarity with a performer who last month raised a Palestinian flag during the curtain call of “Il trovatore” at the Royal Opera House. The staff members said the performer displayed “courage and moral clarity on our very stage.”

Video footage from the incident showed RBO’s Director of Opera Oliver Mears trying to seize the flag from the performer in front of a live, applauding audience. The open letter said Mears’ actions “sent a clear message that any visible solidarity with Palestine would be met with hostility, while the organization remains silent on the ongoing genocide.” They called for Mears “to be held accountable for his public display of aggression,” and demanded that the RBO “publicly acknowledge the genocide in Gaza” and “end its silence” regarding Israel’s actions.

“History will remember the choices we make in times of atrocity. We urge our organization not to be complicit through inaction or false neutrality,” they stated in conclusion.

Continue Reading

Copyright © 2017 - 2023 Jewish Post & News