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August 23, 2002/Elul 15 5762, Vol. 54, No. 49
Prepare for a good, sweet year
VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor
Rosh Hashana comes early this year, even before the intense summer heat dissipates. It heralds a new year, replete with the promise of renewal posited on the premise of reflection. How better to spend a few hours on a hot summer day than preparing for the holidays? Following, a few books that inspire introspection about the past year and spur resolve as we welcome a new one.
Jewish Lights Publishing does it again, continuing its series of spiritual sourcebooks with its new guide to Shabbat. "Shabbat: The Family Guide to Preparing for and Celebrating the Sabbath" (Jewish Lights, $19.95 paperback) is a wonderful choice for readers considering expanding or enhancing their Shabbat observance. Written by Dr. Ron Wolfson, vice president of the University of Judaism in Los Angeles, and published as a project of the Federation of Jewish Men's Clubs and the UJ, the book is a complete guide to the Sabbath. It's replete with how-tos - from preparing Shabbat dinner to celebrating Havdalah - enriched with easy-to-read explanations and historical background. It includes blessings, rituals and prayers as well as recipes, songs and first-person stories of families across the country. "I feel that my family is playing a role, a private, magic role, being in a chain and keeping the tradition going," is how Asher Kelman, a husband and father of three, described his feelings about Shabbat observance in the book.
The guide is a worthy addition to home libraries, especially this year, as we celebrate erev Rosh Hashana on Friday, Sept. 6, around our Shabbat tables.
On a more esoteric note, Daniel Matt's explanation of the quintessential Jewish mystical text, the Zohar, provides accessible insights into the intricacies of kabbalah. "Zohar: Annotated and Explained" (SkyLight Paths/Jewish Lights Publishing, $15.95 paperback) contains selected passages from the 700-year-old text with face-to-face commentary. "The subject matter of the Zohar," writes Matt in the introduction, "is mysterious, virtually indescribable, so language can only suggest and hint. Puns, parables, and puzzles abound. The message is not served to you on a platter; you must engage the text and join the search for meaning. The Zohar is an adventure, a challenge to the normal workings of consciousness. It dares you to examine your usual ways of making sense, your assumptions about tradition, God and self."
Matt, a renowned authority on Jewish mysticism and author of a number of books including "The Essential Kabbalah" and "God and the Big Bang: Discovering Harmony Between Science & Spirituality" is a former professor of Jewish mysticism at the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley. He recently returned to California after spending four years in Jerusalem working on the first step of an immense 20-year project titled "Sefer ha-Zohar: The Pritzker Edition."
Matt writes that the Zohar has the potential to "change forever how you understand God and yourself." This is a worthy endeavor to contemplate in the new year.
What better place for reflection than surrounded by the beauty of divine creation? That's the pre- mise for Rabbi Balfour Brickner's gem of a book, "Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost" (Little, Brown and Company, $24.95 hardcover). His tiny garden plot becomes a microcosm of the world, the life and death issues played out daily between his blooming plants and the elements, a simulation of those we deal with in our lives. Brickner, a Reform rabbi long associated with the Stephen Wise Free Synagogue in New York City, now tends garden in Stockbridge, Mass. In the first chapter of the book, he explains how he came to gardening late in life, after buying a small home on Shelter Island in New York. "The house desperately needed landscaping, but our budget was far too tight for such a luxury. So I began to garden."
The hobby continued even after he mastered the rudimentary techniques and moved to his present residence in the Berkshire Mountains where he now has a sizeable plot. "The more time I have spent in my garden, the more I have realized how much it has to teach me, to teach all of us. I began to see that some of my supposedly far-fetched ideas about how we know God and what law and order mean in the cosmos and to our world are validated by what happens in the garden," he writes.
A profusion of coneflowers begs for reflection on human procreation. The demise of a beloved rhododendron leads to rumination on the limits of prayer. The beauty of slow-blooming peonies inspires a discussion of patience. Brickner's keen observations, expressed simply with sensitivity and grace, grow from his experience as a rabbi of more than 45 years.
"Many times at the end of a day in the garden, as I am putting away my tools and sweeping up the remnants of the mess I have left about, I look around and say to myself, 'I will never finish it. I will never get it right.' And then I am reminded of what a wise teacher in our tradition left us: 'It is not incumbent on you to finish the task, but neither are you free to desist from beginning it.' A garden is like that. It is never finished. Faith is like that. It is never complete. It is always a process, a growing, a discarding, an adding of the new."
L'shanah tovah.
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