Loss of life, justice, admiration: Three rabbis open up Judaism for beleaguered readers

(RNS) — A trio of thoughtful spring books written by rabbis reflects the truth of the saying that no two are alike.

Two of the authors, Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur and Rabbi Sharon Brous, draw deeply on their experiences as leaders of their respective congregations — Horvilleur’s in Paris, where she is a prominent figure in the Liberal Jewish Movement in France, and Brous in Los Angeles, where in 2004 she founded the IKAR spiritual community, which defines itself as “a spiritual community” because, according to its website, terms like ‘synagogue’ can feel restrictive.

Their perspective on faith comes from counseling those in crisis and teaching and sharing Jewish tradition and texts to comfort and educate. For Horvilleur, this means “giving the person hearing the story for the first time unfamiliar keys with which to unlock its meaning for themselves — that is my goal.”

One among honest 5 feminine rabbis in France, and with out a doubt one of essentially the most prolific, Horvilleur has written an elegantly slim and majestically poetic e book, “Living With Our Dull,” structured around eulogies for particular folks. Some are well identified, corresponding to Elsa Cayat, a psychotherapist murdered in the Charlie Hebdo attack, and Simone Veil, the first woman president of the European Parliament. Others are extra vague: Sarah, a survivor of Auschwitz, has honest a single son at her funeral to memorialize her.

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Horvilleur provides each person being eulogized the same dignity and care, seeking to understand who she was and how to reflect that back to the grieving family. Of Cayat and her violent death, the rabbi writes, “Too often a brutal death can take everything from a life, reducing it to its end. But there is a way of fighting death from stealing the full record of a life. Never judge a life by its end, but by everything within it that expressed itself without waste. Remember to focus on everything that could have been before saying what will no longer be.”

Horvilleur wisely acknowledges that a funeral is just not any longer the time to educate mourners who’re no longer deeply an knowledgeable about Jewish customs. “Carry out disaster stricken mourners need history lessons? Indubitably no longer. However there is just not one of these thing as a wound in placing sooner than them the polyphonic voices of the Jewish custom.”

But in writing about death, she writes about the will to live as well. In a chapter titled “The Man Who Didn’t Want to Die,” she writes about Moses’ writing of the Torah that he “transmitted to his people a way of shining in the form of letters that could also grow, just like the mysterious marks that adorn them. These branches, given to the world, would continue to create after him.”

Where Horvilleur pores over individual lives, Brous is attempting in “The Amen Effect” to build a movement and community. She is less trusting of the reader with her ideas, frequently spelling out and reiterating her points and skipping the poetry for cliché and social justice jargon. “I’m in the camp that believes that our most urgent task is to confront and dismantle unjust systems,” she writes, “which requires marginalizing supremacist ideologies, not accommodating them.”

Even where her rhetoric matches the depth of her ideas, one senses the privileged position that she and her congregants hold. “No one can do this sacred work alone,” she writes of the work of mending a garment that has been deliberately torn in grief at a funeral in a ritual known as kriah. “One must hold the frayed edges while another threads this needle, and yet another begins to stitch, all of us taking turns as our weary fingers callous from the work. The amen affirms the journey, holds the broken pieces together with grace, and lets healing begin.”

However, Brous does convey important messages about what it means to live in a community committed to the same values and to supporting one another through the difficulties of being human. She tells the story of a rabbi who weeps with his student over the reality of our mortality, writing, “He has to accept that he cannot erase his friend’s suffering, but he can sit with him in the dark.”

(Characteristically, she then proceeds to bury the moment in religious talk and repetition: “The promise of amen is given,” she writes, “the ritualization of care is that we are able to break the spell of avoidance and denial to find our way to each other, meaningfully and lovingly, even — especially — in the dark.”)

Rabbi Shai Held, the founding director of the Hadar Institute, which promotes Jewish literacy among adult Jews, presents numerous important ideas in his book, “Judaism Is About Love,” but makes them accessible. Although the book is 386 pages of text with another 100 pages of notes, it is well organized, marshaling a range of arguments about loving the self, loving others, bringing the love of God to others, and the theology of a loving God.

Held seeks to explain Judaism for a contemporary American audience, one shaped by the values of the surrounding culture yet rooted in traditional Jewish sources. However, his thinking is enriched by the variety of sources he draws upon — he is unafraid to cite Christian theologians and philosophers, as well as biblical scholars.

At this moment of rising antisemitism, Held’s emphasis on the significance of love — as an emotion and as action — in a faith many view as overly legalistic is profoundly important. Held explains: “To love God is to give God a tangible home. To love God is to live with a passion for the moral and an openness to the sacred,” he writes, “and thus to invite God’s presence into our world.” Thus, for him, the moral thrust of Judaism and its understanding of the sacred are blended, not separate, entities.

Held’s concerns transcend the save of Judaism on this planet. He talks about the energy of divine admire to salve the accidents of the sphere we all reside in. “In a world overrun by savagery, in a world whereby kids are burned alive while the sphere callously goes about its enterprise, divine madden may well presumably even be a blessing. It diagram that somewhere, somebody (Somebody) in reality cares about the victims.”

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Equally central is his meditation on the meaning and impact of kindness — hesed in Hebrew. “I would say that we understand hesed in its ideal form as ‘love manifested in acts of kindness,’ that is, as an inner disposition concretely expressed in outward action. God’s call and command to us,” he writes, “is to live lives of love manifested in acts of kindness.”

However, at the heart of his book is a manifesto for the contemporary Jew, summed up when he says, “we need to be immediately textually literate, morally sensitive, responsive to God’s great love, and honest with ourselves about what we are able and unable to reflect (or wish to reflect). That process of keeping tradition alive is — often — ongoing.”

Readers attracted to that process win these three books for instruction and solace.

(Beth Kissileff is co-editor of “Sure in the Bond of Existence: Pittsburgh Writers Replicate on the Tree of Existence Tragedy.” The views expressed on this commentary do not necessarily reflect those of Religion News Service.)