Adult Education

Busy yourself as much as possible with the study of the divine things, not to know them merely, but to do them; and when you close the book, look around you, look within you, to see if your hand can translate into deed something you have learned.      - Moses of Evreux   
 
In seeking wisdom the first step is silence,
The second: listening, 
The third: remembering, 
The fourth: practicing,
The fifth: teaching others.                
-  Ibn Gabirol

June: Songs for the Broken Hearted by Ayelet Tsabari. 1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha’ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren’t supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man.

1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida’s daughter, has been living in New York City—a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing that her skin was lighter, that her illiterate mother’s Yemeni music was quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn’t looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni’s childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket.

Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family—including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future.

August: Buried Rivers by Ellen Korman Mains. To the chagrin of her parents, Polish Jews who survived the Holocaust, the author became a Buddhist at the age of 19. More than three decades later, on a German train, Ellen felt the presence of spirits who had died in the Holocaust and had lost their trust in basic goodness. Sixty years after the liberation of Auschwitz, their plea for help sent her on a series of life-changing journeys to Poland to reconcile the Holocaust with basic goodness. Would years of Buddhist meditation prove helpful to her people instead of a betrayal?
In 2006, she travels to Poland, the Holocaust’s largest graveyard, and to her mother’s city of Łódź, to reconnect with her family's tragic history and later moves to Łódź to study Polish at a language school called “Babel,” where she is the sole American. With no living elders to consult, she relies on an account dictated by her uncle, an Auschwitz survivor, for clues to her family’s past. As she retraces her mother’s and uncle’s steps through Europe and walks in places where her ancestors lived for centuries, she stumbles into a mysterious stream of love—if only she can receive it.

October: Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future.