On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism's Divine Feminine

Rabbi Leah Novick’s On the Wings of Shekhinah: Rediscovering Judaism's Divine Feminine is a very gentle introduction to Judaism’s premier symbol of God’s feminine side.  The Shekinah, in her most advanced form, acts as a seemingly independent entity in Jewish mysticism (although we are probably in the realm of allegory here).  She is the Queen, who yearns to be reunited with the King, God.

Allegory or not, there is no denying that the Shekinah injects a dose of the feminine into masculine Judaism.  Rabbi’s Novick’s treatment is a soft treatment the Divine Feminine across the centuries.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North

The Narrow Road to the Deep North: A novel by Richard Flanagan is far from easy to read.  Primarily about POWs in a Japanese camp building the Burma Railroad and starving to death, in a wider sense it follows the life of a Tasmanian doctor, his loves, losses, gains and failures.  The novel has a uniquely Australian, and what I suppose a Tasmanian voice, which gives it a firm sense of people and place. 

Flanagan does juggle many characters, stretching the narrative a bit thin.  The romance at the center of the novel is gripping at times, but perhaps veers toward hackneyed expressions and sentiments. 

But The Narrow Road rises above these faults.  This is a novel that has narrative strength and drive.  

The Frictions of War

Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice by William H. McRaven is an utterly fascinating book.  McRaven explores various special operations from World War II to the Raid on Entebbe, showing, by example and theory, how a successful special operation works to reduce the “frictions of war.”

The theory component of the book has great explanatory value.  It should be read with great care, as it is the key to the success of a special operation.

An Akiva for Everyone

Barry W. Holtz’s Rabbi Akiva: Sage of the Talmud, part of the Jewish Lives series, is a well-written and plotted examination of Judaism’s most influential sage.  As Holtz shows, there is an Akiva for everyone.  He was an early hero of the Rabbinical movement; as a man without family connections or wealth, he achieved greatness through his own genius, pushing Judaism merit. 

Both of his origin stories stress his poverty and humility.  In the often rough and tumble world of rabbinical argumentation, Akiva is known for his gentleness.  Rabbincal Sages often bruised each other in debates, leading to bad feelings.  Akiva had a soft touch even when he was (nearly) always right on halakah; he was gentle with the vanguished.

He was a man of the people. There is a charming tale of Rabbi Akiva’s intense, long prayers.  But we are told when he prayed with others he shortened them so as not to overburden people. There is the mystic Akiva who was the only sage to make the journedy back and forth through Pardes alive.

Finally, there is the messianic Akiva, betting on the wrong horse in the Bar Kokhba rebellion and being flayed alive by the vengeful Romans when the revolt failed.  His actions and words when martyred would become a model for, unfortunately, all too many Jews after him.

Read this book.  If you want a distillation of what it means to be a rabbinical Jew, you will find it right here.

American Shame: Columbine

Dave Cullen’s Columbine is difficult to read without getting angry, extremely angry, even twenty years later, even after public shootings are more prevalent and have higher death counts.  Cullen is relentless in his pursuit of details, and there are many, and most were lost opportunities documented in this book.

The killers told many people of their plans, or part of their plans; the police even had a search warrant (that was never executed) for the house of killer number 1, a record of his harassment and threats to another student, all of which they illegally suppressed after the massacre.  

Back then it was SOP for officers to secure the site of a shooting, and wait for the SWAT team.  A community officer assigned to Columbine engaged killer number 1, fired shots, and then failed to follow him into the school.  What armed public safety officer would fail to follow a shooter into a school?  Who would essentially condemn children to die by following procedures? He followed procedures, by made a cowardly moral choice.

And it goes on and on. The killer’s parents, in the dark as their own children planned mass murder.  The  SWAT team’s sluggish entry into the building.  The media circus, with its accompanying valorization of the killers by giving them free air time, creating a myth, showing images of the event on an endless loop.

Columbine created a model for mass murder and its despicable wake of moral, political and social failings.  It modeled an ugly legacy we still live today.

Son of a Gun: A Memoir

Justin St. Germain’s Son of a Gun: A Memoir is both an intimate portrait of the murder of the author's mother, and a wider look at gun violence in America.  

Growing up in Tombstone, Arizona, a town whose tourist economy is built around a thirty-second gun fight at the OK Corral, sets the theme of this work.  With so many guns around, both in Arizona and our nation, we “solve” our problems by gun violence - both in the OK Corral and the trailer where St. Germain's mother lived with her fifth husband.

St. Germain asks the question, many times, of why his mother was murdered.   What drove her husband to kill her when everything seemed fine, not great but not dangerious, to those who knew them?

It is interesting that he never broaches the question of his mother as the victim of domestic abuse.  She had experienced it with other men.  Her last husband appears to have engaged in typically abusive behavior.  He kept her isolated from the people she knew.  Toward the end of her life, the two were always together, living out in the desert.  He gave her love and affection, and withheld it; it was all she had.  In the final few weeks of her murder, she had unexplained, or poorly explained, injuries.  Ray gained her trust and love,took it away and gave it to draw her in to his orbit, to isolate and hurt her.  In the end, when she rebelled, perhaps, he killed her.

St. Germain hints at this scnario, but never embraces it; perhaps it is too painful, given all that happened in his family.  Yet for a book that wants to explore her murder, it is a strange omission. 

Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah: New Insights and Scholarship edited by Frederick E. Greenspahn

Jewish Mysticism and Kabbalah: New Insights and Scholarship (Jewish Studies in the Twenty-First Century Book 2) by Frederick E. Greenspahn (Editor), contains, as the title suggests, works of scholarship recently penned by on Kabbalah.

Invariably, the ghost of Gershom Scholem continues to haunt this field.  Many of these essays take Scholem head on, showing his biases and blind spots.  One of the most fascinating is his dismissal of those practicing Kabbalah in the Holy Land.  He no longer saw the contemporary Orthodox Jewish community as a vital and innovative source of Kabbalah thought and practice.  The Kabbalah existed in the past.  Yet for his entire life in Israel living breathing kabbalists lived only a few steps from his house, but he ignored them. Examples like these abound.

These essays shed light on a topic that has become of great interest to both Jews and non-Jews in the last half-century.  The book has a broad scope and range.

The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden

The Finish: The Killing of Osama bin Laden, by Mark Bowden (of Black Hawk Down fame) provides an extraordinary soup to nuts account of the rise and fall of bin Ladin.  Bowden understands the broad sweep of terrorist Islamic movements, beginning in the Soviet war in Afghanistan, coalescing in the formation of Al Qaeda in the 90s, to culminating, we hope, in 9-11.

President Obama set the agenda of capturing or killing bin Laden as a candidate, and made it a priority of his presidency.  Bowden gives him this accomplishment, especially the monthly reports Obama demanded from the CIA on the hunt.  The hunt was always on, but Obama's reporting structure kept people on task.

But Bowden shows how this was not the only factor in finding and killing bin Laden.  Nearly a decade of intelligence work went into finding of the house, hidden in plain sight, in Abbottabad; both old fashioned spy-craft and new technology led to this mass murderer.