Barukh Atah Adonai

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner, Judaism For Dummies

Until recently, Jewish people and their faith were lumped into two categories in the public imagination: either stereotyped lawyers and entertainment executives, or abstract cultural “heroes” like Anne Frank. That is, when they weren’t hated for centuries-old fictional slurs. But recent trends have moved Judaism to a central position in public discourse, without necessarily answering important questions in outsiders’ minds.

Rabbi Ted Falcon and David Blatner come from a background in multi-faith outreach and cultural clarification. They have experience answering queries, some of them quite naive, and know what doubts and misinformation linger most in outsiders’ minds. They spot the gap between reality and what people think they already know. That makes them good choices to write a “For Dummies” book about the faith that founded the Abrahamic tradition.

If you’ve ever read a “For Dummies,” this book’s format is familiar. It’s designed to read out of sequence, dipping into the reference as questions arise. But it also rewards conventional reading, as the authors progress in inquirers’ most common sequence, from broad strokes of belief, through the people’s history, into brass tacks of practice, finishing with fine detail about what makes Judaism unique.

In their introduction, Falcon and Blatner say they write for two audiences: non-observant Jews interested in rediscovering their heritage, and outsiders curious about one of Earth’s oldest continuously observed religions. As such, the text is essentially bilingual. It gives a plain-English survey of Jewish religious precepts, then for those who want it, proceeds to a detailed investigation of exacting practice. The authors are good about defining terminology.

Jews have maintained their identity as a people over centuries of diaspora, in largest part because they have retained their traditions in ways other scattered peoples have not. Their elaborate mix of written history and oral tradition, bound in ritual that gives observant Jews a body of shared experience, preserves their mutuality. This includes their tradition of controversy, which outsiders have long mistaken for disunion.

Falcon and Blatner do a remarkable job keeping the balance between Orthodox and more Liberal traditions, especially considering that some parties in such divides consider their opposite numbers apostate. Controversy is at the heart of Judaism, as any Talmud student knows. Our authors carefully recount such debates as influence readers’ understanding, while remaining studiously neutral themselves—sometimes, the debate matters more than the solution.

Rabbi Ted Falcon

Not that they are completely impartial. They say some controversies aren’t worth having. They completely exclude Messianic Judaism, as even the Israeli Knesset does, saying it constitutes a wholly separate religion. Also, though they address humanist Judaism briefly, they preponderantly assume Jews share belief in God, while they admit the word “God” admits multiple definitions. “Israel,” after all, means “he wrestles with God.”

The authors include glossaries of Hebrew and Yiddish terms, useful in understanding Jewish thought, and several standard Orthodox prayers, including the ritual blessings, famed for their salutation: “Barukh atah Adonai.” Because Judaism, like any religion or philosophy with a long history, has its own vocabulary, these glossaries help readers understand more, better, faster.

I initially felt frustrated that the authors didn’t cite sources for some of their claims, especially for important rabbinic controversies, which they report in a “some say... others say” manner. But Appendix C cites several valuable books, magazines, websites, and organizations for readers wanting in-depth study. I still wish the authors integrated their citations, but they do pave the way for readers who’ve had their interest piqued.

Christian readers will especially enjoy this book. Our Sunday School history of Judaism often stops in the late Second Temple period, ending when the Gospels diverge from the Talmud. But Judaism, like Christianity, is a living faith. We need to understand where it is, now, if we want to understand where we came from ourselves.

As inclusive as this book is, readers should remember what it is not. Falcon and Blatner craft a synoptic introduction to the Jewish religion, not the Jewish people; you’ll find nothing about Jewish art, culture, or non-religious history. It’s also a layperson’s overview, not a rabbinical textbook, and will make nobody more spiritual, or more Jewish. Remember, this is Judaism for Dummies, not Judaism for the already learned.

But for non-observant Jews seeking a connection to their heritage, or Gentiles wanting deeper understanding of Judeo-Christian roots, this book makes a good primer. The authors’ plain English explanations, laced with gentle but pointed humor, keeps the reading brisk. Any readers interested in browsing Jewish beliefs have here a good reference to begin their research.

Mom and Dad as Learning Coach

Jen Lilienstein, A Parent's Playbook for Learning

If I learned anything in my teaching years, it’s that most “remedial” students don’t really have a problem with the subject. They have a problem with the system. Teachers and students talk past each other, and even eager students become discouraged because school seems like an adversarial environment. Education innovator Jen Lilienstein wants to give parents and teachers the tools to make kids better learners.

Many learning experts don’t actively analyze students’ learning until roughly high school, or older. Lilienstein focuses on grade school ages, adapting the concept of “multiple intelligences,” as popularized by researchers like Howard Gardner and Thomas Armstrong. This holds that human cognitive abilities, like your child’s learning ability, are separate, distinct components, not one big “mind.” Students have more ready individual access to certain intelligences than others.

The classroom model we take for granted, which all of us who went to public (state) school shared, is not necessarily the best way to learn. Lumping kids together based on age and geography, and stuffing them into a classroom with one teacher who may or may not understand them, is cost-effective, but pedagogically inadequate. Even more so today, when budget cuts pack fifty kids into many urban classrooms.

But unless you can afford to homeschool your kids, which most working parents can’t, you rely on schools to prepare your children for their adult roles. That means parents must translate often prolix concepts into approaches children can understand. Your child hasn’t learned to close that gap. As a former teacher, I can attest that if you and your child don’t close that gap early, you never will.

Lilienstein uses an abbreviated version of the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), an inventory test designed to highlight personality strengths. She divides kids into eight learning categories, each of which could hypothetically subdivide further—use this book as an introduction, not a blueprint. Each learning type has its own distinct processing patterns, and parents and teachers can maximize learning by playing to these strengths.

Imagine your child loves activity learning, like art or sports, but has difficulty with reading. Lilienstein suggests teaching your child to finger-spell words in sign language, as a way to make English an activity. Or what if your kid prefers short bursts of activity over the tedium of book learning? Consider adapting Trivial Pursuit to make learning competitive, ensuring a measurable goal at the end of the process.

And not just your kids; Lilienstein suggests ways her principles can smooth communications with their teachers, too. Though she writes primarily for parents, Lilienstein encourages teachers to participate in the learning customization process. She has a lengthy section on group learning, allowing teachers to partner students with peers whose complementary abilities let them go farther. I don’t fully trust this idea—research on collaborative pedagogy is at best contradictory—but for teachers who share this value, Lilienstein’s analysis will help design better group environments.

Lilienstein divides her book according to learning category, signaled by helpful visual icons. This will especially come in handy for parents whose kids have different learning styles. My parents sincerely tried to help, but because my brain doesn’t work like theirs, their tutoring sessions frequently ended in tears. If they’d had this book thirty years ago, my life might look very different, and our relationship would feel much less strained.

I see two inherent risks with this book. First, kids could easily conclude adults will cater to them. Parents and teachers must emphasize that, while we want to utilize their learning strengths, they must learn to take the initiative. Lilienstein calls this a “playbook,” and illustrates the cover with a coach’s whistle, on purpose: while adults may call the play, students must run it in a field they cannot predict.

Second, parents could approach this book too passively. Many adults, like me, graduated from the “come in, sit down, shut up” pedagogical approach, and we learned to run the system by going along to get along. Teaching our children to be active learners requires breaking our own molds and thinking in innovative ways. We must constantly adapt Lilienstein’s guideposts to children’s growing minds, meaning we must grow, too.

Lilienstein wrote this book as a companion to her website, Kidzmet.com. Consider using both together to ease your child through the difficulty of school. Because we all need to learn, and cannot all afford private tutors, Lilienstein’s thoroughly researched assistance can make the difference between kids frustrated and discouraged by the system, and self-guided learners, ready for adult life.

The Right Fear at the Right Time

1001 Books To Read Before Your Kindle Dies, Part 15
Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things

Recent news reports noted that amid heightened fears of gun violence, actual firearms homicide statistics have dropped precipitously since the early 1990s. Despite high-profile shootings like Sandy Hook and Aurora, Americans in the aggregate reach for guns less than a generation ago. It’s hardly unmitigated good news, since America still has Earth’s highest homicide rate. But it raises the question: why the discrepancy between fear and fact?

Times have changed since sociologist Barry Glassner wrote his most influential book. In 2000, American media personalities performed elaborate mental gymnastics to blame anything but guns for the prior decade’s alarming violence. Now, when fewer Americans keep firearms at home, and violence sits at a low unseen since before Lyndon Johnson, an apparent preponderance of public opinion appears willing to blame guns first. Why the about face?

Perhaps, though, circumstances haven’t changed that much. Glassner notes that the anti-drug hysteria of the 1980s, when Nancy Reagan added “Just Say No” to the American lexicon, came at a low ebb for drug use. In the 1990s, we stood paralyzed in fear of “Gulf War Syndrome,” a portmanteau diagnosis into which we threw every ailment ever suffered by Desert Storm veterans. Popular fears historically have little factual foundation.

Americans seem remarkably susceptible to fears based more in emotional reflex than external evidence. This vulnerability gets amplified by our willingness to trust perceived authority figures, particularly in media and politics. When multiple authorities overlap, as happened with drugs in the Reagan era, or with gun homicide today, this creates the appearance of corresponding evidence, sufficient to pass for “proof” in the court of public opinion.

Consider President George HW Bush’s famous 1989 speech, when he waved a baggie of crack at television cameras, claiming Secret Service purchased it across the street from the White House. Despite its telegenic qualities, we now know this speech stank of inaccuracies: the dealer had to be coaxed to Lafayette Park, unfamiliar turf regularly policed by federal smokies. The President manufactured evidence to unify Americans behind his pet scare.

But crack, a drug favored by African Americans, made sense in DC, a predominantly black city. Americans wanted to believe drug abuse was prevalent, and accepted specious testimony that supported their existing prejudices. Even conservative commentator PJ O’Rourke noted, at the time, the racial subtext behind Bush’s speech. Yet Americans so wanted to fear somebody for something, that many (including me) swallowed the tale whole.

Glassner is merciless in identifying culprits behind such pandering techniques. Magazine and TV editors who fan middle-class white paranoia; lobbyists with an agenda; even, appallingly enough, demagogues who believe their own overheated rhetoric. Glassner shows particular annoyance with then-President Bill Clinton, a man so fearful of being called “weak” that he habitually pimped the very fears he campaigned to resist.

Because the media/government confluence tends to create its own cultural narrative, Glassner approaches popular paranoias using the techniques prior critics used to dismantle myths. Reagan-era drug hysteria, for instance, masked official rejection of 1960s culture, and liberalism in general. Gulf War Syndrome allowed Americans to obliquely face our popular support for an overseas engagement, without making concessions for soldiers’ return to civilian life.

Because we refuse to meet such challenges directly, we surrender ourselves to scares du jour. Each bête noire holds our attention long enough to feel we’ve “done something about the problem,” then the circus moves onto the next hip nightmare (Casey Anthony, anyone?). Monday, we whitewash the Seventh Amendment to bust street gangs; Tuesday, we suspend habeas corpus to combat road rage. Nothing gets fixed, but we feel good about ourselves.

How, then, should we read today’s misplaced gun violence fears? Tempting as it is to blame such phobias on delayed reaction to past crimes, or tyrannical government overreach, such partisan responses overlook the wider cultural climate. Even if violence has grown relatively uncommon, America remains a remarkably violent society, conflating saber-rattling with strength and substituting payback for justice. Bold gun laws to address 1993’s social ills only defer real action.

Glassner unequivocally states that anti-intellectual willingness to nurture fear impedes real solutions. Especially when professional fear merchants exaggerate sentiment regarding small risks, we surrender ourselves to paralysis, living from crisis to crisis. We must stop waiting for the white-hatted hero to arrive, talking points in his six-shooter, to solve everything for us. Let us face life as it is, without hiding in somebody else’s prefab world.

Because the next crisis will certainly come, whether we fix the one before us or not.

Go Ask Ashley

Ashley Dukart, Nothing More, Nothing Less

Young Brandon’s spirit has become a festering cancer of guilt, which he drowns with drugs. He has progressed from consuming to dealing, a progress that has him walking a knife’s edge with the suburban PD. His brothers fight to pull him back, but he will only get better when he wants to get better—and his time is growing short.

I like the idea of this book. Freshman author Ashley Dukart has a strong premise, turning on the inherent duplicity of suburban life. While his brothers try to steer him back to the confines of caucasian normalcy, Brandon (no last name) rebels against the tedious constraints of suburban life. Sounds like the sitcom Weeds, but with more tears.

But Dukart’s execution suggests she has memorized these components from a textbook. Like Beatrice Sparks, whose Go Ask Alice described acid highs cribbed directly from government pamphlets, Dukart’s descriptions of drug effects on Brandon, his brothers, and their lives, feels entirely familiar. It has the comforting vagueness of 10th-grade health class.

As our first-person narrator, Brandon describes several highs, drug-fueled sexual encounters, and casual fistfights, all of which he uses to conceal the pain growing inside. His life is driven entirely by guilt, which he admits to himself without coming to grips with it. He would rather numb the pain than actually do anything about it.

The word “numb” comes up frequently, as does “happy.” Brandon uses these words to describe the benefits he thinks he gets from drugs, raves, and house parties. His vocabulary never gets any more specific than that. Read interviews with real drug users. Not only do they describe, sometimes in wrenching detail, the temporary benefits of using, they also describe what they use to get away from.

Instead, Dukart caroms through descriptions of highs and lows that repeat the same few details so often, we clearly recognize their memorized nature. Brandon's vague highs are followed by predictable crashes, characterized by repetitive strings of physical symptoms. Dukart seems weirdly fascinated by the fact that hangovers and withdrawals make users vomit.

Brandon pukes so often, so powerfully, and so close together that I find myself losing track of the story to wonder: when does this guy eat? Because vomiting is the only concrete detail Dukart gives us, the mechanics of malfunctioning digestion loom large in readers’ attention. Only around page 150 does another character finally observe that you can’t puke on an empty stomach.

For about fifty pages, Brandon avoids directly addressing the cause of his guilt, though it’s poorly concealed, since it’s in the back-cover synopsis. He blames himself for his mother’s suicide because... well... because her lengthy, well-constructed note told him not to. His guilt becomes circular. He feels he’s still letting her down, which only prompts more self-destructive behavior.

Brandon’s pain, not that unusual for children from divorced or domestically violent homes, seems larger than life to him. On the one hand, he seems to have remarkably little empathy for others’ pain, believing his own more important. This lack of empathy is emphasized when his part-time squeeze gets busted for possession, and he doesn’t even bat an eye.

On the other hand, Brandon’s apathy finds its mirror in his brothers, Ace and Cole (wow, them’s some white names). Ace wants to be paternal, but only knows how to solve problems with his fists. Cole would keep the peace, but doesn’t apparently know what he wants from his own life. He’s a middle child from Central Casting.

Instead of guiding us through a fully fleshed human soul in torment, Dukart recites a thesaurus of cautionary stereotypes. We never feel for Brandon’s struggles outside bog-standard white suburban malaise (Mom’s death feels distant, reported rather than experienced), nor share the pain he wants to numb. He just grabs more drugs, and flushes his life away, because that’s what people in these stories do.

That encapsulates my problem with the whole story. Rather than push deeper into Brandon’s pain, Dukart seems driven by a checklist. Personal trauma that needs narcotized away: check. Meaningless sex that makes him feel cheaper rather than loved: check. Painful jolt that motivates him to change: check. True love as salvation: check.

Again, I like the idea of this book. But rather than describe a real journey, Dukart recites bromides recollected from prior books. She doesn’t need to have experienced drug washout to write about it. Stephen Crane wrote convincingly about the Civil War without serving, but he learned about authentic experiences. Dukart hasn’t gone that far.

The Jung and the Restless

Caroline Myss, Archetypes: Who Are You?

Most of us, at times, feel like guest stars in life’s drama. Caroline Myss suggests that’s because we don’t know the real role we were born to play. In our dreams, we envision ourselves in one position—victorious warrior, vibrant artist, rebellious firebrand. But we accept some other workaday role because we don’t grasp which is our real life. We have missed, or failed to act upon, our true archetype.

Archetypes, as they appear in this book, derive from the theories of psychologist Carl Jung, who broke with Freud over spiritualism versus materialism. Myss’ archetypes, though, don’t strictly accord with Jungian archetypal theory; her ideas have more in common with Joseph Campbell’s “heroic journey” model. Though Myss doesn’t directly cite Campbell, his Hero with a Thousand Faces casts a long shadow over this book.

Briefly, each person has a life role for which our disposition is uniquely suited. Pause a moment, here, and consider: what do you see yourself doing five years from now? Raising a family? Captaining a rising business? Signing copies of your first novel? That provides a firm clue to what role, what archetype, dominates our psychology. Our life’s mission, then, is to reconcile our actions and situations with our innate archetypal role.

But just because we know our archetypal role doesn’t mean we’ve finished the journey. We may carry an immature archetype, which needs proving through ordeal. Lingering trauma may warp or distort our archetype, requiring us to turn inward and rediscover our correct path. We may even have a false archetype; many of us were ramrodded early into the role our parents, schools, and society chose for us.

This last problem is especially prevalent for women. Though Myss states that both genders have their archetypal prerequisites, she admits she wrote this book primarily for women, who often get trained to accept submissive roles that leave them unfulfilled. Creative, adventurous, or visionary women frequently squelch their true archetype, thinking that they must play an “appropriate” role. I’ve seen such women. They move through their own lives like ghosts.

But if we shed our blinders and accept our natural roles, not only will we know individual fulfillment (Myss says), we’ll increase our ability to promote common good and benefit our society. By undertaking the task for which our dispositions best suit us, we’ll accomplish something nobody else could do for us. Only we ourselves know what that is.

Myss collates ten common archetype families, explaining not only what they mean, but also what unique challenges they face, what gifts they present to themselves and society, and what journeys these people will face as they consummate their roles. Her work rewards careful browsing. Take time to familiarize yourself with them. Some people have more than one. Even if one isn’t your own role, you know people in each category.

At times, Myss ventures into unnecessary mysticism, as Jung himself did. Her postulations on where archetypes originate (Genes? Society? God?) confuse the issue more than they clarify. A brief, separate overview of various theories might interest some readers, perhaps in an appendix or afterword. We want the practical applications, the elucidation of the stories we never realized we tell ourselves, not woowoo spirituality.

Myss also hits heavily on the concept of myth. Don’t misunderstand what this word means in context. “Myth” signifies the stories we tell which allow us to understand topics too vast to address directly. Have you ever had a friend try to sum you up, and thought, no, that’s not me at all? You and your friend have conflicting myths. Perhaps you should examine your myth to understand where your life and your archetype got out of sync.

This book has a companion website, ArchetypeMe.com, to help you find what archetype in Myss’ lengthy gallery explains you. I don’t care for the website. It’s all flashy design and radio buttons, forcing readers into excessively narrow categories. Standardized testing works as poorly for psychology as it does for schoolchildren. Instead, take time with the book, finding which implicit narrative best describes you.

Don’t mistake this book for a profound exegesis on Jungian psychology or the human condition. Myss writes to help individuals take control of their lives by recognizing their roles and attendant myths. As Joseph Campbell asserted, each of us has some task we were born to fulfill, and until we do that, we will shamble through life, hungry and never satisfied. Caroline Myss wants to help you find your role. Accept her help with care.