Out this summer from Maggid Press...The Torah of Leadership: Essays on the Weekly Parsha

The Torah of Leadership takes readers on a journey through every weekly Torah reading through the lens of leadership and merges books and articles on authority, influence, and governance to shed light on our personal and professional development. To form a people and a monotheistic faith, we need upstanding spiritual leaders who are also change agents. To form a nation, we need governance, laws, a home for the Divine Presence, and a story that inspires. To make history, we need an enduring set of universal principles that can influence generations. To endure for millennia, we need to hand tradition down through a chain of leadership succession. The Torah contains, through its laws and stories, a master document for leadership development. It does not hide from its readers the struggles and challenges that our matriarchs and patriarchs faced as they responded to God’s call to serve so that we, centuries later, can learn from them when facing our own tests and trials. The Torah also celebrates the triumphs of its leaders, and this, too, helps us take note of our small victories and our major accomplishments.

The two questions I’m asked most frequently:

What are you reading?

What are you writing?

Summer 2024

My heart and mind have been across the sea every day since October 7th. My daily writing and reading centers on the war from early in the morning through the day. The hostage crisis is intolerable. Jew hatred on campuses and beyond is untenable. Political insecurity is numbing. This summer I’ve chosen several projects to heal from the daily despair and keep the words of my teacher and mentor, Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, close: “Hope as the shape of history suggests that history has a destiny…” May every hostage and soldier come home today.

What I’m Reading…

Spiritual Reads:

I’ve been making my way slowly through a book of Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook’s most intimate writings, journal entries, and meditations in a bi-lingual edition called Hadarav: His Inner Chambers (Koren). If you’ve ever worked through a book of his in Hebrew, this one will likely be easier language-wise but possibly more difficult conceptually. One can see in his words religious ecstasy and freedom laced by the strains of a tormented spiritual master: “One does not acquire any excellence other than from one’s midst, from one’s inner essence – not from the external, for accidents do not produce true happiness.” Biblical verses are woven into these fragments that offer insight into his great mind and capacious soul.

Non-Fiction:

I am loving Georgetown professor Cal Newport’s latest: Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment without Burnout. It’s another short book with a simple gut-punch dose of reality. We need to do fewer things, work at a natural pace, and obsess over quality. Instead we do too many things, too quickly and poorly. How does he know me? Knowledge-based workers have few ways to measure their productivity when it comes to generating ideas and data. We all need more time to think, but instead we get caught in the office busy-ness of meetings and the reactive hamster wheel of emails to show that we are “doing” something. Newport made many of these points in the book that put his name on the office map: Deep Work. Here, he calls this constant pressure the ‘stress heuristic’ and claims it’s why we always feel ‘vaguely overloaded all the time.’ Any unexpected disruption to our overly full plates can push us into the burnout zone. “The informal manner is which we manage our workloads ensures we always have dangerously too much to do.” I hope he helps me figure this out by the time I get to the last page.

The Art Thief: A True Story of Love, Crime, and a Dangerous Obsession by Michael Finkel is a NY Times bestseller and a lot of fun. It tells the outrageous story of art thief Stéphane Breitwieser and his girlfriend who ‘pickpocketed’ treasures from small museums throughout Europe for their personal collection in Breitweiser’s mother’s home. Their aesthetic adventures are detailed as is their unraveling.

I’m also spending a lot of time with Michael Pollen’s wonderful two books, Second Nature: A Gardner’s Education and The Botany of Desire. No. I am not making a garden. I can barely keep a houseplant alive. In fact, I once had my office plant put up for adoption by a co-worker who caught me sheepishly trying to revive it after a two-week vacation. I came in early, but as soon as I took it to the sink, she nailed me. I confessed: “You caught me with my plants down.” Pollen’s work is helping me in my research on gardens for my book on Song of Songs. I’m thinking a lot about taming wilderness, a theme I first developed in my introduction to Leading in the Wilderness: Authority and Anarchy in the Book of Numbers, where I treated nature as a character in the book. The relationship of nature to culture is complex, as Pollen writes, “The Romantic Tree is in fact the mirror image of the Puritan Tree: if Puritans clear trees to redeem nature, romantics worship trees to redeem culture. Both regard nature and culture as opponents; they just vote differently.”

Fiction:

“It would be the easiest thing in the world to lose everything.” I bought Claire Keegan’s small and potent novel, Small Things Like These (shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022) from The Book House, a small, independent bookshop on a Jersey Shore boardwalk. I popped in a few hours later to thank the clerk for his recommendation and what a great read it was. “You finished it already?” I couldn’t put it down. It may have sand still in its pages. It’s the tender story of an Irishman, Bill Furlong, who has a beautiful wife and many daughters, and his complicated reflections on life. Furlong is the son of a young unwed mother; both were taken in by a generous local woman. Furlong discovers that the local convent, where his children go to school, employs unwed mothers in their laundry – doing penance by scrubbing out stains. These vulnerable girls, whose babies were taken against their will and given up for adoption, are terribly mistreated. Furlong must decide whether or not he has the courage to act on his discovery. The story fictionalizes a terrible chapter in Ireland’s history. The Magdalene Laundries, run by Roman Catholic orders, were active from the 18-20th centuries and confined about 30,000 unwed girls and women to thankless work in abusive conditions. In 2013, Ireland issued a state apology and tried to compensate living survivors.

Next Up: Maggie O’Farrell’s The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox. I loved Hamnet, I am, I am, I am, and The Marriage Portrait so I bought three more of her novels.

I am afraid to say that I’ve never read George Eliot’s Middlemarch, though I did read Jeffrey Eugenides’ book Middlesex years back. I try to read at least one classic I missed up until now, so I bought the Penguin edition with notes and am making my way through it. So far I like Dorothea and her naïve spiritual self-sacrifices, but marriage to Casaubon is one heavy lift.

What I’m Writing…

We all talk about love, but we don’t mean the same thing.

Sometimes we mean a dreamy, starry-eyed romance.

Sometimes we want the kind of love that fits us like a well-worn shoe. It may be low on passion and high on comfort.

Sometimes we confuse love with desire.

In our honest hours, we admit the truth. Sometimes we want to be loved more than we want to love. We crave adoration.

Love Notes: Meditations on Romance and the Song of Songs invites readers into a garden. There are two besotted lovers in our garden who cannot stop talking about each other. You are so beautiful. You are the object of my every desire. They obsess over body parts and reference the natural world in every encounter from the pomegranate to a dove’s eye. They boast to their friends about the intensity and uniqueness of their love. No one else can ever have a love like theirs. Yet they keep missing each other. The beloved knocks, but the lover takes her time. He storms away. She runs to the town’s borders in the middle of the night, crazed at his absence. It is not until the book’s end that romantic love transitions in mature love. Rabbinic readings scrub away the human love story for a tale of God’s love, and this re-reading is itself fascinating. This is a different kind of book for me, a throw-back to Paul Ricouer’s second naivete. It’s fragmentary in style and combines art, poetry, and pop love songs with classical textual analysis. It’s full of meditations on infatuation, romance, love – and landscape architecture. I started this book during COVID when I spent a lot of time in nature. But it’s a mess. I’ve reworked it and reworked it. And am reworking it again. Wish me luck!

Ecclesiastes: An Old and Very New Book

Is live worth living?
Is everything futile?
Is there anything new under the sun?
Does work have to be drudgery?
Does death give life meaning?
Can we ever be truly happy?

These are the questions asked by writers, artists, and philosophers for centuries.

Kohelet the Search for Meaning tackles age-old questions about meaning, joy, and suffering in three essays on every one of Ecclesiastes’ twelve chapters of with an introduction that focuses on the human condition and how ancient wisdom can smooth out the modern bumps of everyday living.

Podcasts on Kohelet:

A Theology of Distraction: Exploring Conundrums of Kohelet

Leadership Is Not Comfortable”: Discussing Jewish Leadership, Role Models, Successes, And Failures

Kohelet (Ecclesiastes) And The Search For Morning: Genre, Methodology & Reflection

The Koren Podcast

ARTICLES ON KOHELET:

A Theology of Distraction

Are we Hard-Wired for Happiness?

The Book of Kohelet and a Cup of Joy

Ancient Wisdom on Quiet Quitting

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Take your Soul To Work Podcast

“Take Your Soul to Work” is a podcast hosted by Dr. Erica Brown. In under two minutes, it provides a daily meditation that explores 365 different leadership behaviors or characteristics, one for every new day of the work week. It’s based on the Simon and Schuster book, Take Your Soul to Work: 365 Meditations on Every Day Leadership.

Listen to the podcast here, or sign up to follow the podcast on Spotify here.

An Evening of Learning and Conversation in Memory of Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks