April in Paris… don’t I wish! I’m dreaming of places we could travel – I just don’t know if it’s worth the risk yet to spend time in airports, but I do want to go places sometime soon. I’m starting to ache from wanting to discover new parts of the world. And my camera is too!
I’ve been working on putting this post up for weeks now. Sorry for being so behind. I finished my History of Sephardic Jews class. Such a rich cultural history! And I recently found out a few more details of my own family’s history. My paternal grandfather’s grandfather came to New York from Aleppo, Syria just after the turn of the century in response to unrest there. Sometime during the Depression, my great-grandfather came to Houston, a place of relative prosperity (which I learned also in last month’s great read… The Prophetic City). The family had been in Syria for generations prior to coming to America.
On my paternal grandmother’s side, my grandmother’s grandfather somehow left Russia on his second attempt for land in Iowa. He had to change his name slightly. And boy oh boy… an Orthodox Sephardic boy marrying an Ashkenazi Reform Jew? My grandfather’s parents would have seen this as a rejection of all they stood for.
I will give a short summary of the profound things I am learning in my Alei Shur mussar course: How do I become a person spiritually oriented and able to actualize my wisdom? Mussar is a tool to cultivate self-knowledge. The more you practice, the greater sensitivity you’ll have to everything you learn and experience. The point of our existence is to struggle to do the right thing, to listen to our own voice. All the wisdom is already within us but needs to be pulled out so it will inform the way we feel and the way we animate our lives. It’s much closer than we think. We are going word by word through texts and diving into various source texts too to uncover their deeper meanings. I love it!
What is one thing you learned or experienced today that might allow you to bring more peace to yourself, your community, and your world?
I finished this crazy big diamond painting in 28 days! It’s the first time I did some portion of it instead of working on the entire thing. It’s too long to move around very much. This is the forest trail in Lake Okonee, Georgia, where we went for our anniversary a few years ago.
I also got a few of these Israel photos on the walls!
The delay on these book reviews is that I didn’t want to go find excerpts and write my usual lengthy reviews. So we’ll just do the sparse version and hit Publish.
The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race by Walter Isaacson – quite interesting account of the development of CRISPR and the coronavirus vaccine race. Insight into live of a lab scientist.
Broken (In the Best Possible Way) by Jenny Lawson – all about living with depression. Very relatable and humorous.
When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel by Paula McClain – POWERFUL story. Highly recommend.
The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain by Maria Rosa Menocal – read for class.
Still, I am enjoyed learning about the different groups and how they harmonized and “tolerated” each other. She’s very good at describing people. I also like the attention she gives to language and linguistic trends and how each cultural influenced the others.
The Alhambra Decree by Dr. David Raphael – historical fiction about the Spanish Inquisition. Really good!
Farewell España: The World of the Sephardim Remembered by Howard M. Sachar – text for class.
