When I returned to Jerusalem, my friend Yael’s parents invited me to their rooftop sukkah for the first night of [Sukkot]. It was a lovely evening. The sukkah swayed in the breeze. Yael’s mother turned to me, “I hear you’ve been learning day yomi,” she said. “Perhaps you’d like to share some words of Torah with all of us?” I realized for the first time that night that a commitment to studying Torah bore with it a responsibility to share that learning.
—From Ilana Kurshan’s memoir If All Seas Were Ink
I was invited to speak at Selichot, the late-night service of poems and prayers which opens the High Holiday season. The talk I prepared wove together a Selichot prayer asking G-d to spare our bodies with the writings of Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, an early medieval mystic, about serving G-d with different parts of the human body.
Studying Rabbi Eleazar’s writings recently, I was impressed with his zeal in transforming the negative and punitive into the positive and empowering.
I wasn’t able to deliver that talk, but I expanded it into an essay, published in time for High Holidays, by Applied Jewish Spirituality in Jerusalem.
I feel indebted to AJS for the opportunity to share what I learned because, as Ilana Kurshan points out, learning itself is never for learning’s sake alone. It comes with responsibility. It is to be shared.
Returning to teaching full-time after a sabbatical focusing on my book launch, I found myself in a somewhat similar situation. A former ESL student of mine, who is finishing her Master’s in Teaching ESL, asked me if she could do her teaching practicum in my class. My courseload is high this semester: the writing class she wanted to be in has 41 students, and I teach 4 other classes besides that class.
I said yes. I feel that my experience as an educator would not be complete if I didn’t have the opportunities to share how I teach.
The first day in my class, she shared with the students that she’d taken this very class with me about 10 years ago. We both had tears in our eyes: to her, it came round full circle. To me, it felt like passing the torch: I once taught her English writing and grammar, and now she is adopting some of my teaching techniques.
And I’m learning too. As part of the book tour for A Family, Maybe, I just did my first two author fairs. It was a new experience for me, quite unlike giving talks at bookstores or other venues. Like an artisan at a crafts fair, I’d set up a table in a parking lot (Belmont Shore Book Fair) or a public park (Idyllwild Authors Fair), planning how to display my book, where to find shade in the direct sun, approach the potential reader, and so on. With the setup and breakdown, a fair can take up a full day.
I sold a few books, made some contacts, got a bit of a sunburn, but also a better understanding at what might interest someone who’d never met me before in my family memoir.
So this was yet another experience – one of so many on the tour – of learning about the art of promoting books, of getting the story out. Here too, I hope to have an opportunity to share my learning with others – writers, in this case, to pass it on.
A parting thought. We are entering High Holidays amidst the world in turmoil. Where can we find peace and respite? This holiday season may be just the perfect time to go back to our spiritual core, to find solidity in knowing who we are. It reminds me of Rabbi Eliazar’s beautiful description of a person whose body and spirit are united:
“The righteous person is full of good deeds. The tefillin [is] on his head; his teeth utter words of Torah; his mouth studies the halakhot; his nose smells the mitzvot; his hands give charity; his innards are full of Torah; his body is circumcised; his feet lead him to synagogues and houses of learning, and so all his body is whole.”
May you be whole in this New Year. Shana tova u’metukah!
-Lane
Lane Igoudin | Author, Professor, Dad 