Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery
    Unavailable
    The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery
    Unavailable
    The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery
    Ebook204 pages3 hours

    The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery

    By Sara Davidson

    3/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    A Jewish Book Award Finalist

    In the tradition of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture, New York Times bestselling author Sara Davidson met every Friday with 89-year-old Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, the iconic founder of the Jewish Renewal movment, to discuss what he calls The December Project. "When you can feel in your cells that you're coming to the end of your tour of duty," he said, "what is the spiritual work of this time, and how do we prepare for the mystery?"

    Davidson, who has a seeker's heart and a skeptic's mind, jumped at the chance to spend time with him. She'd long feared that death would be a complete annihilation, while Reb Zalman felt certain that "something continues." He said he didn't want to convince her of anything. "What I want is to loosen your mind." Through their talks, he wanted to help people "not freak out about dying," and enable them to have a more heightened and grateful life.

    For two years, they met every week, and this is Davidson's memoir of what they learned and how they changed. Interspersed with their talks are sketches from Reb Zalman's extraordinary life. He barely escaped the Nazis, became an Orthodox rabbi in the US, was married four times and had eleven children, one from a sperm donation to a lesbian rabbi, and formed friendships with leaders of other faiths, such as Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama. Breaking with the Orthodox, he founded the Jewish Renewal Movement to encourage people to have a direct experience of God.

    During their time together, Davidson was nearly killed by a suicide bomb, and Reb Zalman struggled with a steep decline in health. Together they created strategies to deal with pain and memory loss, and found tools to cultivate simplicity, fearlessness, and joy—at any age. Davidson includes twelve exercises so that readers may experience what she did—a sea change in facing what we all must face: mortality.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateMar 25, 2014
    ISBN9780062281760
    Unavailable
    The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery

    Related to The December Project

    Related ebooks

    Judaism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Being Jewish In New Zealand

      Jul 14, 2019

      Being Jewish In New Zealand
      11 min read

    • Article

      The Hidden God: One man’s path to knowing less about God.

      Jun 13, 2013

      David Friedman moved from Denver to the Israeli city of Safed in 1979 to live as a Haredi, or ultra Orthodox Jew. At 29, he and his wife Miriam already had four children. He enrolled at a yeshiva where he drew a salary to study Talmud. It seemed like

      11 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Ella Baxter

      Dec 6, 2021

      The lowest standard I hold for a book is that I want it to be so psychedelic, so completely discombobulating, that I am torn asunder. I want to read words that turn my bones to dust. The post A Year in Reading: Ella Baxter appeared first on The Milli

      4 min read

    • Article

      WALKING in THE LIGHT

      Oct 20, 2019

      WALKING in THE LIGHT
      10 min read

    • Article

      In Search Of The Story

      Jan 22, 2018

      In Search Of The Story
      5 min read

    • Article

      Amy Tan's Lonely, ‘Pixel-by-Pixel’ Writing Method

      Dec 10, 2013

      Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself” helps remind the Joy Luck Club author to capture the “microscopic” details that make her characters unique.

      8 min read

    • Article

      The Write Stuff

      Oct 1, 2019

      The Write Stuff
      4 min read

    • Article

      Clearly, God Loves Me: The Millions Interviews Nada Alic

      Sep 21, 2022

      "The whole point of art is to ask, 'Are you seeing what I’m seeing?'" The post Clearly, God Loves Me: The Millions Interviews Nada Alic appeared first on The Millions.

      8 min read

    • Article

      Zooming In

      Sep 26, 2021

      Zooming In
      2 min read

    • Article

      The New 2022 Nonfiction

      Aug 17, 2022

      The New 2022 Nonfiction
      13 min read

    • Article

      Reading Vonnegut to Cope with Death

      Oct 15, 2018

      I received the call late on a Saturday night. I live in Europe, far from my home in the U.S., so receiving a call from my mother at 10 p.m. my time (1 p.m. her time) was never unusual. But when the tone of her voice on the other line was a distinct “

      6 min read

    • Article

      How I Picked the Five Books for This Summer’s Selection

      May 27, 2017

      SUMMER IS A GREAT TIME TO escape: to the beach, to the mountains or to the world of a great book. This year, I have found myself drawn even more than usual to books that take me outside, and I don’t mean the great outdoors. These books push me out of

      6 min read

    • Article

      A Pained Intuition and a Palpable Longing: Katie Ford on Theology, Poetry, and the Unknowable

      Sep 13, 2018

      If You Have to Go, the new collection of poems by Katie Ford, is a book that conjures powers of possession. I feel that way about all of her books: Her poems bring me to a mystical plane somewhere between language and life. I’m left shaken. Her willi

      17 min read

    • Article

      A Book That Changed How I Think

      Oct 25, 2023

      The right book read at the right time can alter not just what you think, but how. The effect can feel like putting on a new set of glasses: Everything remains the same, but you view reality with sudden clarity. It can also be more unsettling—great wr

      6 min read

    Reviews for The December Project

    3/5

    8 ratings1 review

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      I've been fascinated by this out-of-the-box man ever since I read a book of his about chassidus. Though these reflections are far more apt for a person of more advanced age, it is good, methinks, to get a thought preview on the process as I turn 40 and enter middle age. I was just as fascinated with the ruminations as I was when reading Christopher Hitchens' "Mortality", though, clearly, the road taken, and lessons learned, vary greatly. The chronicler kept it real by allowing her stressful musings to be at the surface, rather than opaque. A good, worthy exploration, even it's May for me (or earlier, I can hope).