I have for the past year or so been seriously working on converting to Judaism, and whenever I set out to immerse myself in something I am compelled to do a lot of reading about it. Of course I have also been incredibly burnt out, so I haven't gotten much reading done until recently. I wanted to do something special for the high holy days, though, and it's gotten me on a little bit of a roll.
I finished both People Love Dead Jews by Dara Horn and On Repentance and Repair by Rabbi Danya Ruttenberg on the day after Yom Kippur. Both felt topical for the season; the latter I'd especially wanted to read during the holidays.
On Repentance and Repair is an interesting book because in reading theology, I'm used to more of an... appeal to emotion, I guess, with the topics of sin and forgiveness and repentance, whereas Rabbi Ruttenberg takes a much more academic tack in exploring what the Torah's laws and Rambam's commentary mean and how they can be applied to modern life. Which is not to say that it's purely legal and detached—she gets into a number of thorny, difficult situations and how they were handled—but ultimately it's not a *personal* book in the way a lot of texts in the Christian tradition are.
I admit I had my hackles a little raised for part of the book as far as some of the discussion of callouts for those more powerful. This is largely because I've seen how people who can be *perceived* as having power on one axis are still actually very vulnerable when other people decide to excise them from a community; there is an unfortunate tendency to treat peers or community members as if they are distant celebrities when repentance is demanded of them for transgressions of any size, which is a tendency that has hurt people I care about deeply in the past, so I'm a little wary of dragging anyone out on the carpet, metaphorically.
However, she does also discuss the idea that intra-community issues are not resolved by simply excising the Bad Person, and it's the responsibility of people around them to hold them to the act of repentance and continuing to change. You can't do that if you just close the doors on someone's face! I also felt sort of... relieved in the way she talked about the reason why slander is the one thing the Torah notes as not requiring anyone to forgive even if the person repented, because it's impossible to fully pack that back in the box. It felt a little silly to me to get as upset as I have been about just things that were *said* about me or others, but it kind of... validated for me that it is in fact a real form of hurt.
I'm reading To Heal a Fractured World by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks next, which touches on some of the same topics, so I'm excited to compare and contrast!
Meanwhile, When the Angels Left the Old Country is fiction, but also touches on repentance, among other things; at one point the main characters need to talk a dybbuk, an angry ghost, out of killing the man who caused its death because they think he should have the opportunity to repent and change his ways. This doesn't always prove to be the answer to enemies—they certainly encounter several they must deal with in other ways, it also helped contribute to the unique Jewishness of the book.
Nearly all the characters in When the Angels Left the Old Country are Jewish, and Jewishness feels both very ordinary on the page and very distinct in the feel it lends to the narrative, from the way the narration is written to the concerns the characters have to the way events ultimately play out. All in all, despite being an angel and a demon, the angel and Little Ash are concerned with the care of their community and their safety (and in Little Ash's case, motivated by his *own* safety, not being immune to pogroms and having to contend with Christian demons). They do miracles that will never be known outside their shtetl or their street, but all the same, it matters immensely. Also the latter half is a bit like a really good Leverage episode and I love that for them. Also: I can't talk about this book without talking about how much I love Rose. Rose, you beautiful dumbass lesbian.
Lastly—turning the topic or Jewish survival around, People Love Dead Jews is... well, about the mood you'd expect. It's incredibly sobering as a work, but in a way that's a little familiar—the way diaspora and intergenerational trauma sees people build lives around negative space. *There was something there, once, but it's lost/we can't talk about it/we don't know what happened/it's been forgotten.* Both sides of my family were broken and fragmented for wildly different reasons, and while it wasn't by genocidal violence, it still left holes that radiate a sense of unease to me.
The ending also strongly resonated with me, though—how in a very bleak time, the author grounds herself in Daf Yomi and participating in community and connecting to the history of her people's (our people's?) traditions. There's something very soothing about participating in something old; it made me think that when I get the chance, I'd like to do Daf Yomi also.