BTZ members meet monthly for a lively book club

By Holly Shifrah

(Calgary) – Approximately once a month a group meets at the Masala Art Indian Restaurant in southwest Calgary to enjoy dinner and to discuss the latest read for the Beth Tzedec Book Club: What’s Rabbi Reading? The book club, started by Ari Cohen and now facilitated by Rabbi Russel Jayne, tackles one book per month. April’s read, Tablets Shattered: The End of an American Jewish Century And The Future of Jewish Life by Joshua Leifer, generated non-stop spirited discussion; no doubt because, in addition to featuring excellently crafted prose, the book tackles hefty questions about the future of diaspora Jewry and the social fractures so many contemporary Jews sense, and harbor anxiety over, within Jewish communities.

A Statistics Canada study released in 2021 reported that between 1984 and 2019, religious affiliation of Canadians decreased from 90% to 68%. And a survey by the Pew Research Center (“Jewish Americans in 2020”) indicated that only 12% of Jewish Americans attend religious services weekly or more often, less than half the percentage of the general public that reports attending some sort of weekly religious service. The survey also suggests a correlation between Jews who are traditionally observant and those who regularly engage in Jewish cultural activities such as reading Jewish literature.

The growing body of research on declining religiosity and synagogue affiliation at the same time society is witnessing growing incidents of antisemitism makes it eminently reasonable that existential anxiety is plaguing some Jewish thinkers and leaders. In fact, the decline in communal engagement throughout wider society has been a cause of worry and a topic of in-depth debate and research for decades.

Professor Robert Putnam helped bring the extant idea of “social capital” and its importance to a functioning democracy and healthy society starting in the 90s but especially with the release of his 2000 book, Bowling Alone. His work has recently been revisited in a new format with the 2023 documentary Join or Die (available on Netflix). In addition to theorizing that communal welfare is linked to group participation of one kind of another, Putnam asserts its importance for individual wellbeing and says that “your chances of dying over the next year are cut in half by joining one group.”

So it may be that these societal issues of cohesion and participation plaguing Jewish communities, the topic which prompted such lively debate at last month’s book club, can find an antidote in programming like the book club itself. Rabbi Jayne’s comments on the positive benefits he’s observed from the book club would certainly lend support to that idea. He stated that “the most important [benefit], I think, is community. Because Post October 7th, post Covid…we’ve been struggling to reengage different…cohorts of the community…face to face.”

Club founder Ari Cohen shared that “book clubs help us connect to both the subject matter and with others through discussion” and a book club can provide a place where “we learn that age is not a barrier to social connection and stimulating discussions and that we can be vulnerably authentic.” Cohen remarked that the club has brought together participants “ranging in ages from university students to retirees and everyone in between.” And during his time as facilitator, Cohen intentionally selected books that would emphasize “the value Judaism places on community.” According to Cohen “Judaism is a religion of family, of community, and of learning together. Book clubs are just a little sample of what Yeshiva life is all about.”

Another manifest aim in facilitating the book club has been to introduce more of the reputed People of the Book to “just how broad and beautiful Jewish literature can be” says Rabbi Jayne. According to Jonathan Fass, in a 2016 review of Adam Kirsch’s book The People and the Books, “People of the Book was a phrase originally used in the Koran to describe both of Islam’s sister religions – [and that] the Jewish people have adopted this title as an honour. Indeed, historians have suggested that it is this eternal relationship to literature that keeps the Jewish people alive and Jewish identity vibrant.”

A 2016 report from the Pew Research Center calls Jews “the most highly educated of the world’s major religious groups.” Dr. Sober, a researcher at Tel Aviv University theorizes that even as long ago as the first Temple period, “significant portions of the residents of the kingdom of Judah were literate. Economists Maristella Botticini and Zvi Eckstein said when interviewed by PBS about their book The Chosen Few: How Education Shaped Jewish History, 70-1492 that “in the world of universal illiteracy, as it was the world at the beginning of the first millennium” that that religious “norm requir[ing] every Jewish man to read [in order] to study Torah himself” led to “an absolutely revolutionary transformation.” They postulate that it was literacy and education that was a key component in later Jewish economic success; success which alleviated Jews of the “economic pressure to convert” to other religions and “fostered the voluntary diaspora of the Jews during the early Middle Ages in search of worldwide opportunities in crafts, trade, commerce, moneylending, banking, finance, and medicine.” And though Jews are only 0.2 per cent of the global population, they have been awarded 13% of Nobel Prizes for literature for a wide variety of genres including short stories, novels, plays, poetry, essays, and even songwriting. And it is about this extensive variety of Jewish literature that Rabbi Jayne summed up the goal of book club, saying “I really hope that this book club will help introduce those in the congregation…to the true kaleidoscope that is Judaism, Jewish experience, and Jewish life. And I hope we can do it one varied book at a time.”

Reading, writing, and arguing about literature is a key component of Jewish experience. One might even make the case that the weekly Shabbat Torah service is its own kind of highly ceremonial book club. Jewish identity has been deeply rooted in the written word for millennia, from Torah to poetry; philosophy to Yiddish theatre; Talmud to contemporary short stories; the written word has been a vehicle by which the Jewish people both create and are created. Jewish book clubs can serve as a microcosm of that process as the participants are shaped by the books they read and their community is shaped by their coming together to discuss, define, and debate the ideas presented.

Holly Shifrah is a Local Journalism Initiative Reporter.