Friday Dispatch: A Soul-Tenderizing Week

Or, alternatives to doomscrolling

Signs of spring. Roosters, the smallest songbirds, morning light. Keep holding on.

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Friday greetings,

I’m catching up on homework, work, and life after spending Sunday-Wednesday at my first Academy for Jewish Religion gathering. It was soul-tenderizing to sing, cry, laugh, learn, and pray in community and take yet another tangible step in the direction of “rabbi.”

Thus a shorter Dispatch this week, with a few offerings in no particular order.

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Start on page two.

I’m pondering this quote, the implications of which feel as personal as they are vast:

“No Talmudic tractate has a page one; the book always begins, so to speak, on the second page. An old explanation has it that by starting on page two, by not learning page one first, you know from the very beginning of your studies that you will never ‘know it all.’”

~ Robert Goldenberg (Back to the Sources, ed. Barry W. Holtz)

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Snow melting. The song sparrow at dawn. Sounds of hope. Listen:

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Instead of doomscrolling.

Last night, I contacted several Barnes & Noble stores within a few hours of me about scheduling book signings for this spring. Many (all?) of us are reeling for more reasons than we can track. For me, working on getting the book out there is giving me one way to channel some of the overwhelm.

These are the three quotes that welcome you into the book.

I made this book for you.

The 201 writing prompts in Fierce Encouragement offer accessible ways to get some of what's in your head and heart onto the page, whether you consider yourself a “writer” or not. (A writer is a person who writes. A writer is a person who writes. Everybody now. A writer is a person who writes.)

Hundreds of people just like you (maybe even you!) have already used them to generate surprising new writing in many genres, from essays, blog posts, and memoirs to songs, poems, and sermons, as well as to develop and deepen a doable writing practice, process real life happening, and reach into the truths that live between and beneath our many layers of being.

Each time a review pops up, my heart bursts a little.

Whether you write to publish, for self-exploration, healing, refuge, catharsis, or all of the above, I made this book for you, for these fragile times.

Order copies – and it would mean the world to me if you left a review of your own – on BookBaby.

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Visioning*

*a moment from my experience in Rabbi Jill Hammer’s workshop, “The Practice of Contemplating Torah: Visioning as a Portal to Text, Text as a Portal to Visioning”

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Ilu finu malei shira kayam. And were our mouths filled with song like the ocean…

Shabbat Shalom and love,

Jena

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