The Jewish Journaling Book

Janet Ruth Falon

Description

Explore your experiences, relationships, and feelings through this guided tour of
journal-keeping in Jewish tradition.

Journaling has been, and remains, an inherently Jewish activity. From the Kabbalist mystics who recorded their practices of reaching altered states of consciousness, to the more recent journals of those who lived during the Holocaust, to the spiritual precedent for Jewish journal-keeping at holy times of the year, writing, recording, and reflecting have long been a part of Jewish custom.

Janet Ruth Falon delves into the practical aspects of keeping a journal as well as how you can use your journal to nurture Jewish values and concerns. Using examples from her own writing, she demonstrates how journaling can unleash your creativity and reveal aspects of yourself that you may not have thought about before. She also includes 52 journaling tools that teach specific techniques to help you create and maintain a vital, living journal, from a Jewish perspective.

Inspiring and practical, this guided tour of journaling shows how yours can be used to better understand yourself and the world.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Cábala
• Jewish philosophy
• Kabbalah
• Judaism
• Religion
• Kabbale

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 24 janvier 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580237116
• Langue: English

Extrait

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Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Why Is Journaling Jewish?
Part One How It Works
Part Two Putting It into Practice
Tool 1: Starting Your Book of Life
Tool 2: You Don t Have to Write Every Day
Tool 3: Don t Write Only When You re Miserable
Tool 4: Use Any Words, Any Topics
Tool 5: Don t Cross Out or Worry about Spelling and Grammar
Tool 6: Think about the Journal as a Scrapbook
Tool 7: Don t Worry about Making Sense
Tool 8: Focus on Yourself
Tool 9: You Don t Have to Focus on Yourself
Tool 10: It s Okay to Use a Computer
Tool 11: Consider Process as well as Product
Tool 12: Reread Your Journals
Tool 13: Don t Write Only on Vacation
Tool 14: Title Each Entry
Tool 15: Create a Journal-Writing Ritual
Tool 16: Think Twice Before Discarding
Tool 17: Write in One Book
Tool 18: Don t Get Hung Up on Names and Definitions
Tool 19: Think about the Book, Paper, and Pen
Tool 20: Deal with Your Inner Editor
Tool 21: Try a New Writing Style
Tool 22: Use the Space on the Page
Tool 23: Use a Tape Recorder or a Scribe
Tool 24: Use Your Journal as a Jumping-off Point
Tool 25: Make Sure You Feel Safe
Tool 26: Know Your Audience
Tool 27: Always Carry Paper
Tool 28: Don t Try to Be a Writer
Tool 29: Find-or Create-a Journal-Writing Setting
Tool 30: Try Time Travel
Tool 31: You Don t Have to Write the Truth
Tool 32: Don t Use Only Words
Tool 33: Write Lists
Tool 34: List the Benefits of Journaling
Tool 35: Identify the Person You Would Most Not Want to Read Your Journal
Tool 36: Be a Journalist
Tool 37: It s Okay to Contradict Yourself
Tool 38: Make a Pact with Yourself
Tool 39: Write in the Right Language
Tool 40: Create a Journal Group
Tool 41: Keep a List of Prompts
Tool 42: Become Immortal
Tool 43: Use Music
Tool 44: Read Other Good Books about Journal-Keeping
Tool 45: Give Each Journal Book a Title
Tool 46: Consider Sharing Your Journal
Tool 47: Watch for Freudian Slips
Tool 48: Read Published Journals
Tool 49: Use Your Nondominant Hand
Tool 50: Use the Journal to See Better
Tool 51: Women Should Publish
Tool 52: Encourage Children to Keep Journals
Glossary
Suggestions for Further Reading

About the Author
Copyright
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Acknowledgments
I couldn t have created this book without wonderful and varied input from many people.
I m immensely grateful to my friends Rabbi Vivian Schirn and Rabbi Aaron Bisno for their willingness to be my special companions on my quirky Jewish journey, and for their willingness to listen to me, teach me, and point me toward useful resources, and to do all that with kindness and without judgment.
Since 1984, when she helped me prepare for my bat mitzvah, Cheryl Magen has always been willing to share her wisdom with me, and for this I am both grateful and, I hope, smarter. Our Jewish connection is only one facet of our friendship, which means a great deal to me; I also appreciate her instruction in challah-baking and crafts, and her endless supply of chocolate.
Rabbi Joe Forman, too, has been a wonderful resource, generous with his time and knowledge.
My friends Jonathan Harmon, Martha Lask, and Susan Landau always make themselves available to me to talk about our feelings about our Jewish observance. I treasure this.
I will always be indebted to Congregation Or Hadash in Fort Washington, Pennsylvania, for being the first synagogue to use my liturgical writings, many of which have their genesis in my journals.
I want to thank the University of Pennsylvania, and especially the Special Programs division of the College of General Studies, for sponsoring my secular journal-writing workshops for nearly two decades. Similarly, I want to thank Reform Congregation Keneseth Israel in Elkins Park, Pennsylvania, for being the first Jewish organization to sponsor my Jewish journal-writing workshops, and Caryl Levin for her enthusiasm in making them happen.
I d like to express my deep gratitude to all the people who ve taken those workshops for their willingness to try new things and throw off old assumptions; I appreciate their input and reactions, which have taught me so much.
I d like to thank my friend Joyce Eisenberg, and Ellen Scolnic, for writing The JPS Dictionary of Jewish Words , which was an essential tool for me as I wrote this book.
I d also like to thank Angela Demetri, Connie Bitterman, Jeffrey Singer, and Burt Goodman, the New York City public school teachers who encouraged my creative potential early on and at various important stages. Elizabeth McKim was the first person to show me how to teach writing in an exciting way. I ll always be grateful for that experience.
I am grateful to my agent Andrea Pedolsky for her support, honesty, knowledge, and tenacity; my computer guru Karoline Wallace for always being on call and patient; and my friend Caroline Leavitt for her love and support. Special thanks to everyone at Jewish Lights, especially Stuart M. Matlins, Emily Wichland, Amanda Dupuis, and Lauren Seidman, and particularly to my editor Sally Freedman for her smart, respectful, supportive input.
I m thrilled that my cats, Shayna and Yussel, were smart enough to distract me when they thought I needed a break from my work.
And most important, I d like to thank my husband, Cary Mazer, for being my first and most enthusiastic reader, my computer fixer-upper and technology hand-holder, my number-one cheerleader, my partner in spiritual questing, and the delightful human being who continues to create an environment in which I can thrive.


Books
We have always loved books:
Hard covers like an embrace
holding between them pages of possibilities,
words-little squiggles of black on white-
which inspire, instruct,
intuit what we want or need.
They are rungs on a ladder, upward-
or rocks to pause on
on the ascent
up the mountain,
stories to grasp (like a welcome stump)
as the mist lifts
and the air gets thinner
and you can t look back or you ll fall.
We have always made room for books in our packs
from the beginning,
from that first time, to now.
-Janet Ruth Falon
Introduction: Why Is Journaling Jewish?
Let s get right to it. What makes journal-keeping Jewish? Maybe it s the identity of the writer. If you re Jewish and you keep a journal, that can be Jewish journaling-even if you don t write about God or Yom Kippur or matzoh balls. Do a Google search on the Internet for Jews and journals or Jewish journaling, and you ll find lots of examples of journal writers who identify themselves as Jewish, even if the journal entries aren t overtly or exclusively Jewish: a Jewish Civil War soldier, a Jewish woman of that same era, a mad Jewish housewife, contemporary Israelis, a Food Maven, and many more.
Maybe what makes journal-keeping Jewish is the content of the entries, whether cosmic or microscopic in scope. If you write in your journal about Jewish concerns-on the creation of the world, or Israel, or your response to a new book about the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah-you re doing Jewish journaling. And the entry doesn t have to be inherently Jewish, such as describing last night s Passover Seder. You can also take a good, thought-provoking secular exercise-listing dependable joys, for instance-and make it a Jewish exercise by changing it to a list of dependable Jewish joys.
Even little snippets of Jewish musings are appropriate for a journal. Lori Weinrott, a caterer in Philadelphia, doesn t make the time-yet-to keep a journal of Jewish thoughts, but as she becomes more involved in Jewish life, she imagines the type of Jewish images she might record in her journal. In an e-mail to me, she described several images:
Sophie, my daughter, at services, holding a crook-handled umbrella like a cane under my tallit (prayer shawl); she looks like a shepherd! Hanukkah candles dripping the wax projection of tears I feel inside. Challah-baking and odd thoughts that rise (dough like old bones before braiding). Looking at a Hebrew letter (the tzadi) , and how the letter looks just like someone praying.
There is a spiritual precedent for Jewish journal-keeping, especially at specific times of the Jewish calendar. Particularly during the soul-searching month of Elul through the closing of the book on Yom Kippur, and during the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot when we count the Omer, Judaism encourages and fosters self-examination, and, certainly, journaling is an introspective pursuit. Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days: A Guided Journal , by Kerry M. Olitzky and Rachel T. Sabath, is a lovely companion for Elul writing.
Journaling can also be considered Jewish because of history. Some people even think of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, as a journal. Like a journal, it is a written record of our early ancestors struggles and questions: Who were they? What did it mean to be a human being? What did it mean to be a Hebrew or an Israelite? How were they different from other people, in their notion of God, in their moral and ethical systems? Even the Ten Commandments are more accurately translated as the Ten Utterances or Ten Spoken Words.
F