Ever since my kids could climb upon a stool and get their own cereal, I have been an insatiable autodidact – to fully embrace the life of teaching myself things, exploring complex subjects, one book at a time.
If you could name one realm of knowledge you have always found fascinating but never really studied, what would it be?
I am certain the various trades and how-to guides count here, but I am personally thinking more about broad expanses of knowledge, subjects that one might study as a longer-term experience: Humanities, politics, the sciences, an entire country, theology, financial health, or a form of music. Bonsai trees. The Appalachian Mountains. The Gold Rush. Women in combat.
Sure, I did study at college, but that is only a fraction of what I have learned since my adult youth, and now I am in charge of the reading list. For me, learning about obscure or only partially explored subjects is the best.
My favorite strategy is two-fold.
First, take note of jargon, patterns, locations, and events that allow for deeper investigation. Google them. Study maps. Learn pronunciations. Connect to what you do know. Talk about them – a major form of further understanding. Ask others what they know about your subject. Write down books they suggest too!
Second, allow an author to prompt the reading of other authors whom they reference. Then I order the next book to read, and I keep moving forward.
And this past year, for me, it was all about Jews, Jewish life, Judaism.
This was an area of study for which I was sorely lost, inept, and woefully confused. All of my life, I heard whisperings of what it meant to understand Jews as a people – their culture, history (and not only the Holocaust), their ambiguous homeland, and the various paths among the Jewish people. I had more questions than answers.
I knew the stereotypes of course. How true they were was beyond me. I certainly knew of the Holocaust, but it really bothered me that I knew so little of what Jewish people were about before such horrors, or even how they identify as Jewish today.
I tend to know what I don’t know.
I knew a handful of people that identified as Jewish. So what? I had never actually asked them anything. I was afraid to offend them, and afraid to look self-involved and ignorant.
What was Kosher? How about Orthodox? Why is the word, “semitic” related to the Jews? Why have they been so displaced and judged? What is the story of Jerusalem and Israel and Palestine? Why have Jews been forever persecuted? Why are the old films of my youth always filled with misunderstood Jews? How was it that even our celebrated William Shakespeare had notably cast disfavor upon his Jewish character Shylock?
Therefore, I got to work.
It began with Salmon Rushdie’s Satanic Verses. Though Rushdie is not Jewish himself, he imagines Jewish characters in his book. This led me to consider the few stories I had already known: the Bible’s Old Testament, Anita Diamant’s The Red Tent, as well as Bernard Malamud’s short story, “The Jewbird”.
I had also recently read Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, but I learned that she, like plenty of Jewish writers, did not consider herself religious. Not being religious does not fully disqualify a person from her own cultural inheritance.
I had also studied Dion Fortune’s The Mystical Qabalah, which is an entire subculture of Mystical Judaism, not embraced by most traditional, orthodox, or modern Jews. But it sure was fascinating!
After the Hamas attack in Gaza, I turned to an old favorite writer, Muriel Spark. Her novel, The Mandelbaum Gate, brought me back to historical origins of displacement and conflict in the same area.
Naomi Klein’s Doppelganger provided witness to a Jewish woman’s lens in current life, with a strong explanation of the Jewish identity in recent political developments.
Klein referenced Philip Roth’s Operation Shylock and Franz Kafka’s The Trial as classic examples of the mirror quality, the doppelganger within, which we all knowingly or unknowingly embody. I then read both of those books.
I liked Roth so much, I continued with his Goodbye Columbus and other short fiction.
I know, I know, I have a long ways to go.
But let me tell you something important. At least I am on my way. I have a far closer notion of what it is that Jewish people experience, what they value, than I did a year ago. This is progress, and I am pleased.
What is it that you might like to study?
Where does your wonder sit?
Pick a subject of interest, particularly one that stretches you. Once you begin, hold conversations with people and tell them what you are learning, or thinking over, or wondering still.
