The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery

Sara Davidson

Harper Collins, Mar 25, 2014 - Religion - 208 pages

A Jewish Book Award Finalist

In the tradition of Tuesdays with Morrie and The Last Lecture, New York Times bestselling author Sara Davidson met every Friday with 89-year-old Rabbi Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, the iconic founder of the Jewish Renewal movment, to discuss what he calls The December Project. "When you can feel in your cells that you're coming to the end of your tour of duty," he said, "what is the spiritual work of this time, and how do we prepare for the mystery?"

Davidson, who has a seeker's heart and a skeptic's mind, jumped at the chance to spend time with him. She'd long feared that death would be a complete annihilation, while Reb Zalman felt certain that "something continues." He said he didn't want to convince her of anything. "What I want is to loosen your mind." Through their talks, he wanted to help people "not freak out about dying," and enable them to have a more heightened and grateful life.

For two years, they met every week, and this is Davidson's memoir of what they learned and how they changed. Interspersed with their talks are sketches from Reb Zalman's extraordinary life. He barely escaped the Nazis, became an Orthodox rabbi in the US, was married four times and had eleven children, one from a sperm donation to a lesbian rabbi, and formed friendships with leaders of other faiths, such as Thomas Merton and the Dalai Lama. Breaking with the Orthodox, he founded the Jewish Renewal Movement to encourage people to have a direct experience of God.

During their time together, Davidson was nearly killed by a suicide bomb, and Reb Zalman struggled with a steep decline in health. Together they created strategies to deal with pain and memory loss, and found tools to cultivate simplicity, fearlessness, and joy—at any age. Davidson includes twelve exercises so that readers may experience what she did—a sea change in facing what we all must face: mortality.

What people are saying

LibraryThing Review

User Review  - MartinBodek - LibraryThing

I've been fascinated by this out-of-the-box man ever since I read a book of his about chassidus. Though these reflections are far more apt for a person of more advanced age, it is good, methinks, to ...

About the author

Sara Davidson is the New York Times bestselling author of eight books, including Loose Change: Three Women of the Sixties; Joan: Forty Years of Life, Loss, and Friendship with Joan Didion; and Leap! She has written for the New York Times Magazine, Newsweek, Harper's, The Atlantic, Esquire, and Rolling Stone. Davidson lives in Boulder, Colorado.Half the author's proceeds go to support the Reb Zalman Legacy Project.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical Seeker Confront Life's Greatest Mystery
• Author: Sara Davidson
• Publisher: Harper Collins, 2014
• ISBN: 0062281763, 9780062281760
• Length: 208 pages
• Subjects: Religion / Judaism / Rituals & Practice; Religion / Spirituality; Self-Help / Death, Grief, Bereavement