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Event
DEVOTION: Exploring Faith and Doubt
DEVOTION: EXPLORING FAITH AND DOUBT
Literary Affairs and Temple Emanuel welcome you for a special conversation with:
Dani Shapiro, author of Devotion: A Memoir
Sylvia Boorstein author of Happiness Is an Inside Job
and Rabbi Laura Geller
moderated by Julie Robinson of Literary Affairs
ABOUT THE BOOK
In her midforties and settled into the responsibilities and routines of adulthood, Dani Shapiro found herself with more questions than answers. Was this all life wasa hodgepodge of errands, dinner dates, e-mails, meetings, to-do lists? What did it all mean?
Having grown up in a deeply religious and traditional family, Shapiro had no personal sense of faith, despite repeated attempts to create a connection to something greater. Feeling as if she was plunging headlong into what Carl Jung termed "the afternoon of life," she wrestled with self-doubt and a searing disquietude that would awaken her in the middle of the night. Set adrift by lossher father's early death; the life-threatening illness of her infant son; her troubled relationship with her mothershe had become edgy and uncertain. At the heart of this anxiety, she realized, was a challenge: What did she believe? Spurred on by the big questions her young son began to raise, Shapiro embarked upon a surprisingly joyful quest to find meaning in a constantly changing world. The result is Devotion: a literary excavation to the core of a life.
In this spiritual detective story, Shapiro explores the varieties of experience she has pursuedfrom the rituals of her black hat Orthodox Jewish relatives to yoga shalas and meditation retreats. A reckoning of the choices she has made and the knowledge she has gained, Devotion is the story of a woman whose search for meaning ultimately leads her home. Her journey is at once poignant and funny, intensely personaland completely universal.
ABOUT THE PANELISTS:
DANI SHAPIRO'S most recent book's include Black & White (Knopf, 2007), Family History (Knopf, 2003) and the best-selling memoir Slow Motion.
Her short stories and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, Elle, Bookforum, Oprah, Ploughshares, among others, and have been broadcast on National Public Radio. She is a contributing editor at Travel + Leisure and guest editor of Best New American Voices 2010.
Her new memoir, Devotion, was published in February, 2010.
She lives with her husband and son in Litchfield County, Connecticut.
SYLVIA BOORSTEIN is a co-founding teacher at Spirit Rock Meditation Center in Woodacre, California, where she leads a popular weekly class on Wednesday mornings. She is also a Senior Teacher at the Insight Meditation Society in Barre, Massachusetts. She lectures nationally on Buddhism and mindfulness; she teaches vipassana and metta meditation. She emphasizes seeing daily life as practice and has a special ability to illustrate how we can be mindful standing in a grocery store checkout line as well as sitting on a meditation cushion.
A practicing psychotherapist since 1967, Boorstein has a Ph.D. in psychology, and has been a presenter at the American Psychiatric Association. Widely respected by her peers, she is often a keynote speaker at Buddhist, interfaith, and meditation conferences.
Sylvia and her husband Seymour, who is a psychiatrist, have two sons, two daughters, and seven grandchildren. They live in Sonoma County, California.
RABBI LAURA GELLER is the Senior Rabbi of Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, California. She is the first woman to be selected to lead a major metropolitan synagogue. Prior to being chosen for this position in 1994, she served as the Executive Director of the American Jewish Congress, Pacific Southwest Region. Among her accomplishments at AJCongress was the creation of the AJCongress Feminist Center which became a model for other Jewish feminist projects around the county. She came to AJCongress in 1990 after fourteen years as the Director of Hillel at the University of Southern California. While at Hillel, Rabbi Geller was a co-organizer of the award-winning national conference called "Illuminating the Unwritten Scroll: Women's Spirituality and Jewish Tradition." Rabbi Geller has written chapters in many books, including Beginning Anew; Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality; On Being a Jewish Feminist; The Jewish Woman; Spinning a Sacred Yarn; Life Cycles; Preaching in the New Millennium; The Women's Torah Commentary; The Women's Haftara Commentary; Hineni in Our Lives; Living Words V: A Source Book on Israel in a Time of Struggle; Divorce Is a Mitzvah; Broken Tablets: Restoring the Ten Commandments and Ourselves; Jewish Peoplehood: Change and Challenge, and Gender and Judaism. She was on the Editorial Board of the groundbreaking The Torah: A Woman's Commentary in which she has two essays. She has also been featured in several books including Rabbis: The Many Faces of Judaism; White Fire: A Portrait of Women Spiritual Leaders in America; In Sweet Company: Conversations with Extraordinary Women About Living a Spiritual Life; and The Mystery of Being Jewish.
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LocationTemple Emanuel
8844 Burton Way
Beverly Hills, CA 90211
United States
Categories
| Kid Friendly: No |
| Dog Friendly: No |
| Non-Smoking: No |
| Wheelchair Accessible: No |
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