Books to wake and shake you from your slumber

Windows offer new views while mirrors offer reflections. This metaphor is key to the Windows and Mirrors learning framework, but also to personal growth, introspection, and expansion.

Scan the shelves of Exclusive Books, and you will see shelves of windows and mirrors, stories that provide different perspectives of worlds unknown or experiences yet explored, but also an unpacking of our humanity, struggles, emotions, hopes and dreams.

A snapshot of current titles is as much a reflection of current times as it is the Jewish state of mind on the eve of Rosh Hashanah.

Take Nikki Erlick’s The Measure, which has become a word-of-mouth favourite book clubs the country over.

What if, one day, you found a box on your doorstep? Inside the box is the exact number of years you have to live.

The same box appears on every doorstep across the world. Do you open yours? Do you want to know? And would that change how you choose to live?

Gripping, original and thought-provoking, this book really might keep you up at night – but for all the right reasons.

But not all of us are going to receive a proverbial box on our doorstep. What will shake us into really thinking about our 70 years, and making it count?

For some, it was a pandemic that stole so many life milestones from so many – big and small – a stark reminder to enjoy every minute now spent with family and friends. For others, it’s a visit to Poland’s death camps – that experience certainly reframed and continues to reframe my life like none other.

Perhaps that’s why, Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning just goes on selling and selling. If you haven’t reread it like many others did during lockdown, it’s worth a revisit. Published in 1946, psychiatrist Viktor Frankl’s memoir has riveted generations of readers with its descriptions of life in Nazi death camps and its lessons for spiritual survival. Based on his own experience and the stories of his patients, Frankl argues that we cannot avoid suffering, but we can choose how to cope with it, find meaning in it, and move forward with renewed purpose. Man’s Search for Meaning has become one of the most influential books in the world; it continues to inspire us all to find significance in the very act of living.

In the non-fiction space, memoir and personal narratives in a newly coined genre of “stealth help” – books which can help people improve their lives without being overtly self-help guides – have become popular. Frankl’s story – and the lessons he gleaned and taught – is possibly the original “stealth help classic”, a perennial shake up we all need to reframe life.

So, however many years you have, how do you want to live them? The idea that we inspect our lives, and make conscious decisions on how to live and find our “why”, is what a Torah-guided life encourages. The Jewish festival cycle, with its scheduled times for joy, sorrow, introspection, and celebration, force us to go through the gamut of human experience on an annual basis and not be a slave to the feeling of the moment or the unreliable vagaries of mood. It helps us cut through the noise – no the din – of everyday living and crises that so often distract and confuse us.

Ruth Ozeki’s novel, The Book of Form and Emptiness, which won this year’s Women’s Prize, is a powerful, thought-provoking look at the difference between hearing and listening, the noise around us, and the things that really matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz to climate change, the book shows Ozeki to be a poignant and playful writer, but also her Zen Buddhist view of our attachment to material possessions and where we find belonging.

For me, it’s the personal story that really engages. Benny – the boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; his mother, drowning in her possessions; and a book as a talking thing, which narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly count. The Book itself has a marvellous voice – adult, ironic, and affirming.

Here are three very different books that have the power to shake you up and remind you of your raison d’etre (reason for being).

As we face Rosh Hashanah, a time to introspect and recalibrate, these books offer a good primer to get us “in the mood”.

Books and stories have the power to ignite conscious living, something the shofar has been doing for centuries.

Perhaps Erlick, Frankl, and Ozeki heard echoes of the Rambam’s explanation of why we blow the shofar at the start of a new year: “Even though the sounding of the shofar on Rosh Hashanah is a scriptural decree, nonetheless it contains within it a hint [as to its purpose], namely: ‘Wake, you sleepers from your sleep, and you slumberers from your slumber, examine your deeds, return in repentance, and remember your creator, you who forget the truth in the follies of time and waste the whole year in vain pursuits that neither profit nor save!’”

A timeless perspective indeed.

• Batya Bricker is general manager books and brand for Exclusive Books, and the author of Goodnight Golda – A Handbook for Brave Jewish Girls And Her Mighty Friends, available in South Africa at Exclusive Books, and exclusivebooks.com, and internationally at www.bookdepository.com. Visit www.goodnightgolda.com