February 23, 2024, 8:30 pm
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6:30 – 7:30pm: Community Shabbat Dinner
7:30 – 8:30pm: Rhythm and Ruach
Make WJC your home on Friday night. Join us for an hour-long service to welcome Shabbat, reflect on the week, and connect with God and with each other. Learn new melodies and sing your old favorites, accompanied by our volunteer music ensemble.
8:30 – 9:30pm: Author Liel Leibovitz discusses “How the Talmud Can Change Your Life”
For numerous centuries, the Talmud—an extraordinary work of Jewish ethics, law, and tradition—has compelled readers to grapple with how to live a good life. Full of folk legends, bawdy tales, and rabbinical repartee, it is inspiring, demanding, confounding, and thousands of pages long.
As Liel Leibovitz enthusiastically explores the Talmud, what has sometimes been misunderstood as a dusty and arcane volume becomes humanity’s first self-help book. How the Talmud Can Change Your Life contains sage advice on an unparalleled scope of topics, which includes communicating with your partner, dealing with grief, and being a friend.
Leibovitz guides readers through the sprawling text with all its humor, rich insights, compulsively readable stories, and multilayered conversations. Contemporary discussions framed by Talmudic philosophy and psychology draw on subjects ranging from Weight Watchers and the Dewey decimal system to the lives of Billie Holiday and C. S. Lewis. Chapters focus on fundamental human experiences—the mindbody problem, the power of community, the challenges of love—to illuminate how the Talmud speaks to our daily existence. As Leibovitz
explores some of life’s greatest questions, he also delivers a concise history of the Talmud itself, explaining the process of its lengthy compilation and organization.
With infectious passion and candor, Leibovitz brilliantly displays how the Talmud’s wisdom reverberates for the modern age and how it can, indeed, change your life. Liel Leibovitz is host of Tablet’s daily Talmud podcast Take One and cohost of the Unorthodox podcast. Author of A Broken Hallelujah and Stan Lee and coauthor of The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, he lives in New York City.
In addition, we will be selling books using our Shabbat system.
