Kamenetz, Rodger

The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddhist India (Plus)

While accompanying eight high–spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists.

This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

The History of Last Night's Dream: Discovering the Hidden Path to the Soul

A third of our time on earth is spent sleeping, yet our dreams, if we remember them at all, have been relegated to nothing more than curious anecdotes. When Sigmund Freud awakened modern interest in the dream a century ago, his theory of interpretation undermined the potential insights dreams had to offer. For Freud, dreams were little more than fragmented puzzle parts made up of events from our waking lives. Most of us today still live under Freud's far-reaching influence. When we wake up after experiencing a powerful series of images, we too readily explain them away or simply ignore them all together. Whatever emotion or insight the dream evokes slowly fades. But what if Freud was wrong? Unless we challenge his deeply-ingrained assumptions, we will forever lose the gift of our dreams.

International bestselling author Rodger Kamenetz believes it is not too late to reclaim the lost power of our nightly visions. Kamenetz's exploration of the world of dreams reopens all the questions scientists and psychologists claimed to have settled long ago. The culmination of decades of research, The History of Last Night's Dream is a riveting intellectual and cultural investigation of dreams and what they have to teach us. We discover how the age-old struggle between what we dream and how we interpret our dreams has shaped Western culture from biblical times to today. Kamenetz introduces us to an eighty-seven-year-old female kabbalist in Jerusalem, a suave Tibetan Buddhist dream teacher in Copenhagen, and a crusty intuitive postman-turned-dream master in northern Vermont. He fearlessly delves into this mysterious inner realm and shows us that dreams are not only intensely meaningful but that they hold essential truths about who we are. In the end, each of us has the choice to embark on this illuminating path to the soul. But one thing is certain: our dreams will never be the same again.

Stalking Elijah: Adventures with Today's Jewish Mystical Masters

Stymied by a question from the Dalai Lama and thirsting for a religious foundation of equanimity, Rodger Kamenetz goes back to his roots in search of a Jewish inner spirituality. Through encounters with a range of teachers inspired by kabbalah, Kamenetz discovers a wealth of practices that cultivate equivalencies to the Buddhist ideas of balance, emptiness, compassion, etc. Kamenetz personalizes his experiences and delights in finding them in an idiom that connects him with his own tradition. When the story culminates in a Seder with the Dalai Lama, Kamenetz is brought full circle, even offering methods of maintaining Jewish cohesion to the Tibetan diaspora. Penetrating, poignant, and full of discoveries, Stalking Elijah is like an archaeological dig in your own back yard that yields one precious treasure after another.

Rodger Kamenetz continues the dazzling spiritual adventures he began in The Jew in the Lotus, his bestselling account of the historical dialogue between rabbis and the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. In Stalking Elijah, Kamenetz takes his wild mind on the road, seeking the counsel of spiritual teachers across the country as he searches for his own Jewish truth. Entertaining, illuminating, and deeply moving, Stalking Elijah takes us all on a remarkable journey through the new landscape of Jewish practice.

Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother's Life in Mine

In the months following his mother's death from cancer at age 54, Rodger Kamenetz (a poet, and the author of The Jew in the Lotus) had three dreams in which she appeared to him, offering clues to the secrets of her life. After the third dream, Kamenetz began writing Terra Infirma: A Memoir of My Mother's Life in Mine, a tragic story about the way his mother's tyrannical passion for her family shaped Kamenetz's life and prevented him from becoming a man until she was gone. The book is a collection of essays modeled after those of Montaigne, and their form is best described as purposeful wandering. The first chapters begin with Kamenetz's dreams, move on to his meditations on her piano (the household object that seemed most "to radiate my mother's spirit"), and then question why his mother hid from him all the details of her childhood, including the identity of her own mother. Throughout, the book contains vivid profiles of his family members and friends, poignant descriptions of his bewildered participation in Jewish mourning rituals, and painful descriptions of the technology that kept his mother alive until she gave herself up as "just a body in danger." Kamenetz's final chapter, a reckoning with his mother's last words--"I love you"--is especially affecting; like the book as a whole, it offers little solace to those who hope that life will make sense in the end, and great encouragement to those who realize that what sense life has is the sense we make of it. --Michael Joseph Gross

Ter'ra in'fir'ma, n. 1. Shaky ground. 2. The uneasy shared territory of love and painful separation that defines mother and son. 3. The border between life and death. 4. The precariously emotional place in which we are left after the death of a parent. 5. The mythic terrain a boy passes through on the way to becoming a man. 6. The material from which a writer must craft his story.

"Inside a mother, each of us begins a dream," writes Rodger Kamenetz. Actually, two: a mother's dream for her child, and the dream that will become a person. For Kamenetz, crossing the terra infirma--the place where the two collide--was not easy: his mother was a difficult woman who had loved her family with a tyrannical passion. Only as she was losing her battle with cancer at age fifty-four could her son begin to take the essential first step toward becoming a man, thereby fulfilling both of their dreams.

Rich with humor and insight, Terra Infirma is a deeply moving account of one man's spiritual passage to the firmer ground of maturity and self-understanding.

The Jew in the Lotus: A Poet's Rediscovery of Jewish Identity in Buddh

The Missing Jew: New and Selected Poems

A former featured selection of the Jewish Book Club

A poetic examination, as humorous as poignant, of the blessings and curses of Jewish heritage, focusing on how the American Jew has lost his religious and cultural identity through assimilation.

The Lowercase Jew

The Missing Jew

Jewish Spirituality: Essential Kabbalah, the Jews in Lotus, the Legend of the Baal-Shem (Jewish Wisdom)

Stuck: Poems Midlife

These are emotionally powerful poems that speak to the condition of midlife, of being in the narrow place, stuck between the present and the future, between the demands of work and family, between the hope for joy and the desolation of loss. The pain of broken marriage, the tragedy of daily life, the struggle for identity, and the self-doubt of middle age are multiplied into passionate voices that rage, plead, joke, and shout. The language, tough yet dynamic, wraps itself around the images, which are at times deeply disturbing, at times strangely humorous but always honest, open, and real.