The December Project: An Extraordinary Rabbi and a Skeptical
Seeker Confront Life’s Greatest Mystery
By Sara Davidson
2014
HarperOne
There’s thinking ahead, and then there’s thinking beyond.
Sara Davidson’s new book is the product of a two-year,
face-to-face collaboration with one of the leading lights of modern Judaism, Rabbi
Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, who died on July 3. The radical and innovative
spiritual leader, foreseeing his upcoming demise, which came at the age of 89,
wanted to treat the subject of mortality, the end of life, and spiritual
preparation for it. She quotes him: “What is the spiritual work of this time,
and how do you prepare for the mystery?”
The result is this remarkable collaboration, a dialogue that
splits into a multitude of levels, but doesn’t fail to cohere. Readers will learn
about the author and her interlocutor, and measure with them insights,
conjectures, lessons, and musings about the thin interface between human death
and human life.
In case you are allergic to self-help books, this is not one
(even though she includes spiritual exercises one can try at the end of the book).
Davidson has the good sense not to write prescriptively, but to listen and
solidify thought into cogent and compelling prose. She does not idolize Reb
Zalman, nor is she merely transcribing his pronouncements . . . not that he was
given to make them. She honors him more by transmitting her perceptions of him
as a complex whole.
An outline of and illustrative highlights from Reb Zalman’s life
are interwoven with Davidson’s. Here are beautifully articulate and brutally
honest accounts of her thoughts and feelings surrounding her mother’s death,
her own feelings of being increasingly ignored at a professional level as she
ages, the frustration of increasing physical limitations.
We read about the insanity and randomness of sudden death,
whether experienced by Zalman at the hands of the Nazis, or by Davidson’s happenstance
escape from slaughter by terrorists in Afghanistan.
What surfaces from these contemplations? Unlike as in
Christian and some other religions, there is no proffering of hope of
salvation, or promises of bliss in an afterlife to come. The refusal of most Jewish thought
to assert a definitive post-mortem reality is strongly here. Instead, there’s
the calm assertion that the essence of a soul persists despite physical reduction
or disability, that an essential unity with the universal has always and always
will exist, and that relation to God is all.
Actions that Zalman advocates to reconcile himself with the
end of his earthly life are just as applicable to anyone seeking peace at any
stage of life – “December Project” creates a shorthand list of concepts and
intentions that can guide us. Rather than try to retail them all in this
review, I will enumerate them as involving the development of intuition, useful
solitude, gratitude, disengagement from negativity, accepting the path one’s
life has taken, overcoming fear, particularly the fear of giving one’s pain to
God, and threefold forgiveness: to others, from others, and from oneself.
This quote from Davidson is a sample of the wisdom found in
this book, one that has resonated profoundly with me and with everyone I’ve
shared it with to date: “ . . . you have the capacity to forgive everyone. All
you have to do is release the negative energy that keeps you bound to that
person. You don’t need them to apologize, discuss it, or see your point of
view. You don’t have to condone or forget what they did, understand it, see
what in their childhood caused them to act that way, or become friends with
them. You just let go – of the resentment and anger you’re holding.”
Easy? No, like most things that sound simple, it’s not. A
lot of the information in “The December Project” may confuse you, irritate you,
bother you, and upset you. Maybe that’s not such a bad thing. For those seeking
answers, Davidson and Schachter-Shalomi’s work together will help you get to
work on figuring them out for yourself.