5 or 6 months ago my rebbetzin asked me if I would organize a class or reading group at shul. She knows what a voracious reader I am and how much of the stuff I read relates to Judaism in some way. So I came up with an idea for “Not Your Bubbe’s Bookclub.” Part curated reading list, part book club, I’m trying to bring some new ideas and new styles of literature into the shul. At the first meeting I presenting the class with three potential tracks to kick off with. The class unanimously chose the “Tradition Transformed” track which consists of Yom Kippur A Go-Go, Yentyl’s Revenge and The Big Kahn.

We started with Yom Kippur A Go-Go and I am so nervous to find out tomorrow night what the small group thought of this book. I loved it but there are some actually Bubbes in this group and I was blushing just thinking about them because of Roth’s liberal use of “fuck”, his no holds barred descriptions of a friend’s sex toys and all the debauchery he encountered while living the life of an Orthodox Jew he was also a wild-child poet in San Francisco in the early part of the last decade.

What I really want to get into with our discussion tomorrow night is how much room in the Jewish tradition there is for individuality and individual paths and how to navigate those paths to stay close to the heart of our tradition while being true to ourselves. Without any judgement of Roth I say that his self-identity as an Orthodox Jew and his very strict observance of shabbat and kashrut coupled with a lack of any real discussion of any outward manifestations of Jewish ethics was confusing to me. But that’s good because it’s given me a lot to think about.

I’m pretty nervous about the discussion tomorrow night. I can only hope that the Bubbe’s got past the language and talk of trannies and dry humping enough to let the book make them about some big questions as well.