PAST AUTHOR NIGHT EVENTS
The Aquarian Minyan Author Night Series Presents
Shoshana Fershtman, JD, PhD
Author of
The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective: Transforming Trauma and the Wellsprings of Renewal
Wednesday February 2, 2022
7pm PST
Register HERE
The Mystical Exodus in Jungian Perspective explores the soul loss that results from personal, collective, and transgenerational trauma and the healing that unfolds through reconnection with the sacred. The book is based on original research with individuals in the Aquarian Minyan and other Bay Area Jewish Renewal communities, whose engagement with Jewish feminism and an egalitarian approach to Jewish mysticism enabled a lasting and meaningful relationship with the tradition that is both psychologically healing and spiritually transformative.
The book explores the rich psychological meaning of the archetypal journey of the Exodus story, a vessel into which sages over millennia distilled mystical wisdom. Their wisdom enabled Jews to remain connected to our collective memory in the wake of devastating losses. We find that this timeless story is also the story of our own time, offering profound insight for healing from personal and transgenerational trauma following the cataclysmic upheavals of our recent collective history.
Understanding exile as disconnection from the sacred, we follow Moses, keeper of the spiritual fire, and Serach bat Asher, preserver of ancestral memory. We encounter the depths with Joseph, touch collective grief with Lilith, experience the Red Sea crossing and Miriam’s well as psychological rebirth and Sinai as the repatterning of traumatized consciousness. Tracing the reawakening of the qualities of eros and relatedness on the journey out of exile, the book demonstrates how restoring and deepening relationship with the Sacred Feminine helps us to transform collective trauma.
Insights drawn from Jewish Renewal and Reconstructing Judaism teachers, kabbalah and midrash, the Sacred Feminine, and Jungian psychology guide our understanding of the profoundly healing experience of rediscovering the deep wellsprings of Jewish mythic imagination.
Shoshana Fershtman, JD, PhD, is a Jungian analyst and psychologist in Sonoma County, California. She is a member analyst and teaches at the C.G. Jung Institute of San Francisco. She served as core faculty at the Sonoma State University and Meridian University graduate psychology programs, and has offered workshops on Jewish mysticism, transgenerational trauma, and the Divine Feminine. She studied Jewish mysticism for several decades with teachers from Jewish Renewal and Reconstructing Judaism and serves on the spiritual leadership team at Congregation Ner Shalom in Cotati. She spent decades as an attorney advocate for environmental, social justice and indigenous rights.
More information about the book is available here: https://www.routledge.com/The-Mystical-Exodus-in-Jungian-Perspective-Transforming-Trauma-and-the/Fershtman/p/book/9780367537135
Use FLY21 at Routledge checkout for 20% off through December 2021
Wednesday November 3
Author Night with Jai Chakrabarti
"A Play for the End of the World"
A dazzling debut novel—set in early 1970's New York and rural India—the story of a turbulent, unlikely romance, a harrowing account of the lasting horrors of the Second World War, and a searing examination of one man's search for forgiveness and acceptance.
New York City, 1972. Jaryk Smith, a survivor of the Warsaw Ghetto, and Lucy Gardner, a southerner, newly arrived in the city, are in the first bloom of love when they receive word that Jaryk's oldest friend has died under mysterious circumstances in a rural village in eastern India.
Traveling there alone to collect his friend's ashes, Jaryk soon finds himself enmeshed in the chaos of local politics and efforts to stage a play in protest against the government—the same play that he performed as a child in Warsaw as an act of resistance against the Nazis. Torn between the survivor's guilt he has carried for decades and his feelings for Lucy (who, unbeknownst to him, is pregnant with his child), Jaryk must decide how to honor both the past and the present, and how to accept a happiness he is not sure he deserves.
An unforgettable love story, a provocative exploration of the role of art in times of political upheaval, and a deeply moving reminder of the power of the past to shape the present, A Play for the End of the World is a remarkable debut from an exciting new voice in fiction.
JAI CHAKRABARTI’s short fiction has appeared in numerous journals and has been anthologized in The O. Henry Prize Stories, The Best American Short Stories, and awarded a Pushcart Prize. Chakrabarti was an Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. He was born in Kolkata, India, and now splits his time between Brooklyn, NY and the Hudson Valley. A Play for the End of the World is his first novel.
Kabbalah and Sex Magic with Marla Segol
Wednesday October 6, 2021
The Aquarian Minyan’s Author Night Series is excited to welcome scholar Marla Segol, presenting her new book, Kabbalah and Sex Magic: A Mythical-Ritual Genealogy. This provocative new book explores the development of the kabbalistic cosmology underlying Western sex magic. Drawing extensively on Jewish myth and ritual, Segol tells the powerful story of the relationship between the divine and the human body in late antique Jewish esotericism, in medieval kabbalah, and in New Age ritual practice.
Kabbalah and Sex Magic traces the evolution of a Hebrew microcosm that models the powerful interaction of human and divine bodies at the heart of both kabbalah and some forms of Western sex magic. Focusing on Jewish esoteric and medical sources from the fifth to the twelfth century from Byzantium, Persia, Iberia, and southern France, Segol argues that in its fully developed medieval form, kabbalah operated by ritualizing a mythos of divine creation by means of sexual reproduction. She situates in cultural and historical context the emergence of Jewish cosmological models for conceptualizing both human and divine bodies and the interactions between them, arguing that all these sources position the body and its senses as the locus of culture and the means of reproducing it. Segol explores the rituals acting on these models, attending especially to their inherent erotic power, and ties these to contemporary Western sex magic, showing that such rituals have a continuing life.
Marla Segol is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in the Department of Global Gender and Sexuality Studies at the University at Buffalo. She is the author of Word and Image in Medieval Kabbalah: The Texts, Commentaries, and Diagrams of the “Sefer Yetsirah” and coeditor of Sexuality, Sociality, and Cosmology in Medieval Literary Texts.
Wednesday Dec. 16, 2020
at 7pm Pacific time
Poetry Night with Rabbi Diane Elliot: The Voice is Movement
Poetry Night with Rabbi Diane Elliot: The Voice is Movement
Rabbi Diane Elliot will read selections from her latest work, "The Voice is Movement: A Life in Poetry" on Wednesday December 16 at 7pm, which is the 7th candle of Chanukah. Rabbi Diane will be incorporating the lights of the menorah with poetry, movement, chant, as well as debuting some new and unpublished poems as well.
——————————————————————————————————————-
Wednesday January 6, 2021 at 7pm Pacific time
Referendum on the Deli Menu: American Jewish Religion and the Deli Revival with Rachel B. Gross, PhD
In recent years, there has been a nostalgic resurgence of interest in the Jewish deli menu. Restaurateurs and purveyors of Jewish food are deliberately making American Jewish food fit for the twenty-first century, emphasizing sustainability, local produce, and a nostalgic longing for family and communal histories. By selling and consuming a revitalized deli cuisine, American Jews express their longing for authentic Jewish pasts, build community in the present, and pass on their values to future generations. Engaging in the deli revival provides an alternative, under-appreciated way of practicing American Jewish religion.
Prof. Rachel B. Gross is Assistant Professor and John and Marcia Goldman Chair in American Jewish Studies in the Department of Jewish Studies at San Francisco State University. She is a religious studies scholar whose work focuses on twentieth- and twenty-first-century American Jews. She is the author of Beyond the Synagogue: Jewish Nostalgia as Religious Practice (New York University Press, January 2021).