Join Jew­ish Book Coun­cil for a Com­mu­ni­ty One Read with Bruce Feil­er in Con­ver­sa­tion with Rab­bi Angela Buch­dahl.

Feil­er will be dis­cussing his newest book A Time to Gath­er. Since time immemo­r­i­al, humans have turned to rit­u­al to con­nect us in peri­ods of change. Until today. Birth rit­u­als and com­ing-of-age rit­u­als have plum­met­ed; few­er than half of Amer­i­cans are mar­ried; only one in three is buried. ​“It took us ten thou­sand years to estab­lish cul­tur­al norms around how we mark col­lec­tive life tran­si­tions,” writes Bruce Feil­er. ​“It took us fifty years to dis­man­tle them.” Can this threat to soci­ety be reversed?

To find out, Feil­er went on a round-the-world rit­u­al road trip, attend­ing — and par­tic­i­pat­ing in — life rit­u­als in six­teen coun­tries on six con­ti­nents. These spec­ta­cles, some rarely seen, include a mass bap­tism in the Vat­i­can, a trib­al bride price nego­ti­a­tion in South Africa, an ado­les­cent tooth fil­ing in Bali, six wed­dings in Las Vegas, and ten funer­als in Ire­land.

Angela Buch­dahl is the author of Heart of a Stranger: An Unlike­ly Rab­bi’s Sto­ry of Faith, Iden­ti­ty, and Belong­ing and serves as the Senior Rab­bi of Cen­tral Syn­a­gogue in New York City. She was the first woman to lead this flag­ship con­gre­ga­tion and is the first Asian-Amer­i­­can to be ordained as a rab­bi in North Amer­i­ca. Rab­bi Buch­dahl was invit­ed in 2014 and 2023 to share bless­ings for the White House Hanukkah Par­ty and has been fea­tured in dozens of news out­lets — includ­ing Newsweek​’s Most Influ­en­tial Rab­bis.

You can pur­chase A Time to Gath­er here. You can pur­chase Angela Buch­dahl’s book, Heart of a Stranger here.

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