The Jewish Journaling Book: How to Use Jewish Tradition to Write Your Life & Explore Your Soul

By Janet Ruth Falon

Explore your experiences, relationships, and feelings through this guided tour of
journal-keeping in Jewish tradition.

Journaling has been, and remains, an inherently Jewish activity. From the Kabbalist mystics who recorded their practices of reaching altered states of consciousness, to the more recent journals of those who lived during the Holocaust, to the spiritual precedent for Jewish journal-keeping at holy times of the year, writing, recording, and reflecting have long been a part of Jewish custom.

Janet Ruth Falon delves into the practical aspects of keeping a journal as well as how you can use your journal to nurture Jewish values and concerns. Using examples from her own writing, she demonstrates how journaling can unleash your creativity and reveal aspects of yourself that you may not have thought about before. She also includes 52 journaling tools that teach specific techniques to help you create and maintain a vital, living journal, from a Jewish perspective.

Inspiring and practical, this guided tour of journaling shows how yours can be used to better understand yourself and the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Jan 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781580237116

Janet Ruth Falon

Janet Ruth Falon is an award-winning journalist, essayist, poet and teacher. She teaches journaling and creative writing at many venues, including the University of Pennsylvania, and is available to teach workshops based on the concepts in her book, The Jewish Journaling Book: How to Use Jewish Tradition to Write Your Life and Explore Your Soul. Her articles and essays have appeared in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Christian Science Monitor. Janet Falon is available to speak on the following topics: Journaling

Book preview

Introduction: Why Is Journaling Jewish?

Let’s get right to it. What makes journal-keeping Jewish? Maybe it’s the identity of the writer. If you’re Jewish and you keep a journal, that can be Jewish journaling—even if you don’t write about God or Yom Kippur or matzoh balls. Do a Google search on the Internet for Jews and journals or Jewish journaling, and you’ll find lots of examples of journal writers who identify themselves as Jewish, even if the journal entries aren’t overtly or exclusively Jewish: a Jewish Civil War soldier, a Jewish woman of that same era, a mad Jewish housewife, contemporary Israelis, a Food Maven, and many more.

Maybe what makes journal-keeping Jewish is the content of the entries, whether cosmic or microscopic in scope. If you write in your journal about Jewish concerns—on the creation of the world, or Israel, or your response to a new book about the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah—you’re doing Jewish journaling. And the entry doesn’t have to be inherently Jewish, such as describing last night’s Passover Seder. You can also take a good, thought-provoking secular exercise—listing dependable joys, for instance—and make it a Jewish exercise by changing it to a list of dependable Jewish joys.

Even little snippets of Jewish musings are appropriate for a journal. Lori Weinrott, a caterer in Philadelphia, doesn’t make the time—yet—to keep a journal of Jewish thoughts, but as she becomes more involved in Jewish life, she imagines the type of Jewish images she might record in her journal. In an e-mail to me, she described several images:

Sophie, my daughter, at services, holding a crook-handled umbrella like a cane under my tallit (prayer shawl); she looks like a shepherd! Hanukkah candles dripping the wax projection of tears I feel inside. Challah-baking and odd thoughts that rise (dough like old bones before braiding). Looking at a Hebrew letter (the tzadi), and how the letter looks just like someone praying.

There is a spiritual precedent for Jewish journal-keeping, especially at specific times of the Jewish calendar. Particularly during the soul-searching month of Elul through the closing of the book on Yom Kippur, and during the forty-nine days between Passover and Shavuot when we count the Omer, Judaism encourages and fosters self-examination, and, certainly, journaling is an introspective pursuit. Preparing Your Heart for the High Holy Days: A Guided Journal, by Kerry M. Olitzky and Rachel T. Sabath, is a lovely companion for Elul writing.

Journaling can also be considered Jewish because of history. Some people even think of the Torah, the first five books of the Hebrew Bible, as a journal. Like a journal, it is a written record of our early ancestors’ struggles and questions: Who were they? What did it mean to be a human being? What did it mean to be a Hebrew or an Israelite? How were they different from other people, in their notion of God, in their moral and ethical systems? Even the Ten Commandments are more accurately translated as the Ten Utterances or Ten Spoken Words.

Furthermore, there are historic precedents for Jewish journaling that stretch back for centuries. For example, starting about eight hundred years ago, kabbalists kept journals in which they described the practices that enabled them to reach altered states of consciousness as well as what those experiences entailed.

More recently, Holocaust journals—both of survivors and of those who perished—not only depict the horrors of the Holocaust but also serve as a concrete rebuttal against the historic revisionists who claim that the Holocaust never happened. Diaries about the Warsaw Ghetto are particularly moving. Anne Frank’s The Diary of a Young Girl—probably the most widely read and beloved journal of all time, and for good reason—is a fine work of literature as well as an authentic historic record. Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life: The Diaries, 1941–43 is so engaging and well written that it should be Anne Frank’s must-read twin. At a 1994 performance piece by Judith Blankman, Buried Days, Starved Dreams: Auschwitz Memory at the Oakland Museum in Oakland, California, the artist’s friends gathered to copy first-person accounts by Holocaust victims into journals that were buried under trees, unearthed, read, and then reburied by museum visitors. A history of Jewish journaling can be found in the four-page introduction to Jewish Wisdom: A Journal, by Edward Hoffman, after which is a book’s worth of blank journal pages highlighted by a series of Jewish quotations.

Many Jews have valued journal writing enough to commit their time and energy to this pursuit. David Ben Gurion, Israel’s first prime minister, kept a journal from 1915 to 1963. The Information Center of the Ben Gurion Research Center in Israel currently provides a free full-text database of the diaries. Theodor Herzl, founder of the Zionist movement, wrote in a journal from 1895 to 1904; the first full edition of the diaries was a five-volume translation from German to English, published by the Herzl Press in 1960.

Mordecai M. Kaplan, founder of the Reconstructionist movement, kept a journal from 1913 until the late 1970s; his journal consists of twenty-seven volumes, each one 350 to 400 handwritten pages. Communings of the Spirit: The Journals of Mordecai M. Kaplan, 1913–1934, edited by Mel Scult, was published by Wayne State University Press in 2002. Dr. Scult’s second volume will run from 1934 to 1951.

The list continues. You can read The Diary of Sigmund Freud: A Record of the Final Decade, 1929–1939, edited by Michael Molnar (the movie The Secret Diary of Sigmund Freud is a spoof ). Hannah Senesh: Her Life and Diary tells the inspiring story of a young woman who, having escaped to Palestine, volunteered for a mission to help rescue Jews in her native Hungary during World War II. The Memoirs of Glückel of Hameln contains the diary, beginning in 1690, of a forty-four-year-old German-Jewish widow, who writes about how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her children, engaged in trade, ran her own factory, and promoted the welfare of her large family. Albert Einstein, although he may not have kept a formal journal, noted impressions when he traveled.

The most convincing argument for something we might call Jewish journaling is revealed in the wonderful nickname for the Jewish people: the People of the Book. Indeed, we are book people, word people, people who value both spoken and written words as a means for engaging with and understanding ourselves and the world around us. We care about words and enjoy them; we play with them; we appreciate their complexity and how one word resonates with many different meanings. Words, and engaging with them, are integral to the Jewish experience; journaling is another way of getting into the spirit—an ideal companion for Jews contemplating, or on, a spiritual journey.

The core of our weekly service (three times daily for more observant Jews) requires reading from a written document: the Torah, the book of our heart and soul, our history and our singularity. We even kiss the Torah scroll when it passes by (using our tallit, or our prayer book, as an intermediary)—something we’d never do to a volume of Tom Sawyer, Les Miserables, or even Leon Uris’s Exodus. We also kiss a printed Bible or prayer book when it falls.

Jews honor books as special objects and treat sacred books with the same respect we afford the body of a dead person. We’re not supposed to damage or deface sacred books or books with God’s name in them. There are even special rules about how to bury these books, just as we would a human body.

In a wonderfully self-referential pattern, we write books based on books based on books, like seeing your reflection in a mirror that you see in a mirror that you see in a mirror. We start with the Torah, the Law. The Rabbis wrote the Mishnah, which interprets the laws of the Torah, and the Gemara, a discussion of this Mishnah; together, the Mishnah and Gemara make up the Talmud.

And we use books and bits of books as jumping-off points for learning. Serious students of Judaism—yeshivah bochers as well as motivated laypeople—can argue for hours about the meaning and implication of a single word. Rabbis write sermons based on words or slivers of books. And an entire sermon or davar Torah can be based on a single, short piece of text, even one phrase or sentence or word.

Jews are people who question, who look at things from different perspectives before making a decision. There’s an old saying: Put three Jews in one room, and they’ll come up with four opinions. And that’s fine; the Talmud records conflicting opinions, the minority views as well as the dominant ones.

In fact, there are many commentators who have contemplated all of these writings; two of the most famous are Rashi (Rabbi Shlomo ben Isaac, an eleventh-century scholar) and the Rambam (Moses Maimonides, the twelfth-century philosopher and rabbi). It’s layer upon layer upon layer, book upon book upon book.

For the People of the Book, many holidays are based on and include books in their observance. Consider the five Megillot: The Book of Esther, which is traditionally read on Purim, The Song of Songs on Passover, The Book of Ruth on Shavuot, Lamentations on Tisha B’Av, and Ecclesiastes on Sukkot.

Journaling is also a method for preserving and passing down stories, an intrinsically Jewish activity. Think of Hasidic tales, stories about life in the old country, and stories about ancestors, etc. There’s a long tradition of writing midrashim, interpretations of the laws, customs, and rituals of Jewish life mentioned in the Torah. Some are like sermons, some are like fables, and some dissect the Torah verse by verse, looking for explanation and meaning. They’re still being written today.

Journaling is a private pursuit, generally something you do by yourself and for yourself alone—like the Jewish prayers that are said privately, such as those recited upon awaking, performing morning ablutions, and getting dressed.

And if a primary goal of keeping a journal is to help you become a better person, a more ethical and generous and self-aware and kindhearted person, then journaling is about as Jewish as you can get.

We can’t all be Jewish scholars who spend hours engaging with text to uncover tiny shards of meaning as well as cosmic life lessons. But it has always been an inherently Jewish pursuit to explore the workings of the universe and to challenge ourselves about how we should live our lives. A journal can be a tool to better understand ourselves and our world, and to figure out how to bring about tikkun olam, the repair of the world—and in so doing, the repair of ourselves.

How can this book help you do Jewish journaling? Following this Introduction, Part One will explain how journal-keeping can be used in a Jewish context; in Part Two you will learn 52 specific journal-writing tools that will help you create a vital, organic journal with a Jewish perspective.

I’m not suggesting you keep a Jewish journal in which you write about only Jewish things. I certainly don’t keep a separate Jewish journal, and I can only imagine a few scenarios that would inspire me to write a journal about Jewish things alone—perhaps if I ever went to rabbinical school or wanted to write a memoir about my personal Jewish journey.

I have one journal where I write about anything, Jewish or not. Sure, I’m Jewish, and sometimes I write about Judaism, but I also write about work, friends, family, health, my cats, and everything else. Many years ago I kept a separate dream journal, which I left by my bed with a pen that doubled as a flashlight. Later, at the beginning of my freelance-writing career, I kept a writer’s journal, recording my feelings and experiences as a writer. But I soon realized that it’s all me: the dreamer, the writer, the Jew, and all the other pieces. They play off one another and fit together in some grand scheme, and they belong together in one book.

So I’m more interested in Jewish journaling than I am in a Jewish journal—in the process rather than the object. Because it’s in the doing that the thing takes shape; it’s the activity that frees the spirit to soar. The book takes a backseat—it’s the journal writing that’s Jewish.

Part One

How It Works

Life is all about change—about becoming conscious of choices already made, deciding whether those choices work for you, and if not, replacing them with things that are more effective, more appropriate for that moment in time.

That’s certainly true for keeping a vital journal.

I’ve been keeping a journal since 1963, since I was eight years old. It’s been one of the tools for self-awareness and growth I rely on most in my life, and I expect that it will continue to serve me faithfully through my old age. But I came to journaling—at eight I called it writing in my diary—with many assumptions about how it should be done. Some of my assumptions I got from the layout of the books I used as my first diaries.

Although I later discarded those early books, I remember them well. Three or four of them were desk journals—expanded calendars, really—that my father hadn’t used, presents from banks where he had accounts. They were covered in a dull burgundy or brown vinyl with the year stamped in gold-tone on the cover. Inside, each date was allotted ten or twelve lines.

Because there was a space for each day in those books, I assumed that I was supposed to write every day; if not, my journal would be incomplete, and I would be doing it wrong. Because each date had a set number of lines, I assumed there was a limit on how much I was supposed to record about a particular day. Not filling in all the spaces seemed just as wrong as needing more room.

By using these hand-me-down calendars rather than a new book I was saying that journaling wasn’t all that important. And with their muddy-colored covers—I’ve always responded to hot, bright colors—I didn’t think to write with frivolity, vitality, or joy, all of which are as important in a journal as pain and reflection.

All those early assumptions about writing in my diary turned out to be wrong, of course. But it took me years of journal writing to realize that my journaling experience had been so profoundly shaped by my initial suppositions.

I had to challenge consciously my early diary-writing assumptions to see whether they were serving me well. First I identified each of them, examining the ideas that had obviously affected me but that I had never questioned, such as you have to write every day. Next, I looked at each assumption to see whether it helped or impeded good journaling. Not surprisingly, many of my old ideas needed to be tossed out. By discarding ineffectual assumptions and grappling with and re-sculpting early beliefs, I’ve made room for more organic journaling practices, all of which have contributed to many years of happy journaling for me.

I like it that the journaling process is always evolving. I like knowing that I still haven’t discovered all the best ways of keeping a journal and that even though I’ve adopted a solid core of approaches that work well for me, the how-to’s of journaling will always be ripe for reevaluation.

Rethinking long-held beliefs—tossing out old ones, shaping and honing new ones—isn’t always pleasant or uplifting. Often, the process is complicated by all sorts of emotional baggage, and it may be thrust upon you suddenly by the bumps and detours of life. I know this in a deep way, from having re-thought assumptions that affected several important parts of my life. And I can tell you that the process of reevaluating my Jewish beliefs, practices, and assumptions was not nearly as enjoyable as rethinking journaling, and it was also forced upon me by life events and not by choice.

All things considered, I was relatively comfortable in my Jewishness for most of my life. There was the summer at a Jewish sleep-away camp where I learned prayers and songs I still remember. There was hanging out, rooming with, and learning from Orthodox kids in college, some of whom didn’t even tear toilet paper on Shabbat. There was the feminist Jewish statement I made by becoming a bat mitzvah at age twenty-nine. Through all this, I always felt basically at ease in my Jewishness.

It was only in my early forties that my relationship to Judaism started to come apart, when I felt increasingly disengaged from Jewish things that had, in the past, been comfortable and often extremely soul-satisfying. My disengagement began as disappointment and soon snowballed into anger and bitterness. I, who had always found fulfillment in my own idiosyncratic brand of Judaism, could barely sit through a service; in fact, I walked out of at least one High Holy Day service, afraid that I’d explode if I stayed. What I did then was go home and passionately write in my journal, recording the disappointment, anger, and bitterness I’d felt in services. Luckily this worked well and I always felt that I’d somehow celebrated the holiday, even if the celebration was sour.

What caused the slow disintegration of my happy relation with Judaism was that my husband and I, who had married when he was forty and I was thirty-eight, started trying to have a baby. Through nearly seven years of attempts at baby-making and later the tangled mess of adoption, we dealt with the overwhelming demands and brutal disappointments of infertility and our efforts, as my husband says, to bring another heartbeat into our home. Except for once, when I miscarried a fetus with so many physical deformities that he would never have become a viable human being, I never got pregnant in spite of all the high-tech interventions we used. We tried fertility drugs and timed intercourse. We did four rounds of IVF (in vitro fertilization). We then used egg donors, sperm donors, and three times tried to get pregnant using donated embryos. No luck. And each step required us to give up something: a genetic connection to both of us, then one of us, then either of us—and finally, we gave up the idea that I would ever be pregnant.

Our adoption experiences that followed were nightmarish. After signing on with an agency in El Paso, Texas, and anxiously waiting for one-and-a-half years, we brought home our newborn daughter—only to be called the day after and told that her birth father had decided he wanted to parent her. We took care of Zoe for the two months it took to fight a legal battle in Texas; we fed her and changed her and sang to her and played with her and washed her and watched her finally begin to smile—and then we lost her, handing her over to the adoption agency lawyer at the Philadelphia airport.

One year later, having found the strength to subject ourselves to this process again, we were in Springfield, Missouri, about to bring home our newborn son—whom we were going to name after my father, who had died the year before, five days after we lost Zoe—when lightning struck in the same place: The birth father, who hadn’t supported the birth mother in any way during the