This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared

Simply superb.

I read this in real time this year: a chapter for Tisha B'Av, a chapter for the rest of Av and so on, through Sukkot. R'Lew had me dead to rights: the holidays had fallen into a rut of tradition and ritual, but I needed to be shaken up and see them anew. And he got to me: I couldn't stop thinking about this book for months. Thinking about why I get angry when I want to be sad or empathetic; about the imagery of being completely unprepared, about mortality, and the books of life we write.

This book is really for all Jews: R'Lew makes clear that he has no expectations on what you believe, or if you believe anything at all. Whether you believe in G-d, whether you participate in any ritual life, whether you even acknowledge the HH, what is real is that we have on fewer day each day; our lives matter, but also will inevitably be forgotten and it is our responsibility to write the books of our lives how we wish them to be. And that we will fail at that responsibility. Those are the undeniable, intolerable facts of life. R'Lew died suddenly at a relatively young age, and that made his work more poignant to me.

(It's not aged perfectly: the passage about what an amazing and virtuous person Giuliani is made me cringe, reading it in 2019.)