Customer Reviews

Return from Exile: One Woman's Journey Back to Judaism

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Carol Orsborn movingly describes her return to the faith of her childhood, Judaism. No sentimental hash here; this spiritual renewal came through study and hard work while Orsborn was a student at the Vanderbilt University Divinity School. She paints a very realistic picture of the current state of education in university-related divinity schools, and the composite characters she uses are sometimes howlingly funny (and familiar). This is not just a book for Jews; anyone hoping to make peace with the faith of his or her early years will find in this book a helpful, hopeful story. I have loaned it to several members of my church who are struggling with Christianity. What is important for me and the readers I know is not so much the faith to which Orsborn returns, but the journey she makes. That journey can be universal.

I am a person from a strong fundamentalist Christian background I am reexamining my spiritual journey and studying Judaism. I have to say that I loved the book! It helped me personally in her openess and transparency of her feelings of anger, confusion and hope. Good Job!

As I read the previous reviews, I was struck by the anger expressed by some, and the joy filled paragraphs of others. Carol Orsborn has obviously hit a few nerves here, which is exactly what a wonderful writer,(and I truly believe she is), should do. This journey, one I daresay few would be brave enough to begin, leads us down (and up) a glorious path, allowing the reader to feel the emotional and spiritual road beneath the writer's feet as if we are there alongside her. The name of your chosen faith is not the issue here. Take this walk with her and learn.

As a fellow traveler of Ms. Osborn, I was extremely troubled by some of the comments made here about Return from Exile and feel compelled to offer my own comments. I, too, am a Jewish student making his way through theological studies at Vanderbilt Divinity School. Unlike Carol, I came to VDS with already solid roots in my Jewish faith and heritage. I was not searching for spirituality, or connections, but for education. And that VDS provides quite well. I know with certainty that neither Carol nor anyone else makes it through this program on sloppy scholarship.

While my journey, and many of my experiences at VDS have been quite different than those that Carol relates in her book, what she describes in her narrative rings true. While I suspect that my own surety in my faith has made my encounters with Christianity at VDS less threatening, or at least temepered my feelings, I can fully understand and appreciate Carol's reactions and commend her willingness to write about them so publicly. This is not vitriol, there is no chip on the shoulder here. Just plain honest reaction and feelings. It is writing that does touch a nerve, as another reviewer suggests. That's a strength, not a wekness.

Her path, her intention, and her outcomes may not be those that others approve of, or seek for themselves, but that, after all, is not the point of such a literary effort as "Return From Exile." It is the courage, the willingness to so expose oneself, that is important. This book offers encouragement to others to do the same, and that is its highest recommendation.

I commend this book to all who seek courage to pursue their own path. I especially commend it to Jewish readers, not as a model for spiritual search or renewal, but for its unspoken candor, its unresolved issues, and its willingness, like Torah, to allow for apparent contradictions, incosistencies, and uncertainty. The challenge is always to exegete meaning from the differences.

Carol's journey is one that all Jews, all people of faith (or lack thereof) for that matter, can learn from. Those of us fortunate to have solid roots in our faith should not be so quick to criticize those trying to find their way in, lest they frighten them off.

Carol Orsborn's story of her first year as a Theology student is an inspiring and exciting story. First, it is an engrossing and well written story of her process in school with her co-students and teachers. Even more engaging to me was the description of Ms. Orsborn's study of the bible and related writings through which she rediscovered spirital sustenance in the tradition of her youth and her ancestors. After "traveling the world" of spiritual traditions in her search for self understanding the irony is that the answers that mean the most to her were with her from birth. It was inspiring to me, a non-jew to know that maybe my own answers are as available as hers were. She has made her search so personal and accessible it has inspired me on my own search. I appreciated Ms Orsborn's willingness to be so forthcoming with her process and hope that she continues to include readers in her process during the next phase. I highly recommend this book - it was powerful!

As a person who is in the process of finding my way back to my own spiritual roots, like the author, I could hardly wait to read this. But within a couple of chapters I began to be put off by a number of things: First, the anger that is implicit in so much of her narrative, such as the incident of the book signing, where she portrays the writer who actually got the attention the author was hoping for as being pretty much the spawn of hell, and her descriptions of Southern culture--she can't forgive the South for not being Marin County. Second, the fact that there was not really much in the way of a "return from exile:" she had been a member of a shul, albeit an unconventional one, before coming to Vanderbilt. This book is more a description of her gradual decision to join a particular congregation. Third, the dialogue is obviously contrived, and there seems to be little in the way of structure or logical flow in the writing. I was struck by the way chapter titles seemed to be trying to dramatize fairly mundane things: In the chapter titled "The Monastery In Kentucky," for example, the only mention of the monastery was in passing, to say that Willow had hurt her leg and was staying there. Yawn.

Fourth, and most difficult to discuss, is the author's strong animus towards Christianity, and impatience with those who espouse it. She says a number of quite offensive things about Christians and Christ. Regardless of one's own religious tradition, it is NEVER helpful to denigrate that of others. She is guilty, in fact, of the very thing she gets so angry about in her classmates and professors.

I couldn't help wondering what exactly she expected to find at a divinity school in the South. It reminded me of the Americans who go to Paris and get upset at all those Frenchmen who don't speak English. All in all I wound up with the feeling the author was more interested in shifting her writing career from her previous pop-prosperity niche to the current interest in spiritual homecomings than anything else.

A far better book with the same theme is Miriam's Kitchen, by Elizabeth Erlich.

Carol Orsborn's works are always fun, exciting, informative, and a great read. When she lets us share her own experiential search and research, we know we have a good, solid guide to higher understanding. We recommend this and her other works unconditionally and hope that readers will give themselves the treat of reading them.In 'Return from Exile,' she once again guides us, this time on her own journey back to her Jewish roots and a deeper understanding of this ancient tradition. In so doing, she invites all of us to rethink the traditions on which our lives stand, finding gold where we might have only seen dust. Using her own experiences - which she shares with humor and candor - she allows her readers to experience with her the process of spiritual seeking as both a way of returning to one's own roots and a way of life.

Whether your background is Jewish or not, this book can help you find genuine wisdom on your own spiritual path - and with Carol Orsborn, you know you'll find yourself both lighter and enlightened as you walk.

Mrs. Orsborn may feel like she rediscovered her Jewish roots and rejoined religious life, but her account doesn't read that way. First of all, she was involved in a renewal-type synagogue back in California, Shabbos Shul, even though she didn't go there on a regular basis. It's not as if she were completely assimilated and secular and finally made a return to a devoted Jewish life. She had a connection, however loose and un-mainstream it was. And she admits that she only enrolled in VDS to learn more about Judaism for an article on spirituality she was writing. It's no surprise that she as the average secular American Jew would be sadly lacking in knowledge about her own religion, but she could have solved the problem by doing some reading, spending some time with more observant people, talking with an area rabbi, instead of transplanting her family across the country so she could get a degree at a predominantly Christian divinity school. Not that there's anything wrong with it, but a more appropriate choice might have been a place such as the University of Judaism, which in Los Angeles would have been a whole lot closer to her home.

Her so-called "return to faith" ends up to be nothing more than agonising over whether or not to join your average North American Reform synagogue, Temple Micah, which split from the city's main Reform shul when the rabbi gave a sermon denouncing intermarriage and a lot of the intermarried members walked away. Mrs. Orsborn herself is intermarried, so it's natural this type of shul would be close to her heart. She wanted to try out the shuls in her new area, and was on the verge of walking into an Orthodox shul on Rosh Hashanah when she remembered a bad experience she had a long time ago at another Orthodox shul. So she walks away without bothering to find out if this shul would be completely different. Though with that attitude, thinking it will be awful without even giving it a chance or keeping an open mind, she probably would have had another bad experience anyway. At least try it before you decide it's not for you. Temple Micah is the only shul in the city she goes to, and she almost walks away from that one as well because of how crowded and unspiritual it feels to her during Rosh Hashanah. I'm glad she was able to join a congregation that spoke to her spirit, but it's a bad idea to pick your house of worship, whatever your religion is, because it's the first and only one of its type you've been to in your area. She could have tried out the other denominations as well before coming to this conclusion, so she would know what she was rejecting or missing.

Overall, this book was a disappointing read. The characters are composites of actual people, instead of just changing their names and giving us more characters, and some of the events actually took place in her third and fourth years at the school, but she had them happening in her first two years to give us background on her theological and philosophical discoveries and awakening. Here's a novel idea: Why not write a book covering all four years she spent there, without composite characters, so we can get more of a full accurate picture of what really went on there?

This was a compelling story. I found this book hard to put down. The subject matter with regards to experiences in divinity school were unique. The triumph of the author's rediscovery of her faith were heartwarming.

I read this book right after finishing Tirzah Firestone's "With Roots in Heaven," her account of her search for spiritual meaning. I thought this would be a similar kind of narrative. It's not, and it suffers by comparison.

Ms. Orsborn was raised in the synagogue but evidently turned from it because she wasn't getting the spiritual nourishment she needed, and because we unfortunately tend to devalue that which is a part of our early upbringing. She has made a career of producing and lecturing on pop-psychology books, largely rooted in Eastern spiritual and philosophical traditions.

She enrolled in Vanderbilit Univ. Divinity School for reasons that are still unclear to me, other than propinquity. If I were searching for spiritual fulfilment, the last place I would go is a large institutional theology school. Especially a Christian one. Especially if I were seeking my way back to Judaism. But there's the rub - at one point, she says that her reason for being there is to get a Jewish perspective to add to her arsenal so she can include it in her future books. So how serious was she about finding her Jewish roots, anyway?

Acknowledging that the other students depicted are composites, none of them aroused much interest for me. Willow the spiritual junkie bopped from religion to religion, seemingly based on the sermon of the day. Sammy was pretty repellant. Jered (? - can't remember his name - already...) made a miraculous one-day turnaround from anti-Semite to touchy-feely leader of the tolerance movement in his church. And Carol herself seemed to have a chip on her shoulder the size of a Buick.

Her theological explanations were interesting, but I kept looking for the epiphany that would turn her back to her own tradition, and it never came. Mostly what I saw was her waffling over whether or not to join a fairly standard Reform temple. Her descriptions of the community she left behind in San Francisco sounded very much like a Jewish Renewal group, but there was no mention of any attempt to find - or start - a similar group in Nashville. She claimed to want and need the singing and dancing and emotional content of the Renewal tradition, as elucidated by Reb Zalman Schacter-Shalomi, so her eventual participation in the fairly standard Reform temple came across as an accommodation, a second-best choice.

I didn't get any sense at all of a seeking or return to any spiritual element of Judaism for her. I didn't see any growth or deepened understanding of her tradition - she appeared to be the same person at the end of the book that she had been in the beginning.

What I did see was a quick-and-dirty book, cranked out to join the others on her shelf in the self-help supermarket.

Compare her story with Tirzah Firestone's and you'll see why I was so disappointed.