Customer Reviews

Travels with the Evil Inclination: A Rabble-Rousing Renegade Rabbi's Story

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I hesitated to write this review because this book made me so sad.

Rabbi Winkler's earliest books (e.g., Soul of the Matter, Dybbuk, Golem) reflected a high level of Jewish scholarship and dedication to truth. If you followed up the sources cited in the footnotes of Rabbi Winkler's early books, you'd have ended up with a pretty broad and deep grounding in Jewish spiritual subjects. Back then Rabbi Winkler had that breadth and depth of knowledge. He perhaps had the potential to be on the level of Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan z"l, one of the finer American-Jewish scholars of the last fifty years, who succeeded, with integrity, in making previously closed subjects available to a much wider audience. His early writings meant a lot to me.

And then Rabbi Winkler seems to have lost his way.

It hurts to say that this book is the work of someone who seems to be seriously confused about what Judaism is. He rejects the core of Jewish practice (like performing work/m'lah-kha on Shabbat) in favor of libertine-ism, behaving more like a New Age neo-pagan than a Jew.

Like one of the four who entered "Paradise" (of the four only Rabbi Akiva entered in peace and left in peace), he has "uprooted his plantings", effectively undoing much of the good that he accomplished earlier in his life.

If I had to distill his argument, I'd say that his main gripe is that over the last two-thousand years Judaism has grown too narrow and constraining, restricting the average Jew from polygamy, sex before marriage, sex outside of marriage, shamanism, witchcraft and earth magic. While he wants to understand how the Torah masters of previous generations were able to perform miracles, instead of following in their footsteps by living as they did according to Halakha (the Jewish legal system) and investigating from within their system, he rejects their teachings & methods and sets out on his own peculiar path.

I take his strained style of humor as saying to the reader that he was in serious emotional pain and wrote this book in the process of thrashing around trying to find relief. He doesn't seem to me to be succeeding.

Perhaps the Jewish community would have paid more attention to him and his opinions had he made the effort to rise to the level of one of the rabbinic leaders of our generation. Instead, he left the community and wrote a book like this.

Oy Gershon, Gershon, Gershon...

If you liked Winkler's early books, I recommend that you have a look at Yitzhak Buxbaum's books here on Amazon.

Fascinating, Honest and Funny account of one man's spiritual path

I read the whole book in two days - I couldn't put it down. I also recommend his other book 'Magic of the Ordinary' which completely shifted my perceptions of Judaism.

This book is crazy, irreverent, mocking, angry, abusive...and lots of fun to read. I feel sorry for the author though. No one should have to struggle that much.
If you're looking for a concise handbook geared towards those unfamiliar with the beliefs, practices, and guidelines of Orthodox Judaism, you should try The Outsider's Guide To Orthodox Judaism It's a great gift for your "outsider" friend, boss, or coworker.

First off, Gershon Winkler is funny, very funny. At times, extremely funny.

But the thing is.... This is the story of an irresponsible man.

Winkler leaves his wife and young daughter's to find himself.
He turns his back on his family, and leaves his wife and daughters to fend for themselves in Brooklyn, while he has a middle age crisis of sorts in Los Angeles.

He says that he needs to get away from it all, but ends up remarrying and having another daughter.

No matter how funny Winkler may be, it can't detract from his irresponsible nature.