The Skeptic and the Rabbi
Falling in Love with Faith
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Narrated by:
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Susanna Burney
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By:
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Judy Gruen
About this listen
As Judy Gruen walked down the aisle and into her Orthodox Jewish future, her bouquet quivered in her shaky hand. Having grown up in the zeitgeist that proclaimed, “If it feels good, do it”, was she really ready to live the life of “rituals, rules, and restraints” that the Torah prescribed?
The Skeptic and the Rabbi is a rare memoir with historical depth, spirituality, and intelligent humor. Gruen speaks with refreshing honesty about what it means to remain authentic to yourself while charting a new yet ancient spiritual path at odds with the surrounding culture, and writes touchingly about her family, including her two sets of grandparents, who influenced her in wildly opposite ways. As she navigates her new life with the man she loves and the faith she also loves - surviving several awkward moments, including when the rabbi calls to tell her that she accidentally served unkosher food to her Shabbat guests - Gruen brings the listener right along for the ride. Reading this wry, bold and compelling memoir, you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and when you’re finished, you may also have a sudden craving for chicken matzo ball soup - kosher, of course.
©2017 Judy Gruen (P)2018 Judy GruenListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner's remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a "year in Provence" with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoe, Katie's teenage daughter. Katie and Zoe had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a 77-year-old woman set in her ways....
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Listen and be swept away!
- By Barbara Quick on 06-02-22
By: Katie Hafner
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Committed
- A Skeptic Makes Peace with Marriage
- By: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Narrated by: Elizabeth Gilbert
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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At the end of her best-selling memoir Eat, Pray, Love, Elizabeth Gilbert fell in love with Felipe, a Brazilian-born man of Australian citizenship who'd been living in Indonesia when they met. Resettling in America, the couple swore eternal fidelity to each other, but also swore to never, ever, under any circumstances get legally married. But providence intervened one day in the form of the United States government....
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Perfect timing
- By Nancy on 01-15-10
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Laughing Without an Accent
- Adventures of an Iranian American, at Home and Abroad
- By: Firoozeh Dumas
- Narrated by: Firoozeh Dumas
- Length: 5 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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In the best-selling memoir Funny in Farsi, Firoozeh Dumas recounted her adventures growing up Iranian American in Southern California. Now she again mines her rich Persian heritage in Laughing Without an Accent, sharing stories both tender and humorous on being a citizen of the world, on her well-meaning family, and on amusing cultural conundrums, all told with insights into the universality of the human condition. (Hint: It may have to do with brushing and flossing daily.)
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Sigh
- By Sara on 01-29-14
By: Firoozeh Dumas
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I Can't Complain
- (All Too) Personal Essays
- By: Elinor Lipman
- Narrated by: Elinor Lipman
- Length: 3 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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Elinor Lipman has populated her fictional universe with characters so utterly real that we feel like they're old friends. Now she shares an even more intimate world with us - her own - in essays that offer a candid, charming take on modern life. Looking back and forging ahead, she considers the subjects that matter most: childhood and condiments, long marriage and solo living, career and politics. Here you'll find the lighthearted: a celebration of four decades of All My Children, a reflection on being Jewish in heavily Irish-Catholic Lowell on St. Patrick's Day, a hilariously unflinching account of her tiptoe into online dating.
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Fabulous!
- By Louise on 09-15-19
By: Elinor Lipman
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Funny in Farsi
- A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America
- By: Firoozeh Dumas
- Narrated by: Firoozeh Dumas
- Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1972, when she was seven, Firoozeh Dumas and her family moved from Iran to Southern California, arriving with no firsthand knowledge of this country beyond her father's glowing memories of his graduate school years here.
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The melting pot, next generation
- By Jerry on 02-15-08
By: Firoozeh Dumas
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The Wrong End of the Table
- A Mostly Comic Memoir of a Muslim Arab American Woman Just Trying to Fit In
- By: Ayser Salman, Reza Aslan - foreword
- Narrated by: Ayser Salman, Assaf Cohen
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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Part memoir and part how-not-to guide, The Wrong End of the Table is everything you wanted to know about Arabs but were afraid to ask, with chapters such as “Tattoos and Other National Security Risks,” “You Can’t Blame Everything on Your Period; Sometimes You’re Going to Be a Crazy Bitch: and Other Advice from Mom,” and even an open letter to Trump. This is the story of every American outsider on a path to find themselves in a country of beautiful diversity.
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Not what I was looking for
- By Amazon Customer on 09-01-22
By: Ayser Salman, and others
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My Two Moms
- Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family
- By: Zach Wahls, Bruce Littlefield
- Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 31, 2011, Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public forum regarding civil unions. The 19-year-old son of a same-sex couple, Wahls proudly proclaimed, "The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character." Hours later, his speech was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, quickly receiving more than two million views. By the end of the week, everyone knew his name and wanted to hear more from the boy with two moms.
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You will not regret listening to this.
- By V. Brown on 06-07-12
By: Zach Wahls, and others
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And After the Fire
- A Novel
- By: Lauren Belfer
- Narrated by: Xe Sands, Simon Vance
- Length: 12 hrs and 33 mins
- Unabridged
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In the ruins of Germany in 1945, at the end of World War II, American soldier Henry Sachs takes a souvenir, an old music manuscript, from a seemingly deserted mansion and mistakenly kills the girl who tries to stop him. In America in 2010, Henry's niece, Susanna Kessler, struggles to rebuild her life after she experiences a devastating act of violence on the streets of New York City. When Henry dies soon after, she uncovers the long-hidden music manuscript.
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Very disappointing
- By Margalarg on 06-28-19
By: Lauren Belfer
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Between Two Worlds
- Growing Up in the Shadow of Saddam
- By: Zainab Salbi, Laurie Becklund
- Narrated by: Josephine Bailey
- Length: 10 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Zainab Salbi was 11-years-old when her father was chosen to serve as Saddam Hussein's personal pilot, her family often forced to spend weekends with Saddam where he watched their every move. As a palace insider, Zainab offers a singular glimpse of what it is like to come of age under a dictator and provides an intimate portrait of the man she was taught to call "uncle". She watched as Saddam pitted friends, spouses, and even children against each other to compete for his approval.
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An excellent history lesson
- By Ella on 12-01-09
By: Zainab Salbi, and others
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Chicken Soup for the Soul - Find Your Happiness
- 101 Inspirational Stories about Finding Your Purpose, Passion, and Joy
- By: Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen
- Narrated by: Cynthia Barrett
- Length: 11 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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What makes you happy? Others share how they found their passion, purpose, and joy in life in these 101 personal and exciting stories that are sure to inspire and encourage listeners to find their own happiness. Chicken Soup for the Soul: Find Your Happiness will encourage listeners to pursue their dreams, find their passion and seek joy in their life with its 101 personal and inspiring stories. This book continues Chicken Soup for the Soul’s focus on inspiration and hope, reminding us that we all can find our own happiness.
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I got even more depressed
- By Tom on 09-08-14
By: Jack Canfield, and others
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Ordinary Light
- A Memoir
- By: Tracy K. Smith
- Narrated by: Tracy K. Smith
- Length: 11 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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Tracy K. Smith has a fairly typical upbringing in suburban California: the youngest in a family of five children raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But after spending a summer in Alabama at her grandmother's home, she returns to California with a new sense of what it means for her to be Black: from her mother's memories of picking cotton as a girl in her father's field for pennies a bushel to her parents' involvement in the Civil Rights Movement.
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Simply spoken - poetic
- By CarolynneRHarris on 04-27-15
By: Tracy K. Smith
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Modern Loss
- Candid Conversation About Grief. Beginners Welcome.
- By: Rebecca Soffer, Gabrielle Birkner
- Narrated by: Meredith Mitchell, Josh Bloomberg
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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At a time when we mourn public figures and national tragedies with hashtags, where intimate posts about loss go viral and we receive automated birthday reminders for dead friends, it's clear we are navigating new terrain without a road map. Let's face it: Most of us have always had a difficult time talking about death and sharing our grief. We're awkward and uncertain; we avoid, ignore, or even deny feelings of sadness; we offer platitudes; we send sympathy bouquets whittled out of fruit.
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Not What I Was Expecting
- By Bessie Mae on 03-01-23
By: Rebecca Soffer, and others
What listeners say about The Skeptic and the Rabbi
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MA
- 01-03-20
Very Interesting
A very interesting insight into a journey of Judy's into Orthodox Judism. With humor and warmth Judy explains about her path to Judism and her marriage.
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- Megan
- 11-08-18
I’d recommend this book for a peek into observant Judaism (although it by no means represents all of Orthodoxy)
I really enjoyed the book overall. I appreciated the author’s description of her struggles with, and learning about, becoming more observant. I valued her insight into the journey. My only issue was the fact that near the end of the book the tone turned decidedly self-righteous and a bit smug in describing her interactions with non-orthodox Jews.
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1 person found this helpful