Heart of a Stranger: An Unlikely Rabbi's Story of Faith, Identity, and Belonging by Angela BuchdahlMy rating: 5 of 5 stars
Rabbi Buchdahl's memoir weaves together personal experiences and family background with broader lessons and insights. Each chapter ends with a Dvar Torah, a commentary drawn from Jewish liturgy, texts, and wisdom, that gives a way of seeing Rabbi Buchdahl's experiences in our own lives and experiences. The memoir covers the backstories of her parents and how they met, how they ended up in Washington state, and how Rabbi Buchdahl came to the rabbinate. The second half of the book then covers Rabbi Buchdahl's adult professional life and experiences, ranging from how she came to be at Central Synagogue to the pandemic and October 7.
A theme of the book, captured in the title, is that we all, to some extent, have the heart of a stranger. Or to borrow from Billy Joel: "we all have a face// that we hide away." We can be strangers to each other and to ourselves. Buchdahl connects this to Judaism: Jews for so much of our history have been strangers in the land's of others. Much of Jewish thought is about how to live as strangers in strange lands, but also to apply those lesson to our lands: to treat the strangers in our amidst better than we have better treated. This is the lesson, I think, that Buchdahl wants to teach us. Since we we are all at different times and different way strangers, to others and ourselves, we have to make sure to treat the stranger, in others and ourselves, better.
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