February 21, 2007

Yesterday I spoke with Estelle Frankel, author of Sacred Therapy.

I first met Estelle when she came to the House of Love and Prayer when I was running the House sometime around 1969. In the 38 years since then we've stayed in touch from time to time. Besides her therapy classes, Estelle is active as a teacher, workshop leader and service leader in Jewish Renewal communities in the Bay Area.

I asked for her advice on getting published. She suggested I contact people we both know in the Jewish world who are involved with writing and publishing, and referred me to an email list of new Jewish authors. She said that she didn't find giving talks in book stores to be particularly rewarding. Her favorite place to give talks has been synagogues, where she can reach a larger audience, and people come with more openness to a spiritual discussion.

We talked about what it's like writing from a Jewish experience and Jewish spiritual perspective, with the intention of getting your message out to a more general audience. She confirmed what I heard from Wayne last week: that books focused on readers within the Jewish world usually sell less than 10,000 copies. "My book is a crossover book," she said. She has been successful in reaching a larger, more general audience and selling more books. Still she cautioned me, unless you're one of the very, very few that get national attention and wind up on shows with people like Terry Gross or Oprah (which doesn't seem much more likely than winning the lottery), don't expect to make any money. The amount you make on royalties is very meager.

I wonder about the whole issue of "crossing over." For Jews, the idea of crossing over is part of our story. The word Hebrew, Ivri, means "one who crosses over."

There's also something quintessentially American about this notion. We're a nation of immigrants, most of us rooted in some way in the world or worlds of our ethnic origins, of our great grandparents, and all of us have to make decisions about how we identify ourselves. Where am I on the continuum? How much am I a Jew, or a Christian, or Muslim, or African American, or Irish or German, or Mexican or Cuban, or Chinese or Indian -- and how much am I an American? How much do I share my intimate experience with others outside of my particular tribe (liberal, conservative, San Francisco or LA or New York, Midwest, South, sports world, book lovers, tech world, agriculture, construction trades, etc.)? How interested am I really in listening to the messages and stories from others outside my tribe, whose lives, viewpoints and opinions are very different from mine?

The world of the Internet and the global network of communications media presents a huge paradox for crossing over. On the one hand, hundreds of millions of us on this planet are becoming increasingly interconnected in ways we couldn't possibly have imagined a couple of decades ago. On the other hand, our communities of shared experience are getting fragmented at a furious pace. When I grew up in the 50's there were three TV channels and one "Top 40 Hit Parade." Now there are so many TV channels and so many worlds of popular music that most of us of my generation can't keep track. Armed with the latest digital technology, we can each create our own news feeds, or music shows, our own virtual video networks, or on-line virtual communities. All of this was dramatically symbolized by Time Magazine's December 2006 "Person of the Year: You" lead article.

So in American culture today, where is the new town square, the village commons, the place where we can cross over to actually connect with people different from ourselves? This is something I continue to ponder.