Dr. Goldmeierteaches at Touro College Jerusalem. He is an award-winning entrepreneur receiving the Governor's Award for family investment programs in the workplace from the Commission on the Status of Women. He was a Research and Teaching Fellow at Harvard. Harold is a Managing Partner of an investment firm, a business management consultant, a free public speaker on business, social, and public policy issues, and taught international university students in Tel Aviv.
Modern personal development and human potential exercises have morphed from religious beliefs into capitalistic and secular-based movements. The plethora of media extolling self-help, self-motivation, and personal life control includes social media, retreats, Ted Talks, and tens of thousands of books.
My friend in the ‘70s went East to learn how to find his ultimate potential by studying with a Guru. The spiritual leader asked about the religion of his family. Jewish, my friend replied. The Guru told my friend, “Return home and study Talmud with your rabbi.”
If only then there had been a book for English readers like A Mysterious Guest for Dinner: Exploring Talmudic Narratives by the Dean of Lander College for Men, Rabbi Dr. Moshe Sokol (Maggid Books of Koren Publishing, 2024), my friend might have saved the travel costs. Because the Torah directs humanity on how to live our lives. And the Talmud is a multi-book collection of “profound narratives.”
A Mysterious for Dinner explores “what that particular text might teach us about that individual,” especially self-motivation and control.
The 236 pages come in 10 chapters. Each chapter transmits a message that a teen or adult of any religion can understand. South Koreans who study the Talmud, evangelicals, and Anglo-Jewish yeshiva students will find Dr. Sokol’s explanations and insights fascinating and educationally uplifting.
Jews suffer anguish from other Jews who collaborate with and finance enemies of Jews. . It has been a centuries-long practice that converts out of Judaism treated Jewish resistance activists the worst. Today, Jewish collaborators with antisemites contribute to violence against Jewish college students and Israel advocates. It will do them no good. In Sokol’s chapter, Who Is The Blind Man, he concludes Talmudic narratives with, “The pile of bones manages to endure.”
Jews are not doomed to extinction, unlike so many other civilizations. The self-fulfillment journey in Judaism is a search for redemption that guarantees, just like sages centuries ago, the quest will have “returned from his journey a changed man.”
