In honor of Hey Teves, we present the following article:
The following is an excerpt of a lecture given in Yerushalayim (link here: http://www.inner.org/kabbalah/intermediate/unification-emotive-sefirot.php)
Authors can email me if they have questions about writing and marketing a Jewish book. Will do my best to respond in a timely fashion.
Writing a Best-Seller
Here is a practical piece of advice that stems out of this analysis. If a person is writing a story or script, to be successful, to be interesting, it was to have two essential ingredients: love and courage. These are the expressions of loving-kindness and might in story-telling. Courage is exhibited when there is some challenge to overcome. This brings out the character in a protagonist. If there is no love in a story, the story lacks value. If there is no courage, no heroism, it is not interesting.
In Hebrew, there is a synonym for author, which is pronounced mechaber (מחבר ). This word stems from the root that means to connect things together and as such is directly related to the sefirah of knowledge, whose inner experience is unification. So an author in Hebrew is also a “connector.” Now, we understand that indeed the author’s task is to connect loving-kindness and might into a story. When loving-kindness and might, love and fear, are successfully combined the result is compassion or empathy. In terms of storytelling this means that the story can be identified with—the reader feels empathy and identifies with the hero. When a person reads a good book he identifies with the book’s protagonist. The ultimate form of empathy is when the reader wants to become the hero himself. The stories told about tzadikim are so good because they make us want to be like the tzadik. They make us yearn for the same sense of Divine Providence and meaning that each tzadik projects through the events of his life.
To read the full lecture, please click here
