If You Have One Book on Your List, Make It This One!

by Karen Elizaga | Posted: January 25th, 2012 | No Comments »

Every person I’ve recommended this book to comes back and says how much they loved it, how it inspired them and how it made them laugh and cry. I personally could not put the book down once I began (it’s short, so that’s a good thing!), and I found myself sobbing uncontrollably by myself on a train to Connecticut one early morning. If you like books that make you think about life and which give you little bits of inspiration on how to live it, get this one!

I did not expect to be so inspired by this book. I’ve never read anything by Mitch Albom (sports writer and author of such books as “Tuesdays with Morrie” and “The Five People You Meet in Heaven”). To be honest, I just picked it up in an airport as I was browsing the racks for the latest US Magazine and Life & Style (trashy gossip mags are my vice and indispensable when I travel) only because I’d read all of mags on the way over.

So I picked up “have a little faith” in which Albom chronicles the lives of two religious men, one rabbi and one reverend. One who’d sort of seemed pre-destined to be a man of religion, and the other who found his way there via drugs, crime and jail. The whole story really begins because, for some reason, Albom’s long-time rabbi asks him to give his eulogy when he passes, and being the journalist that he is, Albom embarks on a mission of discovery about this man’s life.

In the process of his discovery about this reverend, the author learns a lot about himself, his beliefs (yes, about religion but also about others and differences) and how to live authentically, happily and in service of others.

Throughout the book, there are so many life lessons and succinctly and beautifully written passages about how, in fact, despite differences in belief, culture and life’s trajectory, we are all the same. We can help each other, inspire each other and love one another, no matter who we are or where we’ve come from. No one is more right than the other. This is especially meaningful to me, as this weekend, I witnessed the beauty and love of another bar mitzvah, a tradition which I did not grow up with, but in which I can appreciate, and even covet, the love, introspection and celebration of family.

One of my favorite passages, where the rabbi is talking to the author:

“The genius of life is its variety. Even in our own faith, we have questions and answers, interpretations, debates. In Christianity, in Catholicism, in other faiths, the same thing – debates, interpretations. That is the beauty. It’s like being a musician. If you found the note, and you kept hitting that note all the time, you would go nuts. It’s the blending of the different notes that makes the music.”