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Travels with the Evil Inclination: A Rabble-Rousing Renegade Rabbi's Story
According to Jewish theology, the "Evil Inclination," or yetzer ha-ra, is the small inner voice that tempts us into doing wrong. In a tone at once witty and heartfelt, Rabbi Gershon Winkler, a.k.a. the “stand-up theologian,” tells stories of his own struggles with that voice as he passes from yeshiva boy with a strong libido, to earnest infantryman, to Orthodox rabbi, to redneck ranch hand, to the respected "rabbinic trickster" and scholar he is today. Travels with the Evil Inclination offers a tongue-in-cheek account of a most unusual life journey, a humorous and sometimes exaggerated tale of personal spiritual dissolution and re-emergence. This moving story of his transition from orthodoxy to what the author calls “flexidoxy” will inspire, entertain, and provoke as Winkler explores roads not only less traveled but virtually unmapped.
240 pages, Paperback
First published February 13, 2004
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
January 10, 2020
Gershon Winkler is the spiritual leader that we all need even if is funny and sometimes irreverent manner are shocking to the more sober minded. Travels with the Evil Inclination is a book about Winkler's journey from an ultra Orthodox upbringing in the Bronx to an Ultra Flexidox life in the middle of New Mexico. The book is bold and beautiful as Winkler is honest about his desires, his shortcomings, and his missteps.
What I found the most interesting about this book is that even tough Winkler is Jewish and I practice an eclectic form of spirituality, many of our lessons and experiences are the same. I firmly believe that if you put your intentions out there, the goddess will deliver, but that you will be tested as few things are easy in this life. Winkler exemplifies this lesson as he put out his intention to live a more flexible life and while he was continually tested on his path by the Evil Inclination, he ultimately persevered. Some of the tests he encountered included having all of his belongings wash away and being robbed by hitchhikers.
This book reinforced my growing realization that there are many similarities between different religious paths and that there is no right or wrong path only a right or wrong path for an individual.
What I found the most interesting about this book is that even tough Winkler is Jewish and I practice an eclectic form of spirituality, many of our lessons and experiences are the same. I firmly believe that if you put your intentions out there, the goddess will deliver, but that you will be tested as few things are easy in this life. Winkler exemplifies this lesson as he put out his intention to live a more flexible life and while he was continually tested on his path by the Evil Inclination, he ultimately persevered. Some of the tests he encountered included having all of his belongings wash away and being robbed by hitchhikers.
This book reinforced my growing realization that there are many similarities between different religious paths and that there is no right or wrong path only a right or wrong path for an individual.
April 12, 2020
Unfortunately, I was really not very impressed with this one. I felt like the author tried too hard at times, and that his account was anything but 'hilarious,' as the praise on the back would have me believe. I am not unimpressed with his struggles, those to me seem real, authentic. I am commenting more on the style of delivery of the humor, which is too 'stand up' and misses chances to go more deeply. I appreciated Winkler's connections and commentary to classical writings about the yetzer ha-ra, but was disappointed that he generally gave 'interpretation' instead of translations, as the pieces he chose would have actually gone beautifully with his story in original/translated format. I was a bit disappointed on the re-use of several passages, as there is an incredibly wide range of literature dealing with yetzer ha-ra which might have been tapped into for alternate quotes. While honest, this is not his best work.
January 14, 2014
When I was reading the books of the ultra-orthodox keruv (outreach) focused Rabbi Gershon Winkler in the 1980s, as I moved into the orthodox world for the first time in my twenties, he was already abandoning that community to pursue sex and freedom in California. Ain't that the way it goes?
Even though I never met the man, the world he describes, where orthodox outreach met the secular Jewish students and young people of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is something that I lived. Like him, and in my way, I moved beyond that time too. The places and personalities and debates are all familiar ones - Berkley California and Boulder Colorado, Reb Zalman and Shlomo Carlbach.
Here's the deal with Gershon Winkler - he was a good writer back then, when he wanted to open the path to orthodox Judaism, and even today he spins a damn funny memoir of how he set himself free and found a new life for himself. Listening to his tales of army service in Korea, as the only orthodox yeshiva bocher in Korea, his tales of moving through the Berkley and Boulder Jewish renewal worlds, working to stitch together a new self after necessity forced him to flee not only his ultra-orthodox community but his wife and three daughters who were rooted in it, I cannot help but have enormous sympathy.
I would add that the question of the morality of his choice to leave his wife and 3 daughters is not light question. He knows it, and he has his justifications. When I read it ten years ago I detected self justification, and was somewhat skeptical. On this reading I found myself more open to his self defense. He had become someone who was incompatible with the assumptions of the community that his wife and family were deeply committed to. It reached the point where staying meant dying. I can see that. He tells his daughters (and himself) that they will be better off with a distant father who is happy and visits, than an unhappy father who is there all the time. His wife remarries. We don't know anything about the reality of his family life - only his side of the story. But, like a gay person who discovers their homosexuality while married to an opposite sex partner, we can all imagine situations, realizations, or new understandings that change the fundamental basis of a marriage and make it impossible to continue. It wasn't just about sex, plainly, but about a yearning for a different freer way of life, far from the confines of his New York frum world. He knows he is betraying the agreement he made with his wife about how and where he would live, but who cannot understand that such a choice might be necessary for some people in some situations?
Look, the man is simultaneously annoying and brilliant. To demonstrate the depths to which he had sunk, he describes a pathetic search for a prostitute in Los Angeles. He footnotes his search for the prostitute on Hollywood Blvd. with ironic erudite commentary from the Talmud, and then goes on to tell tales of his own growth as a human being interwoven with the texts that nurtured him for the first 20 years of his life.
This is a book about freedom and the pursuit of sex and the struggle to re-write yourself when the place you begin is too constricted to ever work. And, with Winkler, I would have to agree that it's the problem of sex that makes the whole orthodox thing break. The sex and the sexual repression and the search for all kinds of freedom are all wrapped together. But in that mix it is the sexual dysfunction, wrapped in layers of repression, misinformation, fear and denial, which most epitomizes where I watched orthodoxy fail, and where it seems to fail for Winkler. This is a book about the Yetzer HaRa, the "evil impulse", which is also, in essence, the sexual impulse, and one person's attempt to come to terms with it.
I wonder how this book would read to someone whose experience of a strict religious community was Christian or Muslim? The cultural references here would be hard to fully understand, but I think anyone who has moved between free thinking and a strict traditional community, might enjoy hearing a Jewish version of that journey.
In the end, Winkler describes his new life as a heterodox free thinking Rabbi in the American west and I can't help but be happy for him. I too have found my own refuge from the past out here.
(I read this book about 10 years ago, when it was published around 2004, and enjoyed rereading it again last night.)
(I rewrote this essay to respond to some comments I received. I hope it is clearer now.)
Even though I never met the man, the world he describes, where orthodox outreach met the secular Jewish students and young people of the late 1970s and early 1980s, is something that I lived. Like him, and in my way, I moved beyond that time too. The places and personalities and debates are all familiar ones - Berkley California and Boulder Colorado, Reb Zalman and Shlomo Carlbach.
Here's the deal with Gershon Winkler - he was a good writer back then, when he wanted to open the path to orthodox Judaism, and even today he spins a damn funny memoir of how he set himself free and found a new life for himself. Listening to his tales of army service in Korea, as the only orthodox yeshiva bocher in Korea, his tales of moving through the Berkley and Boulder Jewish renewal worlds, working to stitch together a new self after necessity forced him to flee not only his ultra-orthodox community but his wife and three daughters who were rooted in it, I cannot help but have enormous sympathy.
I would add that the question of the morality of his choice to leave his wife and 3 daughters is not light question. He knows it, and he has his justifications. When I read it ten years ago I detected self justification, and was somewhat skeptical. On this reading I found myself more open to his self defense. He had become someone who was incompatible with the assumptions of the community that his wife and family were deeply committed to. It reached the point where staying meant dying. I can see that. He tells his daughters (and himself) that they will be better off with a distant father who is happy and visits, than an unhappy father who is there all the time. His wife remarries. We don't know anything about the reality of his family life - only his side of the story. But, like a gay person who discovers their homosexuality while married to an opposite sex partner, we can all imagine situations, realizations, or new understandings that change the fundamental basis of a marriage and make it impossible to continue. It wasn't just about sex, plainly, but about a yearning for a different freer way of life, far from the confines of his New York frum world. He knows he is betraying the agreement he made with his wife about how and where he would live, but who cannot understand that such a choice might be necessary for some people in some situations?
Look, the man is simultaneously annoying and brilliant. To demonstrate the depths to which he had sunk, he describes a pathetic search for a prostitute in Los Angeles. He footnotes his search for the prostitute on Hollywood Blvd. with ironic erudite commentary from the Talmud, and then goes on to tell tales of his own growth as a human being interwoven with the texts that nurtured him for the first 20 years of his life.
This is a book about freedom and the pursuit of sex and the struggle to re-write yourself when the place you begin is too constricted to ever work. And, with Winkler, I would have to agree that it's the problem of sex that makes the whole orthodox thing break. The sex and the sexual repression and the search for all kinds of freedom are all wrapped together. But in that mix it is the sexual dysfunction, wrapped in layers of repression, misinformation, fear and denial, which most epitomizes where I watched orthodoxy fail, and where it seems to fail for Winkler. This is a book about the Yetzer HaRa, the "evil impulse", which is also, in essence, the sexual impulse, and one person's attempt to come to terms with it.
I wonder how this book would read to someone whose experience of a strict religious community was Christian or Muslim? The cultural references here would be hard to fully understand, but I think anyone who has moved between free thinking and a strict traditional community, might enjoy hearing a Jewish version of that journey.
In the end, Winkler describes his new life as a heterodox free thinking Rabbi in the American west and I can't help but be happy for him. I too have found my own refuge from the past out here.
(I read this book about 10 years ago, when it was published around 2004, and enjoyed rereading it again last night.)
(I rewrote this essay to respond to some comments I received. I hope it is clearer now.)
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews