God Winked: Tales and Lessons from my Spiritual Adventures

by Sara Yoheved Rigler

Sara Yoheved Rigler, author of the bestseller Holy Woman, made her first, year-long trip to India while still in college. She spent 15 years living in an ashram and practicing and teaching meditation. Then her spiritual journey took a hair-pin turn. She went to Jerusalem and started studying what she called, "the world's most hidden religion: Torah Judaism."

The tales collected in this book span the breadth of Sara Yoheved Rigler's colorful, adventure-filled life. The lessons derive from a dizzying variety of sources:

A Hassidic Rebbe in Jerusalem
A guru in Varanasi
A Kabbalist in rural Israel
Girls at a Calcutta orphanage
A clown
A Maharaj's palace in the foothills of the Himalayas
Her 90-year-old mother-in-law
A cat on a dangerous military mission
A totally paralyzed author of 8 books
The tales in this book will make you laugh - and cry. The lessons will transform your life.


Sample chapters:
Buddhism, Judaism, and the Great Cheerio Fiasco
Eat, Pray, Love, Then What?
My Five Weeks with Cancer
My Son the Doctor-Murderer
God vs. Prozac
My Niece's Catholic Wedding

Genres: Jewish, Memoir, Judaism

334 pages, Hardcover

First published February 13, 2012

About the author

Sara Yoheved Rigler is an acclaimed author and lecturer. She resides with her husband and children in Jerusalem's Old City.

She is a regular contributor to aish.com, the educational website of Aish HaTorah. Her articles have also appeared in many anthologies as well as in Mishpacha Magazine and Hamodia.

Reviews

[Kressel Housman · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am going to give this book the highest praise I can possibly give to any book: it helped me remember G-d. Many Jewish books have inspired me over the years, and many self-help books actually helped, but I’ve never found a book that addressed practical spirituality quite like this one. It works because the author is open about her own struggles, so she doesn’t come across as judgmental. But her metaphors are really what did it for me. So accessible and apt, I was saying “Ahh” from the very first page. (Remember, I read this immediately after Eat, Pray, Love, so reading the Jewish approach to spirituality was a breath of fresh and familiar air. Incidentally, Sara Rigler herself is a fan of Elizabeth Gilbert, and the book contains a chapter called “Eat, Pray, Love, and Then What?,” which I actually skipped ahead to.)

Probably the most relevant chapter to my life was “The Spiritual GPS,” which is about recognizing whether you are in a place of connectedness or divisiveness at any given moment. Of course, it’s easy enough to detect, except that when you're in the midst of divisiveness, it’s just as easy to forget to notice and perpetuate it. A close second for favorite chapter was “The Horse in the Gate,” which teaches that when you’re between a rock and a hard place, frustrated by some external limit even though you’ve got the energy of a horse and want to just forge on ahead, daven to Hashem. He’s not limited in the solutions He can provide. But I’ve also been enjoying and getting use from the exercise of brainstorming about two questions to help discover my mission on this earth: 1) What are my five happiest moments? and 2) What would I do with a billion dollars? And here’s one final totally awesome insight: acceptance of life’s challenges leads to spiritual growth, but using life’s challenges as springboards to positive action is spiritual greatness.

May Hashem help us all to become great.

[Naama · Rating 4 out of 5]

I picked up this book on a whim - it had been collecting dust in the little free library outside of my house and I decided to expand my horizons a bit (one of the best things about having a little free library in front of my house is picking up books that’s I never otherwise give a second glance).
A lot of Rigler’s writing is simplistic and dogmatic. She doesn’t try to analyze her own life too much, though she is a woman who’s made incredibly drastic changes in it - going from New Jersey suburbia and a type-A lifestyle to an Ashram and then the Old City. She does spend the first part of her book in some kind of minimal, often judgmental dialogue with her past and others - criticizing the Conservative moment as being watered down and devoid of roots, criticizing Buddhism as being disconnected from the source of it all - but she doesn’t really do the work of introspection in a manner that would allow the reader to deeply connect to her story. I don’t think she asks herself any hard questions in this book. She’s had an interesting life and she writes about it articulately, but it strikes very much as her partial truth rather than her whole truth.

I have very mixed feelings about the second half of the book, where she moves from her personal story to a hodgepodge of various stories mostly focused on others and on her beliefs.
On the one hand, many of her stories contain plain goodness, much of which is even universal in its themes - unconditional love, not judging, helping others, bringing big theories down into the world by a daily practice of goodness. On the other hand, the book gets a little preachy - a little too full of absolute one-dimensional knowledge - and reality is always so much more complicated.

Despite all of the lukewarm things I’ve written about this book above, I’ll end this review by writing that most faults in this book were redeemed for me by one simple story which spanned less than a page yet made the entire book worthwhile. It is a story that I will take with me for a long time and have already related to others. Perhaps, if just one story in this book was so incredibly moving for me, then others may also find some personal gem in it for them as well, but it requires digging.

[Frum Books]

For a liberal Jewish girl, Sara Yocheved Rigler’s story couldn’t be more colorful. Her furious drive for truth led her to explore spirituality both far and close to home, and ultimately in Buddhist India and Montana. From sheltered childhood to desperate search, from colorful and exotic wanderings to chaotic but peaceful frum family, each stage of her urgent but poignant path is a fascinating story of its own.