In 2020, Rabbi David Bashevkin was asked on the “Meaningful People” podcast how many books he had read. His answer? Perhaps 10,000. That, however, didn’t survive his nephew’s math.
“There’s no way I have read 10,000 books,” Bashevkin writes in the introduction to his new book, I Read This Over Shabbos: Reading Jewish History in the Parasha, which comes out on Sept. 1. “He’s right. I am just very bad at math.”
Bashevkin began posting his weekly reads on Twitter, now X. On Saturday nights, he’d post, “I read this over Shabbos,” with a photo of a book.
Social-media users joined in, posting about books but also about reading the backs of cereal boxes and Febreze instructions. “I redt this over Shabbos,” one social-media user wrote, using the Yiddish word for “matchmaking.” Bashevkin welcomed what he called the narishkeit.
“You don’t make it culturally until people are making fun of you,” he told JNS.
“When I visit communities, people ask, ‘What are you reading this Shabbos?’” he said. “That’s the best part. That’s when you see the stickiness of culture unfold in real time.”
Bashevkin, 41, lives in Teaneck, N.J., with his wife, Tova, and their three children. He is the founder and host of 18Forty, a Jewish media organization, and a clinical assistant professor of Jewish values at Yeshiva University’s Sy Syms School of Business.
The posts turned social media into a place to exchange ideas and literary suggestions, and offered Jews of varied backgrounds a low-barrier way to participate in Shabbat. “I thought one thing that could unite everybody is Shabbos is a great time to read,” he said.
“I want people to build the muscle memory that Shabbos is a time to learn. To remember what it means to have deep reading, deep learning on Shabbos,” Bashevkin said. “If you want to read this book, if you want to do Daf Yomi, if you want to read comic books. Shabbos is a time for us to preserve that muscle memory of deep learning. The whole world’s forgetting how to stay focused, how to learn, how to read.”
At 540 pages, the book is “a harder lift, literally, and an easier lift metaphorically,” Bashevkin said. “This is much more about teaching people how to fall in love with the Jewish people.”
‘Ode to the community’
Bashevkin told JNS that this tome is “an ode to the community that we have formed online” and “a love letter to the communities where I gave over Torah.”
Koren Publishers approached him two years ago. “I’m especially grateful because they allowed me to use the native transliteration I’m most comfortable with, which is Shabbos instead of Shabbat,” Bashevkin told JNS. “I’ve got no beef to pick with the Shabbat community, but I was grateful they were flexible.”
Organized according to the weekly Torah portion, his book pairs Torah themes with Jewish historical events and personalities. Its subjects include Israel; German reparations; mixed seating in synagogue; the philosophical writings of Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz; and the reactions to the death of Talmudist and philosopher Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik.
Each chapter concludes with the recommended books and articles, titled “Shabbos Reads,” that informed the essay.
“What I think makes it unique is I am trying to show people how the themes and concepts of the portion reverberate through Jewish history into our contemporary lives,” Bashevkin told JNS. “It’s not about reading Torah into our lives, but it’s reading our lives into the Torah.”
