Lag BaOmer in Nature

Lag BaOmer in Nature

This year’s Lag BaOmer gathering brought our community out of the city and into the forest for a day of bonfires, food, conversation, music, and togetherness. Families, friends, and new faces gathered around the fire to celebrate one of the Jewish calendar’s most communal holidays — a tradition centered around light, reflection, and being together outdoors.

The event was created in collaboration with Jewbrew, DJFN, Moishe House, and Perpleks – The Book Club, and became one of those rare days where people could simply slow down, reconnect, and share space together in nature.

A special moment during the trip was a reflection shared by Fabian Mosenson from Perpleks, the Oslo-based Jewish book club that emerged after October 7. In his text, Fabian described how literature, discussion, and community became a way for people to navigate uncertainty and isolation during a difficult period for Jewish life in Norway.

PERPLEKS — WHO WE ARE

Lag BaOmer is a festival of bonfires, of light in the dark, of community gathering outdoors. That’s actually a pretty good description of what Perpleks is trying to achieve.

On October 7, 2023, desperation sank in. We have members from all over Norway and abroad, while London, Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Toronto, or New York, have rather large Jewish communities nearby. Norway is smaller, and sometimes it feels that the size of the Jewish community here could be a statistical rounding error.

In the following days, the world did not change. It was revealed.

There’s an image we keep coming back to, a flare going up in the dark sky. For a few seconds everything is illuminated. You can see the landscape. You can see precisely where anyone was standing. With it came disappointment, but also interesting surprises. Those we thought close were on different sides, but also, and surprisingly, viceversa. We met new people.

Another image: the days following October 7 were like a slow Kodak chemical process that develops an old film. The film had been there for ages. But finally we could see its contours. The image was already there, somehow hidden. October 7 just made it visible.

A recent novel by British author Howard Jacobson is called Howl. He has a character who, after October 7th, feels that the world has gone mad, upside down: sympathy for the aggressors, silence or worse for those defending themselves and trying to make sense of it all. Many of us felt the same. We had two problems: October 7th, and the reactions around us to it. In those weeks and months we all lost friends and spaces all of a sudden seemed stranger, rarefied. But we gained others, both people and environments. Some of us resigned from things. Left places where we felt no longer welcome. And then Kos og Kaos organized a meeting.

There’s another overused image: if you’re not invited to the table, build your own. So a small group of us did exactly that. In Oslo, late 2023, early 2024. Kos og Kaos gathered at the Jewish Museum. They asked for plans or ideas. So we shared ours. A simple one: let’s read, then gather, then discuss, and let’s see where it goes.

At first our meetings looked more like Jewish Anonymous than a regular book club. More a support group, where reading was not the main course. People needed to talk. Books were almost a pretext.

We were not very organized. We are still not very organized. But we kept meeting. For a while our name was kind of a joke, a riff on the New York Review of Books. Ours was something like the Scando Jew-ish Review of Book Club. SJRBC.

And then we got a real name.

Maimonides, the great medieval Jewish philosopher, born in Córdoba, Spain, wrote one of the most important works in Jewish thought: The Guide for the Perplexed. Written for those who feel torn between different traditions and heritages, between belonging and doubt, between the world as it should be and the world as it is.

So we simplified. Perpleks. In Norwegian. Because that’s exactly what we were. Perplexed. Like Howard Jacobson’s character in Howl. And still are.

In roughly three years we have read and discussed around a dozen books together. Plus a few more this year. Let us mention some of them, because the list tells a story.

We started with Dara Horn, People Love Dead Jews. A book about how Jews are more acceptable when they are historical victims than when they are alive, complicated and present. That set the tone.

We read Etgar Keret, The Seven Good Years. Our moment of lightness. Humor as a form of Jewish survival.

We read Theodor Herzl, The Jewish State. Written in 1896. Because sometimes we need to actually read the books we are supposed to have read.

We read Torkel Brekke, Ingen er uskyldig, a rare Norwegian voice on these questions.

We made an attempt at a long read, Jerusalem by Simon Sebag Montefiore, a brick of around a thousand pages that took us a couple of meetings to get through.

We read Hostage by Eli Sharabi. Many of us also saw Sharabi at Litteraturhuset.

And most recently, Who By Fire by Matti Friedman, about Leonard Cohen going to sing for soldiers during the Yom Kippur War.

You don’t need to be a Luddite to understand contemporary technological challenges. We like technology and use it. But sometimes it feels that reading a book, a physical book, is almost an act of rebellion. And a good rebellion at that.

Reading a book that more often than not had to be ordered from abroad, to read quietly in Norway, with a small group of people trying to make sense of things.

We believe deeply in the humanities. In the idea that literature and non-fiction help us understand the world and ourselves. And this is a practice that doesn’t stop at the act of reading, it creates concrete connections, actions, and meaning.

That’s what Perpleks is trying to be, at its core. A small, disorganized, perplexed humanities seminar, also oriented toward some forms of action.

Perpleks is open. We meet roughly once a month. We read books that matter to us. We argue. We laugh. We are perplexed together.

If any of this resonates, you are welcome.

PERPLEKS