Spiritual roundup

“The Islamic Jesus” by Mustafa Akyol, St. Martin’s, 288 pages, $26.99

If there is a book for which this tumultuous moment in history cries out, “The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims” certainly would be a contender.

It’s a book that answers the question of how a Jewish preacher who became the Christian Messiah also became one of the most admired figures in the Quran. It’s a question for which Mustafa Akyol, a Turkish journalist and columnist for The International New York Times, is precisely equipped.

Akyol pores over early Christianity and the historical Jesus. The Quran parallels the Gospels for much of the narrative, though it diverges on the matter of divinity: Jesus, like Abraham, Moses and Muhammad himself, is seen as a human prophet of God, not God himself. In this view, he deserves to be praised, admired and followed but not worshipped.

Is that enough of a place to begin? Akyol promises — and delivers — even more: “I will explore how the three great Abrahamic religions of our battered world, despite all the past and present tensions between them, come together at the story of this most amazing man — this Jesus of Nazareth.”

And therein is reason alone to read closely “The Islamic Jesus.”

“My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew” by Abigail Pogrebin, Fig Tree, 336 pages, $22.95

Abigail Pogrebin opens “My Jewish Year: 18 Holidays, One Wondering Jew” with the challenge that drew her in, a line in Leon Wieseltier’s book “Kaddish”: “Do not overthrow the customs that have made it all the way to you.”

And so this daughter of Letty Cottin Pogrebin, a founder of Ms. Magazine who was largely estranged from Judaism during Abigail’s childhood, and Bert Pogrebin, a “bagel Jew” who “isn’t much for prayer,” sets out to chart the Jewish holidays, “an annual system that organizes and anchors the lives” of observant families. She writes: “I wanted to know what they knew. I had a hunch it would take me somewhere deeper.”

Indeed it does, and because of Pogrebin’s natural-born storytelling capacity and the vulnerable transparency of her searching, the reader too is drawn somewhere deeper. Pogrebin peels back layers of tradition, of varied perspective, of wisdom newfound or long-held. She seamlessly weaves her own story, each brave encounter, with thousands of years of Jewish history. Each holiday’s exploration is filled with revelations both pragmatic and profound.

Pogrebin is a luminous guide through the Jewish holy days.

“Two Worlds Exist” by Yehoshua November, Orison, 76 pages, $16

The Polish poet Adam Zagajewski has said that Yehoshua November’s poems are “like a documentary film — close to life, narrating episodes from the everyday.” Yet they spiral from the quotidian to the otherworldly and back again. Each nearly bursts from its taut parameters, aching with sorrow and reverence, stitched with humility, love and pain, pulsing with passions.

In the knowing hand of November, an Orthodox Jew, a good dose of illumination is brought down from on high. He allows a radiant spiritual light to shine through deeply human fissures.

“Two Worlds Exist,” November’s second collection of poems, reads nearly Talmudic — that is, as commentary on the holiest text. Consider these lines:

“The mystical teachings/ do not erase sorrow./ They say, here is your life./ What will you do with it?”

The depths of his humanity open his poetry, invite in anyone with a beating heart. He frames the moments in the finegrained lens that allows no wisdom, no beauty to escape. He makes it plain to see. And what we see is blessed, beautiful and indelible.