Reading Group Guide
1. Week One: Author’s Note, Introduction, and “What Happened?”
1. Narratives of our parents and other ancestors can have a tremendous impact on our own lives. What did the story of Sherre’s mother tell you about the author and her upbringing? Is there a “change of plans” narrative in your family’s legacy?
2. How did you define your happily ever after when you were younger? Do parts of your earliest plan still influence your goals and dreams?
3. How did you react to Sherre’s notion that God laughs with us, not at us, because he is deeply moved to see his children striving for greater responsibility? How had you previously perceived God’s reaction to your life?
4. Chapter One offers many examples of people whose plans were derailed in dramatic ways, as well as those who seem to have attained their desired place in life but were haunted by feelings of emptiness. Which category applies most closely to your experience? What disappointments do you wish to confront by embarking on the journey set forth in Sherre’s book?
5. Week Two: “Ending the Excuses”
What is the source of your most debilitating fears? Which of these fears caused you to pass up a land of milk and honey?
6. How did you respond to Sherre’s fill-in-the-blank sentence regarding “if onlys”?
7. Discuss the expectations others have placed on you throughout your life. How do your own dreams compare to those that have been wished for you?
8. What is the best way to find a happy medium between naysayers who quash your grand expectations and cheerleaders who entice you to strivefor shallow expectations? What authentic dreams lie dormant in your soul?
9. Week Three: “Getting Present”
What oopses, ashamah, anger, and stolen caramels were captured in the list you pinned to your plastic chicken? In what ways had they burdened you? What had prevented you from letting them go previously?
10. What have been the most significant losses in your life? Did you allow yourself a substantial mourning ritual? Which sources of anger or grief are interfering with your prophet potential?
11. Make your last list: write down the lists that you are willing to throw away. In what way have these prerequisites and “shoulds” interfered with your destiny?
12. How did your contemporary yearbook exercise compare to descriptions of you when you were a senior in high school?
13. Week Four: “Celebrating the Divine You”
Spend today’s gathering describing the traits you most admire in one another. If you are working through the book alone, spend an hour creating a collection of uplifting words, pictures, or mementoes that capture your achievements, great and small.
14. Week Five, Two Chapters: “Partnering with God” and “Re-Creating Your Creator”
Where did your earliest perceptions of God come from? Were those early perceptions comforting, frightening, or something else altogether?
15. Discuss your reaction to Sherre’s observations about God’s desire to have a partnership with humanity. How does this philosophy compare to your experience of God? How has your partnership with God compared to your partnership with the people in your life?
16. Name one action you could take to try to “move the Spirit,” as Heschel recommended.
17. What words and images did you conjure in your newly envisioned version of God? What words or experiences formed your first prayer after this re-creation?
18. Week Six: “Finding Your Divine Spark”
Spend time uttering a blessing for even the most mundane aspects of your group’s gathering, or of your solitude. Afterward, take a few minutes to sit peacefully in silence, immersed in the single thought of being open to God’s light.
19. Week Seven, Two Chapters: “Engaging Up” and “Finding Meaning”
Look up–at your job, your family, your home, your neighborhood, yourself. What do you see that you had overlooked before, due to inertia and routine?
20. Look closely–at the people in your life, at your habits, at the way you spend your time. Which small tweaks might open the door to big change?
21. Who are the most courageous people you know? Who in your world most exudes shleimut? What inspiration can you take from such women and men as these?
22. In practical terms, what would it mean for you to focus on the process of living more than on the outcome of a plan, finding abundance in all you possess and respecting the transitory nature of happiness?
23. What would it mean for you to carry in one pocket the message that you are the center of the universe, and carry in the other pocket the message that you are but dust and ashes? Which of these messages has resided more forcefully in your soul? What would be achieved by balancing them?
24. Week Eight: “Questioning” and Conclusion
What freedom lies in the notion that it’s healthy to doubt God, and that mistakes contribute to your success? In what way do these concepts go hand-in-hand?
25. Choose one of the book’s stories–ancient or contemporary–to serve as your guiding inspiration. What drew you to this story? How will you integrate it into your personal life journey?
26. What tangible or intangible chametz must be cleansed from your life? Are there any relationships, routines, thoughts, or material goods that now seem to interfere with your partnership with God?
27. When looking back through the moments that sparked your soul, what is the common thread?
Has that spark been informing your life in a way that you have dismissed until now?
Who is your Shirley Colodny, who is the person who dismisses their own spark that you can see? Let them know how much they matter.
28. How does your current perception of your life compare to when you began reading We Plan, God Laughs?
Read an Excerpt
We Plan, God Laughs?
We have all heard the Yiddish proverb “We plan, God laughs” (
Mann traoch, Gott lŠuch), and every time we see on it on a bumper sticker, we laugh too because we know it is true.
We all have plans.With each stage of life, we imagined who we would be when we “arrived.” But when we got there, things were not quite in place. Life did not turn out like we expected. In fact, at times life seemed to take another direction entirely. For a lot of us, it felt like we failed. We did not measure up. We are not who we thought we would be. Life is not turning out like we planned.
I remember my first plan. It was the Cinderella plan. I was going to become a beautiful princess.Then one day my fair and handsome prince would save me from my regular existence.We would fall in love with one magical kiss and live happily ever after. At the time the details were foggy, but the plan was in place. As I matured, the elements of fantasy disappeared, but the dream remained. One day I would fall in love with a wonderful man, get married, have 2.5 children, a house, a dog, and live happily ever after.
I never thought about what would happen if the plan did not go as planned.What if I did not meet the prince? What if the prince was really a frog? What if I could not have children? What if housing prices were too high? What if I was allergic to dogs? What if I discovered that this plan was not for me after all? What would happen if this plan didn’t work? My fantasies were not necessarily based in reality.
I have learned this lesson over and over.When I was sixteen, my family spent a week white- water rafting. On thefirst day I fell madly in love with our guide. He was a teen’s dream: a cool, tall, tan nature man. I wanted to spend the rest of my life on that raft trip, camping, cooking, and sleeping under the stars. It all seemed perfect on the first day. He could quote Thoreau. He could make elaborate dinners on a camping stove. He could lead me around the world on a boat. By the third day I learned he knew only one quotation by Thoreau. Chili was his masterpiece. I get seasick on boats. The smaller the boat, the more severe the illness. By the end, covered in bug bites, exhausted from the experience, starving for the city, a hot meal, and my comforter, I’d realized nature life was not all I had imagined it to be. Just last week I got stuck in the trap again. Before I got married, I had fantasies of Shabbat dinner at our home.We would sit down perfectly dressed at a beautifully set table with flowers, with candles, with the aroma of a gourmet meal wafting through the house. As a mother of three small children, I have found out that if we can all manage to sit together at the table for five minutes, it is a miracle. We use paper plates because glass shatters. We use plastic tablecloths because wine stains. The candles can never be on the table because my children are little pyromaniacs. And our favorite smell is pizza. So when a Shabbat dinner goes especially wrong, like ours did just last week, it can seem symbolic of something much bigger. Is my marriage in trouble? Do we have “problem” children?
You would have thought that in adulthood (having realized that dogs give me hives and apartment rent in Los Angeles surpasses that of most castles) I would have let go of my improbable fantasies and root myself in reality. Even though “I knew,” I still got angry. It felt like God was laughing at me. He was making a mockery out of my life. If God and I both knew that Cinderella was not real, why was I still waiting for my “happily ever after”?
Happily Ever After?
It never occurred to me that God might be waiting for his “happily ever after” too. God too may feel that some of his plans have not gone as he wanted and that we were laughing at him. It all started with Adam and Eve.They had only one rule, and they broke it. Cain killed Abel.The Israelites begged to return to Egypt. Moses broke the first set of the Ten Commandments. God plans, we laugh.
Sometimes literally. Sarah was ninety and Abraham was one hundred when God promised them a son. He said to Abraham, “I will give a son through her [Sarah], I will bless her and she shall give rise to nations.” Abraham had no doubt. Like all men, he imagined he would be virile until he was a thousand. He was overjoyed. He laughed out of sheer happiness. Sarah, on the other hand, was more realistic. She knew the odds of getting pregnant at ninety were zero. Just the thought of carrying a child at her age made her laugh. But her laughter was not the same as Abe’s. She laughed mockingly at herself, her husband, and at God. She said, “After I have withered shall I again have delicate skin? And my husband is old!” She was not about to run out and decorate the baby’s nursery. God was angry. Sarah was laughing at him. No one had ever laughed at God. But of course she was laughing at him; all women would have, his plan was ridiculous. But God, angry or not, “remembered” her. God gave Sarah and Abraham a son in their old age. God commanded them to name him Isaac, meaning “laughter.”
God has a sense of humor.With the birth of Isaac, God claimed the true meaning of laughter. Laughter was possibility, not mockery. Laughter came to represent joy, creation, love, faith, and passion. The tradition teaches that on the day Isaac was born there was so much of this new laughter in the world that women who had previously been barren gave birth.
People who had been sick were healed. On that day, the day of Isaac’s birth, the world was filled with true joy. It was filled with laughter.
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