I’ve just published my fourth book in four months. This one is different, because it didn’t begin as a book at all. It grew here on the Times of Israel.

Since October 7, I have posted a blog on the Times of Israel, including for the last year on the weekly Parsha – wrestling with the parsha, searching for the thread that ties ancient text to the week I was actually living. Without much intention, those posts accumulated into something larger: a full year of reflections, all 54 parshiot, gathered and shaped into a book you can hold. It has a foreword by Rabbi Doron Perez. It is called Living the Tension: Finding Beauty in a Complex World. If you’ve read me here, you already know whether it’s for you.

I won’t be doing book fairs, interviews, or signings. Illness has put the usual promotional machinery out of reach. So, this is it: the sum total of my marketing. An honest post, written for people who already choose to read what I write.

Some will wonder how four books appeared in four months – and whether anything produced that quickly can be worth reading. It’s a fair question.

What it misses is the longer story. After my diagnosis, blogging became a form of therapy: a way to process, to think out loud, to refuse to look away from a world that had suddenly become more complicated. My other blog on my illness, at benlazpsp.com, has been read by roughly 57,000 individual visitors and generated over 100,000 views in the past year. I didn’t write four books in four months. I wrote them over years, one post at a time. The last four months were simply the finishing.

I will however, admit to being blindsided by what finishing actually involves.

I know books matter. What I hadn’t fully reckoned with is how much invisible labour sits behind something we so easily take for granted. Publishing is a long chain and every link matters. An idea is formed. It is tested, challenged, rewritten. An editor finds what the writer missed. A proofreader finds what the editor missed. Then come the designer, the distributor, the marketer, the salesperson. Only after all that do books reach their readers.

I crashed through that chain rather than walking it – deadlines of my own making, processes abbreviated, corners acknowledged if not always fully turned. My respect for those who do this properly hasn’t diminished. If anything, it’s deepened.

There is a certain irony in all of this that I find hard to ignore.

My very first project as an M&A consultant was advising on the merger of two of the world’s most iconic publishing houses. One of the quieter perks was access to their London basement and two free returned books a day – a privilege I abused until my wife, newly married and in a small flat, put a stop to it. One relic survives: a signed dictionary from that merger’s management team. Today it referees our weekly games of Bananagrams – a game I’ve learned to love, unless I’m losing, in which case something closer to restrained irritation sets in.

Twenty-five years on, I find myself back in publishing. Not as a consultant, but as a writer. The books are back in the house. Life, it turns out, has a fondness for circles.

Living the Tension is a book about wrestling with complexity, finding meaning in difficulty, and discovering that tension – honestly held – can itself become a kind of beauty. It’s the book this community helped me write, one week at a time. It is available on Amazon – as a Shabbat companion, a study aid, or simply something to sit with.

The most sophisticated marketing I’ve managed is a WhatsApp message and this post.

For a book about living with tension, that feels about right.

Amazon are currently not shipping to Israel due to the war, so pre‑orders for Israel are here and I will ship copies from Amazon via the UK https://forms.gle/kitYtcL2k2kZ8Vwy6

Amazon US and UK: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GV313R7L  and  https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0GV313R7L

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)