This book describes a search for God and for values which is both personal and traditional. It is a quest set within the ancient Jewish disciplines of Thorah, the service of God and acts of faithful love, upon which Simon the Just taught over two thousand years ago that the world stands, and which, to this day, define the life of the Jew. The questions and attempted responses here relate to issues with which the author has lived all the more seriously since he became a rabbi and has had the privilege of listening to others at some of the most important moments in their lives. Here is a book for practising Jews; for Jews who for one reason or another have ceased to practice but cannot forget their Jewishness; and for those of other faihs, whose questions are so often those which are discussed so movingly here. Jonathan Wittenberg is Rabbi of The North London Synagogue.

Diamant shows how to make Judaism's time-honored rituals into personal, meaningful sources of comfort. She guides the reader through Jewish practices that attend the end of life, from the sickroom to the funeral to the week, month, and year that follow. She describes the traditional Jewish funeral, and includes sections on caring for grieving children, mourning the death of a child, neonatal loss, suicide, and the death of non-Jewish loved ones.

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"Creating a Life that Matters is a provocative, insightful guide to finding meaning amidst the often confusing challenges of today's complex world. Whether it's the personal struggle to discover the purpose of life, or difficulties in relationships in marriage and parenting, or answers to the ultimate questions of life, death, and a deeper connection with God, Rabbi Friedman offers a witty and sometimes not-so-commonsense approach to what matters most: living each moment with peace of mind, fullness of heart, and real, lasting happiness"--Provided by publisher.

Wisdom, solace and inspiration from Jewish tradition to bring you hope and healing after loss. "Mourning can open doors you may not have imagined before your life was shaken by loss. This book provides keys to those doors and a way into the rooms beyond them. Whether you stand at grief's threshold or give counsel to someone who does, this book can offer guidance.... With words of wisdom, ranging from comforting to provocative, each author stands at the entrance to one of mourning's doors, extending a hand to offer the key you will need, inviting you into one of these deep conversations." --from the Preface by Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW Beloved and respected spiritual leaders from across the Jewish denominational spectrum share insights from their experience, Jewish tradition and their personal encounters with grief and healing. This wide range of perspectives, offered with grace and compassion, will be a treasured resource in your time of grief. Whether mourning a recent loss or experiencing pain from old scars, you will be encouraged and challenged to be fully, vulnerably present to your emotions; forgive your own shortcomings and those of others; and remain open to love despite pain and uncertainty. Contributors: Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, DHL - Rabbi Anne Brener, LCSW - Dr. Norman J. Cohen - Rabbi Mike Comins - Rabbi David A. Cooper - Rabbi Rachel Cowan - Rabbi Edward Feinstein - Rabbi Nancy Flam - Rabbi Lori Forman-Jacobi - Rabbi Dayle A. Friedman, MSW, MA, BCC - Debbie Friedman - Rabbi Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer, PhD - Nan Fink Gefen, PhD - Rabbi Neil Gillman, PhD - Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, DHL - Rabbi Arthur Green, PhD - Dr. David Hartman - Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD - Rabbi Margaret Holub - Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar - Rabbi Lawrence Kushner - Rabbi Maurice Lamm - Rabbi Naomi Levy - Rabbi David Lyon - Rabbi Joseph B. Meszler - Rabbi James L. Mirel - Rabbi Kerry M. Olitzky - Rabbi Daniel F. Polish, PhD - Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso - Rabbi Harold M. Schulweis - Rabbi Dannel I. Schwartz - Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz - Rabbi Rami Shapiro - Rachel Josefowitz Siegel - Rabbi Shira Stern, DMin, BCC - Rabbi Nancy Wechsler-Azen - Karen Bonnell Werth - Rabbi Nancy H. Wiener, DMin - Dr. Ron Wolfson - Rabbi Sheldon Zimmerman For use by individuals as well as in groups or counseling settings.

"Jewish theologian Peter Ochs argues that a significant and expanding movement in recent Christian theology offers a way for Christians to rededicate themselves to the gospel message and to classical, patristic doctrines of the church without revisiting classical claims that, with the coming of Christ, God has replaced his love of the Jewish people with his love of the church. Ochs examines the christologies and pneumatologies of leading postliberal theologians George Lindbeck, Robert Jenson, Stanley Hauerwas, John Howard Yoder, Daniel Hardy, and David Ford, who argue in their work that God's love of Christ and the church does not replace his love of Israel and the Jews. Another Reformation not only provides a detailed study of the movement of recent postliberal Christian theology in the United States and the United Kingdom but also offers stimulating Jewish-Christian theological exchange. Ochs's realization that some Christian thinkers retain a place for the people of Israel opens up the possibility of new understanding and deepens the Jewish-Christian dialogue" -- Publisher description.

God and the Ways of Being --The Secret of the Sh'ma --God Above, God Within --The Two and the One --God as Y-H-W-H: "Is-was-will be" is one! --Speak my Name --Seeking God: Look First to Love --In God's Own Image: Seek My Face --Face to Face --Male and Female: An Excursus --One and Two --Creation --One God, two Ways --Creation and the Jewish Question --Creation and the Struggle for Faith --What Comes "First"? --Two Tales --The One and the Many --Who is at the Center? --Evolution: An Ongoing Process --From Aggadah to Halakhah --The First Mitzvah: Be Aware --In God's Image --Celebrating Creation: The Mitzvah of Shabbat --"To Work it and Guard it": Preserving God's World --Vegetarianism: A Kashrut for Our Age --Human Love and Human Pain --The Human Being: Bearer of Divine Compassion --Revelation --Y-H-W-H and Language --Before the Mountain --Human Understanding and Divine Speech --The Inner Mountain --Torah as the Name of God --Revelation and the Inward Journey --The Role of Covenant: A Reinterpretation --Revelation and Torah --Revelation, Will, and Law --The Personal Path: Accepting the Yoke --Sinai and Language --Sinai and Study --Sinai and Community --The Three Festivals: Sinai and the Sacred Cycle --The Word in Our Day --Redemption --The Light of the First Day --Crying Out for the Light --Redemption as Coming Home --The Bible: A Tale of Exile --Homecoming and Teshuvah --Teshuvah and the Sacred Year --The Redemptive Task: Getting to Work.

For fans of All-of-a-Kind Family , here is the true story of how Sarah Brenner, a poor girl from New York City’s Lower East Side, became Sydney Taylor: dancer, actress, and successful children’s book author. Sarah Brenner might have come from an all-of-a-kind family (five sisters who all dressed alike), but she was always one of a kind. Growing up in a Jewish immigrant family on New York’s impoverished Lower East Side, Sarah loved visiting the library, celebrating holidays with her family, and taking free dance classes at the Henry Street Settlement. But she was always aware of things that weren’t fair—whether it was that women couldn’t vote, or how girls were treated in her school, or that her parents had had to leave Europe because they were Jewish. When she grew up, Sarah changed her name to Sydney and became an actress and a dancer, but she never forgot the importance of fighting unfairness, whether it was anti-Semitism at her job or the low wages of workers. And when her daughter complained that it wasn’t fair that there were no books about Jewish children like her, Sydney put pen to paper and wrote a one-of-a-kind children’s book. From well-known Jewish children’s author Richard Michelson, this is the story of how Sarah became Sydney and how she showed children the joy of seeing their culture reflected on the page.

The unique wisdom of Judaism comes from the Talmud and the Judaic sages' other ancient writings that preserve the tradition of the originally oral Torah, or Teachings of Moses. Sometimes surprising - "better sincere sin than hypocritical virtue" - and always penetrating and helpful - "who are rich? those who are happy with their lot" - the wisdom of the oral Torah is set forth on more than one hundred subjects, arranged alphabetically, in their sources' own words, here rendered in clear and easily readable English. This is the "how-to" book for people who think deeply about everyday life: facing death of a loved one, the duties and rights of women and men together, busy-ness versus real achievement, deceit, gossip, discretion, virtue, honor, forbearance, forgiveness.

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman's generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a "biobibliography" of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman's unapologetic scholar's tale.

For people who never thought they would read a book of theology--let alone understand it, enjoy it, savor it and have it affect the way they think about their lives. In forty-five intense meditations, each a page or two in length, Stone takes us on explorations of the most basic human struggles: life and death, love and anger, peace and war, covenant and exile.

Cohen and Mendes-Flohr's classic work has been hailed by many as the most important comprehensive anthology ever published on topices central to Judaism from a modern perspective. In 140 essays by renowned Jewish figures such as Eugene Borowitz, Blue Greenberg, Jacob Neusner, Gershom Scholem, and Adin Steinsaltz, this volume presents striking insights into a provocative range of topics - charity, chosen people, death, family, love, myth, suffering, tradition, Torah, and many more. Each essay will bring readers closer to an understanding of what Judaism is all about.

Some of the highest moments wiht Reb Shlomo were at the weddings he performed. When he would perform a wedding, he would spend hours teaching what a Jewish wedding really is. He transformed the wedding from a social gathering into hte highest spiritual experience. Everyone would listen spellbound to his chassidic parables, songs and teachings which made those present laugh, cry and sing at the same time. This book has some of Reb Shlomo's unique insights into the holiness of love, weddings, and marriage.

A rabbi whose faith was challenged by the death of his daughter and who rediscovered his spirituality while gardening discusses the healing benefits of observing nature, citing lessons that can be learned by caring for the land.

The International Society for Science and Religion has selected Matters of Life and Death as an element of the ISSR Library. The mission of the ISSR Library is "to provide a comprehensive resource for scholars, students, and interested lay readers in the area of science and the human spirit."The incredible medical breakthroughs of today, like genetic engineering, in-vitro fertilizations, and cloning have transformed long-held beliefs on the nature of both life and death, raising difficult moral and religious questions. In Matters of Life and Death Elliot Dorff thoroughly addresses this unavoidable confluence of medical technology and Jewish law and ethics. Elliot N. Dorff, Rabbi (Jewish Theological Seminary), PhD (Columbia University), is rector and Sol and Anne Dorff Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the American Jewish University (formerly the University of Judaism) in Los Angeles. Among the twelve books he has written are four award-winning books on Jewish ethics and law published by The Jewish Publication Society: Matters of Life and Death (1998) on Jewish medical ethics; To Do the Right and the Good (2002) on Jewish social ethics; Love Your Neighbor and Yourself on Jewish personal ethics; and For the Love of God and People: A Philosophy of Jewish Law (2007). He has also edited 10 books, including Contemporary Jewish Ethics and Morality (Oxford, 1995) and Contemporary Jewish Theology (Oxford, 1999), co-edited by Louis Newman, who also co-edited with Dorff the first three volumes of the Jewish Choices, Jewish Voices series. Since 1984, Rabbi Dorff has served on the Rabbinical Assembly's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards, and has served as its Chair since 2007. He has also served on several federal advisory commissions dealing with the ethics of health care, sexual responsibility, and research on human subjects. He is a member of the State of California's Ethics Committee on embryonic stem cell research. He is married to Marlynn, and they have four children and seven grandchildren.

From the bestselling author of The Red Tent and Good Harbor , a collection of intimate, autobiographical reflections on the milestones, revelations, and balancing acts of life as a wife, mother, friend, and member of a religious community. Before The Red Tent won her international literary acclaim, Anita Diamant was a columnist in Boston. Over the course of twenty years, she wrote essays that reflected the shape and evolution of her life, as well as the trends of her generation. In the end, her musings about love and marriage, birth and death, nature versus nurture, politics and religion—and everything from female friendships to quitting smoking—have created a public diary of the progress of her life that resonated deeply with her readers. Now, Pitching My Tent collects the finest columns of a writer who is a reporter by training and a storyteller by heart, all revised and enriched with new material. Personal, inspiring, and often funny, Pitching My Tent displays the warmth, humor, and wisdom that Diamant's legions of fans have come to cherish.

A provocative and moving dialogue between two men of faith, two voices of conscience, about the most profound events and issues of our time, based upon, but expanded from, a WNBC-TV broadcast. A book that all who cherish the essential goodness in man will want to read and reread and give to friends and loved ones.

A fascinating exploration of the many faces of God and what they reveal about our own humanity. He was a whole pantheon in Himself.... He constantly appeared in many and ever-changing roles lest He be frozen and converted into the dumb idols He Himself despised. God was a polyvalent personality who, by mirroring to man His many faces, provided the models that man so needed to survive and flourish. This is the true humanity of God. --from the Introduction In scholarly but accessible terms, with many startling and controversial insights, renowned Bible scholar Dr. Yochanan Muffs examines the anthropomorphic evolution of the Divine Image--from creator of the cosmos to God the father, God the husband, God the king, God the "chess-player," God the ultimate master--and how these different images of God have shaped our faith and world view. Muffs also examines how expressions of divine power, divine will and divine love throughout the Bible have helped develop the contemporary human condition and our enriching dialectic between faith and doubt.

What does it mean to trust in God? How can man love God? If timidity is unwholesome, why does Scripture speak of the fear of God? When should a lie be told? What ought to be our attitude to warfare? Of what relevance is the ideal of holiness to men and women of this age? How can pride be conquered? Can a man love his neighbor as himself? In Jewish Values , these and many other ethical and religious questions are considered in the light of Jewish teachings. It is the author's thesis that a gap exists between traditional views as presented in the classic sources of Judaism and their application in the lives of our contemporaries, but he is convinced that this gap can be bridged. This book is a contribution to the building of such a bridge or, at least, as the author suggests, it is a surveyor's plan of part of the work to be done.