How well integrated were Jews in the Mediterranean society controlled by ancient Rome? The Torah's laws seem to constitute a rejection of the reciprocity-based social dependency and emphasis on honor that were customary in the ancient Mediterranean world. But were Jews really a people apart, and outside of this broadly shared culture? Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? argues that Jewish social relations in antiquity were animated by a core tension between biblical solidarity and exchange-based social values such as patronage, vassalage, formal friendship, and debt slavery. Seth Schwartz's examinations of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, the writings of Josephus, and the Palestinian Talmud reveal that Jews were more deeply implicated in Roman and Mediterranean bonds of reciprocity and honor than is commonly assumed. Schwartz demonstrates how Ben Sira juxtaposes exhortations to biblical piety with hard-headed and seemingly contradictory advice about coping with the dangers of social relations with non-Jews; how Josephus describes Jews as essentially countercultural; yet how the Talmudic rabbis assume Jews have completely internalized Roman norms at the same time as the rabbis seek to arouse resistance to those norms, even if it is only symbolic. Were the Jews a Mediterranean Society? is the first comprehensive exploration of Jewish social integration in the Roman world, one that poses challenging new questions about the very nature of Mediterranean culture.

Lawrence Kushner fans rejoice! The award-winning author and Massachusetts rabbi, whose writings have helped restore a mystical dimension to popular Judaism in America, has a new five-book gift set! The Lawrence Kushner Gift Pack of Jewish Spirituality includes Invisible Lines of Connection , God Was in This Place & I, I Did Not Know , The River of Light , The Book of Words , and The Book of Letters.

"This book was the first comprehensive manual to deal with all facets of marriage within a halakhic framework. It was informed by the author's experience as an orthodox rabbi and psychologist specializing in marriage issues. Included are chapters dealing with the dating experience, the place of love in life and marriage, the ethics and goals of marriage, marital harmony, conjugal relations in theory and practice, and what happens when the marriage encounters difficulties. This valuable work formulates basic guidelines and gives advice for the development of a sound marriage. It also contains comprehensive notes anchoring the text to authentic Jewish tradition, and incorporates observations from the world of psychology. This highly acclaimed guide to marriage has now been republished for the first time, and includes an additional chapter on second marriages"--back cover.

Glory and Agony is the first history of the shifting attitudes toward national sacrifice in Hebrew culture over the last century. Its point of departure is Zionism's obsessive preoccupation with its haunting "primal scene" of sacrifice, the near-sacrifice of Isaac, as evidenced in wide-ranging sources from the domains of literature, art, psychology, philosophy, and politics. By placing these sources in conversation with twentieth-century thinking on human sacrifice, violence, and martyrdom, this study draws a complex picture that provides multiple, sometimes contradictory insights into the genesis and gender of national sacrifice. Extending back over two millennia, this study unearths retellings of biblical and classical narratives of sacrifice, both enacted and aborted, voluntary and violent, male and female—Isaac, Ishmael, Jephthah's daughter, Iphigenia, Jesus. Glory and Agony traces the birth of national sacrifice out of the ruins of religious martyrdom, exposing the sacred underside of Western secularism in Israel as elsewhere.

Norbert M. Samuelson asks--what is the most reasonable possible conception of the doctrine of "revelation" found in the sources of the Abrahamic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) in the light of modern challenges from academic studies of evolutionary psychology, analytic philosophy, and biblical history? The proposed answer is drawn from his extensive knowledge of western philosophy-- from ancient Greece to contemporary England and America and Jewish intellectual history from Maimonides to Buber and Rosenzweig. The book engages with the history of philosophy, religious thought and Judaism.

This book examines major psychological issues from a Judaic perspective. It concentrates on major Judaic themes that are essential to Jewish life, and how these themes relate to mental health, guilt, the self, the nature of the person, marriage, and the pain and suffering prior to death. Common threads weave their way through the different subject areas, which cover the wide gamut of life. Contents: Mental Health: Biblical and Talmudic Directives; Guilt From, Guilt Towards; Fulfilling the SelfóJudaic Parameters; The Dynamics of Jewish Marriage; To be Good or EvilóWhich is More Natural?; Illness, God and Us.