“ Who can deny that our world is starved for a new understanding of love, of what it means to live together and work at love and not give up?” What is the antidote to romantic love that all too often exhausts itself over night? Might it be to join with a partner in a spiritual search? “Love to . . . awaken us: Body and Soul to a greater unknown.” Further, what is the work which will sustain a love over a lifetime? By searching for the sacred with our lover we might well find the divine within them. Philosopher and teacher Jacob Needleman suggests love can be a reflection of our spiritual being. He asserts that by the time “we are living together something beyond passion is required;” something intentional and conscious is needed. In The Wisdom of Love, philosopher Jacob Needleman draws wisdom from myth, religion, philosophy and sacred poetry in an exploration of that which brings two people together in love — of what love is, why we need to give it and receive it, and how it can be sustained beyond the passion and mystery that first draws us together.

There emerged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries a new Jewish elite, notes Moshe Idel, no longer made up of prophets, priests, kings, or rabbis but of intellectuals and academicians working in secular universities or writing for an audience not defined by any one set of religious beliefs. In Old Worlds, New Mirrors Idel turns his gaze on figures as diverse as Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida, Franz Kafka and Franz Rosenzweig, Arnaldo Momigliano and Paul Celan, Abraham Heschel and George Steiner to reflect on their relationships to Judaism in a cosmopolitan, mostly European, context. Idel-himself one of the world's most eminent scholars of Jewish mysticism-focuses in particular on the mystical aspects of his subjects' writings. Avoiding all attempts to discern anything like a single "essence of Judaism" in their works, he nevertheless maintains a sustained effort to illumine especially the Kabbalistic and Hasidic strains of thought these figures would have derived from earlier Jewish sources. Looming large throughout is Gershom Scholem, the thinker who played such a crucial role in establishing the study of Kabbalah as a modern academic discipline and whose influence pervades Idel's own work; indeed, the author observes, much of the book may be seen as a mirror held up to reflect on the broader reception of Scholem's thought.