With wit and wide-ranging intelligence, Rabbi Telushkin explains the harm in spreading gossip, rumors, or others’ secrets, and how unfair anger, excessive criticism, or lying undermines true communication. By sensitizing us to subtleties of speech we may never have considered before, he shows us how to turn every exchange into an opportunity.Remarkable for its clarity and practicality, Words That Hurt, Words That Heal illuminates the powerful effects we create by what we say and how we say it.

    Author is Nosson Scherman Title is Tanach: The Stone Edition/Black The Torah/Prophets/Writings The Twenty-Four Books of the Bible Newly Translated and Annotated ISBN is 0899062695 Excellent condition, brand new.

    This first collection of Heschel's essays - compiled, edited and with an introduction by his daughter Susannah Heschel, is a stunning reminder of the virtuosity of one of the most well respected minds in Judaic studies.

    To hear or read such a discussion is to embark on a journey in which we are challenged and forced to move, and at the end stand far from where we began. Here, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Great Britain, serves as guide to that journey, elucidating the question in each discourse and explaining its context. In this collection of lucid adaptations of the Rebbes talks on the weekly Torah readings and Jewish holidays, each question is not only resolved but also revealed to be the starting point of a major spiritual search, a journey to the inner sanctum of Torah.With descriptive introductions to each chapter and extensive indexes, Torah Studies is an important gateway to the Rebbes teaching and legacy.

    How Good Do We Have to Be? is for everyone who experiences that sense of guilt and disappointment. Harold Kushner, writing with his customary generosity and wisdom, shows us how human life is too complex for anyone to live it without making mistakes, and why we need not fear the loss of God's love when we are less than perfect. Harold Kushner begins by offering a radically new interpretation of the story of Adam and Eve, which he sees as a tale of Paradise Outgrown rather than Paradise Lost: eating from the Tree of Knowledge was not an act of disobedience, but a brave step forward toward becoming human, complete with the richness of work, sexuality and child-rearing, and a sense of our mortality. Drawing on modern literature, psychology, theology,,and his own thirty years of experience as a congregational rabbi, Harold Kushner reveals how acceptance and forgiveness can change our relationships with the most important people in our lives and help us meet the bold and rewarding challenge of being human.

    

    I lived in total isolation, not knowing what was taking place outside the ghetto gates, outside the barbed wires of concentration camps. After the war, would anyone ever believe my experiences?"Kimmelman had no way of preserving her experiences on paper while they happened, but she trained herself to remember. And now, as a survivor of the Holocaust, she has preserved her recollections for posterity in this powerful and moving book—one woman's personal perspective on a terrible moment in human history.The daughter of a Jewish seed exporter, the author was born Mira Ryczke in 1923 in a suburb of the Baltic seaport of Danzig (now Gdansk, Poland). Her childhood was happy, and she learned to cherish her faith and heritage. Through the 1930s, Mira's family remained in the Danzig area despite a changing political climate that was compelling many friends and neighbors to leave. With the Polish capitulation to Germany in the autumn of 1939, however, Mira and her family were forced from their home. In calm, straightforward prose—which makes her story all the more harrowing—Kimmelman recalls the horrors that befell her and those she loved. Sent to Auschwitz in 1944, she escaped the gas chambers by being selected for  slave labor. Finally, as the tide of war turned against Germany, Mira was among those transported to Bergen-Belsen, where tens of thousands were dying from starvation, disease, and exposure. In April 1945, British troops liberated the camp, and Mira was eventually reunited with her father. Most of the other members of her family had perished.In the closing chapters, Kimmelman describes her marriage, her subsequent life in the United States, and her visits to Israel and to the places in Europe where the  events of her youth transpired. Even when confronted with the worst in humankind, she observes, she never lost hope or succumbed to despair. She concludes with an eloquent reminder: "If future generations fail to protect the truth, it vanishes. . . . Only by remembering the bitter lesson of Hitler’s legacy can we hope it will never be repeated. Teach it, tell it, read it."The Author: Mira Ryczke Kimmelman is a resident of Oak Ridge, Tennessee, and lectures widely in schools about her experiences during the Holocaust.

    The Reichmanns is filled with fascinating characters, epic scope, and an illuminating look at the world of the ultra-orthodox. 16 pp. of photos. 608 pp. Author tour. Targeted ads. Online promotion. 35,000 print.

    Most of the time, we are unaware of it. Yet, every now and then, on account of some fluke, we are startled by the results of its presence. We realize we have been part of something with neither consciousness nor consent. It is so sweet and then it is gone. You say, But I don t believe in God. And I ask, What makes you think it matters to God?" fromLawrence Kushner, whose previous books have opened up new spiritual possibilities, now tells us stories in a new literary form.Through his everyday encounters with family, friends, colleagues and strangers, Kushner takes us deeply into our lives, finding flashes of spiritual insight in the process. Such otherwise ordinary moments as fighting with his children, shopping for bargain basement clothes, or just watching a movie are revealed to be touchstones for the sacred.This is a book where literature meets spirituality, where the sacred meets the ordinary, and, above all, where people of all faiths, all backgrounds can meet one another and themselves. Kushner ties together the stories of our lives into a roadmap showing how everything ordinary is supercharged with meaning if we can just see it.

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    Take two of every kind of living plant....Work quickly. The rains begin tomorrow."From award-winning author Sandy Eisenberg Sasso, a new story which lights our spiritual imaginations.When God tells Noah to bring the animals of the world onto the ark, God also calls on Naamah, Noah's wife, to save each plant on Earth.Entrusted with this task, Naamah sets off to every corner of the world, discovering a fabulous array of growing things, and gathering seeds, bulbs, cuttings, spores, and roots. She fills a room on the ark with every type of plant--from amaryllis, soybeans, and wheat to lilies, moss, and even dandelions. Then, after 40 long days and nights on the ark, the most important part of Naamah's work begins.In this new story, based on an ancient text, Naamah's wisdom and love for the natural harmony of the earth inspires us to use our own courage, creativity, and faith to carry out Naamah's work today.

    Rather than having spent the last 50 years coming to terms with the magnitude of evil of the Holocaust, this book is about a country that, according to the author, has largely ignored its participation and attempted to minimize its national memory of the event.

    Steeped in dialogue with rabbinic tradition, it is for those who seek a more contemporary, egalitarian approach to traditional liturgy. "[Falk] manages to create extraordinarily beautiful prayers--in Hebrew and English--that are both radically new and deeply resonant with Jewish tradition." --Judith Plaskow, The Women's Review of Books "Marcia Falk's work in Hebrew blessings is as beautiful as it is innovative; and it is innovative in the sweetest, most nourishing sense, sat urated in love for the language itself (its overtones and melodies as well as its deep structure), its history, its people. Even those who do not hear the traditional liturgies as exclusionary will respond to the meticulously flowering poet's passion of Marcia Falk's wholly original contribution."--Cynthia Ozick "A truly magisterial and exciting collection of brakhot . . . that invites us to re-encounter not only the blessing, but the Source of blessing. . . . Falk rekindles the flame of Jewish ardor and devotion."--Hadassah "[Falk's] prayers are re-creations of traditional prayers, her versions striking in the beauty and power of their language, in English and Hebrew: this is a poet's siddur, full of profound meaning."--Sandee Brawarsky, Jewish Week

    The issues of mikvah and Jewish family purity are addressed from philosophic, psychological, mystical, legal, practical, historical, and personal points of view.

    Some endured concentration camps, some passed as non-Jews, some fled, some fought in the underground. From Germany to Greece, from Romania to Denmark, every country touched by the horror of the Holocaust is here. Punctuating the narratives are essays by Rabbi Arthur Hertzberg, Eva Fogelman, Yaffa Eliach, Anne Roiphe, and Abe Foxman, each focusing on the effects the Holocaust has on life today. This powerful collection forms a moving, unforgettable testimony to human dignity.

    This edition of Irving Cutler's definitive historical volume also includes a new foreword written by the author. The first comprehensive history of Chicago's Jewish population in eighty years, The Jews of Chicago brings to life the people, events, neighborhoods, and institutions that helped shape today's Jewish community. Cutler intertwines neighborhood histories with representative biographical vignettes of some of Chicago's best known figures, such as Edna Ferber, Saul Bellow, Benny Goodman, Mel Tormé, Studs Terkel, Paul Muni, Mandy Patinkin, Emil G. Hirsch, Julius Rosenwald, Dankmar Adler, Arthur Goldberg, Philip Klutznick, and many others. From their roots in the Old Country to their present-day communities, Cutler captures in extraordinary detail the remarkable saga of the Jews of Chicago.

    As the progenitor of Hasidism, the Ba'al Shem Tov is one of the key figures in Jewish history; to understand him is to understand an essential element of modern Jewish life and religion.Because evidence about his life is scanty and equivocal, the Besht has long eluded historians and biographers. Much of what is believed about him is based on stories compiled more than a generation after his death, many of which serve to mythologize rather than describe their subject. Rosman's study casts a bright new light on the traditional stories about the Besht, confirming and augmenting some, challenging others. By concentrating on accounts attributable directly to the Besht or to contemporary eyewitnesses, Rosman provides a portrait drawn from life rather than myth. In addition, documents in Polish and Hebrew discovered by Rosman during the research for this book enable him to give the first detailed description of the cultural, social, economic, and political context of the Ba'al Shem Tov's life.

    Noted historian and anthropologist Raphael Patai, himself a native of Hungary, tells in this pioneering study the fascinating story of the struggles, achievements, and setbacks that marked the flow of history for the Hungarian Jews. He traces their seminal role in Hungarian politics, finance, industry, science, medicine, arts, and literature, and their surprisingly rich contributions to Jewish scholarship and religious leadership both inside Hungary and in the Western world. In the early centuries of their history Hungarian Jews left no written works, so Patai had to piece together a picture of their life up to the sixteenth century based on documents and reports written by non-Jewish Hungarians and visitors from abroad. Once Hungarian Jewish literary activity began, the sources covering the life and work of the Jews rapidly increased in richness. Patai made full use of the wealth of information contained in the monumental eighteen-volume series of the Hungarian Jewish Archives and the other abundant primary sources available in Latin, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Yiddish, and Turkish, the languages in vogue in various periods among the Jews of Hungary. In his presentation of the modern period he also examined the literary reflection of Hungarian Jewish life in the works of Jewish and non-Jewish Hungarian novelists, poets, dramatists, and journalists. Patai's main focus within the overall history of the Hungarian Jews is their culture and their psychology. Convinced that what is most characteristic of a people is the culture which endows its existence with specific coloration, he devotes special attention to the manifestations of Hungarian Jewish talent in the various cultural fields, most significantly literature, the arts, and scholarship. Based on the available statistical data Patai shows that from the nineteenth century, in all fields of Hungarian culture, Jews played leading roles not duplicated in any other country. Patai also shows that in the Hungarian Jewish culture a specific set of psychological motivations had a highly significant function. The Hungarian national character trait of emphatic patriotism was present in an even more fervent form in the Hungarian Jewish mind. Despite their centuries-old struggle against anti-Semitism, and especially from the nineteenth century on, Hungarian Jews remained convinced that they were one hundred percent Hungarians, differing in nothing but denominational variation from the Catholic and Protestant Hungarians. This mindset kept them apart and isolated from the Jewries of the Western world until overtaken by the tragedy of the Holocaust in the closing months of World War II.

    The inspiring life-story of Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch.

    Basing his work on biblical and rabbinic sources, twentieth-century philosophy, and Christian theology, Michael Wyschogrod focuses on the depiction and personification of God. Rather than looking at God as a depersonalized omniscient being, Wyschogrod depicts God as engaged in human history and as a partner in a covenant with the Jewish people. The similarities and differences between Jewish and Christian teaching about God's presence in the world are discussed in great depth.

    Before he was five he began his studies; by the time he was ten he had outgrown the town's teachers and started to learn at home with his scholarly, impoverished grandfather. Even before his ordination at the age of fifteen, in 1943, he was famous for his erudition. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish community of the Carpathians in 1944, he closed his Talmud. Halivni taught in the concentration camps and risked his life to save a scrap of paper from a sacred book. But adherence to the fundamentalist worldview that insists on reconciling every apparent contradiction in the text -- troubling to him even as a child -- had become impossible for him now. When he arrived in New York after the war, he began struggling toward the window of secular learning. From that synthesis emerged his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern printed form but as it was in its original form, the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages.

    Here are Miriam, Esther, Dinah, Lilith and many other women of the Torah in dialogue with Jewish daughters, mothers and grandmothers, past and present. Together these voices examine and debate every aspect of a Jewish woman's life -- work, sex, marriage, her connection to God and her place in the Jewish community and in the world. The Five Books of Miriam makes an invaluable contribution to Torah study and adds rich dimension to the ongoing conversation between Jewish women and Jewish tradition.

    His understanding of both traditional Judaism and secular philosophy shaped two generations of rabbinic students at Yeshiva University, and charted a new course for American Orthodox Jews. In On Repentance, noted scholar Pinchas Peli has gathered the major points of Rabbi Soloveitchik's teachings on teshuvah (repentance), based on the annual series of lectures on the theme of teshuvah, presented on the anniversary of his father's death. For many Jews, these lectures were the major academic and intellectual event of the year. Outside of his followers however, few were able to experience the genius of Rabbi Soloveitchik. He gave his lectures in Yiddish, and generally refused to publish. Now readers can experience the brilliant thinking of this great teacher and sage.

    Peter Cole's groundbreaking versions of HaNagid's poems capture the poet's combination of secular and religious passion, as well as his inspired linking of Hebrew and Arabic poetic practice. This annotated Selected Poems is the most comprehensive collection of HaNagid's work published to date in English.The Multiple Troubles of ManThe multiple troubles of man, my brother, like slander and pain, amaze you? Consider the heart which holds them allin strangeness, and doesn't break.I'd Suck Bitter Poison from the Viper's MouthI'd suck bitter poison from the viper's mouth and live by the basilisk's hole forever, rather than suffer through evenings with boors, fighting for crumbs from their table.

    What does the Jew stand for in modern culture? The conscious or unconscious, often hysterical repetition of myths and exaggerations, and the repertory of cliches, fantasies and phobias surrounding the stereotypes of the Jew and the Jewess, have meant that they are figures frequently represented both in the world of literature and art and in the industries of popular culture.

    They were mostly young, single and uneducated, but filled with hope of a new life in a new land. The newcomers maintained a sense of community longer than most immigrant groups, although culturally they were uncertain, clinging to fading memories of home, and not yet able to enter American life.

    This investigation concludes that extreme religious groups in Judaism of the period influenced other groups, classes, and factions to tighten their control of women. They also encouraged an understanding of ideal relationships between men and women, represented in the literature and the legal codes of the time, that required increasing chastity. Despite this, the lives of real women and their relationships to men continued to be varied and nuanced.This book integrates both Jewish and Early Christian sources together with a feminist critique. It is the most comprehensive work of this sort published thus far and offers a vast repository of relevant material, as well as a fresh interpretation.

    Ninety-five percent of the Jewish population was restricted to a life of poverty and starvation in the ghetto and barred from schools and universities. Ultimately, four million Jews left Eastern Europe between 1880 and 1924, three million of whom settled in America. Monumental though this mass migration was, it is even more surprising to learn that twice as many Jews decided not to leave Eastern Europe, despite the horrid conditions they endured. This puzzling statistic lends even sharper emphasis to the reasons surrounding the biggest movement of people in world history. Milton Meltzer has gathered eyewitness accounts, diaries, letters, documents, songs, maps, poems, and memoirs, weaving them into an historical narrative that details the Jews' motivation to abandon their old world and venture into a new one. It is a story that will at once educate and inspire the reader, delight and disappoint, while restoring a world practically unfathomable to today's American Jews, most of whom can find their roots in that rich and wondrous past.

    Bible Review hailed this book as "brilliant, an elegant and learned reflection on one of the central mysteries or the Bible and of modern life."

    Now in its second edition, this essential reference guide contains new introductions to the lives and works of such thinkers as: Hannah Arendt, Immanuel Levinas, Judith Plaskow, Sigmund Freud, and Walter Benjamin.Also including fully updated guides to further reading on figures from the middle ages through to the twenty-first century, historical maps and a chronology placing the thinkers in context, this is an essential and affordable one-volume reference to a rich and complex tradition.

    In fact, says Michael Brenner in this intriguing book, the Jewish population of Weimar Germany became more aware of its Jewishness and created new forms of German-Jewish culture in literature, music, fine arts, education, and scholarship. Brenner presents the first in-depth study of this culture, drawing a fascinating portrait of people in the midst of redefining themselves.The Weimar Jews chose neither a radical break with the past nor a return to the past but instead dressed Jewish traditions in the garb of modern forms of cultural expression. Brenner describes, for example, how modern translations made classic Jewish texts accessible, Jewish museums displayed ceremonial artifacts in a secular framework, musical arrangements transformed synagogue liturgy for concert audiences, and popular novels recalled aspects of the Jewish past. Brenner's work, while bringing this significant historical period to life, illuminates contemporary Jewish issues. The preservation and even enhancement of Jewish distinctiveness, combined with the seemingly successful participation of Jews in a secular, non-Jewish society, offer fresh insight into modern questions of Jewish existence, identity, and integration into other cultures.

    Elazar explores the paths that emerged out of the constitutionalized covenantal tradition in Europe such as federalism, communitarianism, and the cooperative movement.