By carefully introducing the letters and vowels of the Hebrew alphabet, the goal is to develop the reader's ability to decode written Hebrew words as well as to ground the learning of Hebrew in the broader sense of its use in Jewish life, ritual, study, and tradition. Each chapter introduces two or three Hebrew letters; through instructional drills and exercises, the reader progressively becomes familiar with key Hebrew vocabulary and its role in Jewish tradition, text, and prayer.

    Yet over the course of the thousand-year Biblical Era, encounters with God changed dramatically. As James L. Kugel argues, this transition allows us to glimpse a massive shift in human experience—the emergence of the modern, Western sense of self. In this landmark work, Kugel fuses revelatory close readings of ancient texts with modern scholarship from a range of fields, including neuroscience, anthropology, psychology, and archaeology, to explain the origins of belief, worship, and the sense of self, and the changing nature of God through history. In the tradition of books like The Swerve and The Better Angels of Our Nature,The Great Shift tells the story of a revolution in human consciousness and the enchantment of everyday life. This book will make believers and seekers think differently not just about the Bible, but about the entire history of the human imagination.

    Religion need not be involved.” The Sabbath is not just the holy day of rest. It’s also a utopian idea about a less pressured, more sociable, purer world. Where did this notion come from? Is there value in withdrawing from the world one day in seven, despite its obvious inconvenience in an age of convenience? And what will be lost if the Sabbath goes away? In this erudite, elegantly written book, critic Judith Shulevitz weaves together histories of the Jewish and Christian sabbaths, speculations on the nature of time, and a rueful account of her personal struggle with the day. Shulevitz has found insights into the Sabbath in both cultural and contemporary sources—the Torah, the Gospels, the Talmud, and the writings of the Apostolic Fathers, as well as in the poetry of William Wordsworth, the life of Sigmund Freud, and the science of neuropsychology. She tells stories of martyrdom by Jews who died en masse rather than fight on the Sabbath and describes the feverish Sabbatarianism of the American Puritans. And she counterposes the tyranny of religious law with the equally oppressive tyranny of the clock. Can we really flourish under the yoke of communal discipline, as preachers and rabbis like to tell us? What about being free to live as we please? Can we preserve what the Sabbath gives us—a time outside time—without following its rules?Whatever our faith or lack thereof, this rich and resonant meditation on the day of rest will remind us of the danger of letting time drive us heedlessly forward without ever stopping to reflect.

    His father was a Zionist by way of faith. Whether Harvey was going to daily Hebrew classes or attending Zionist picnics, he grew up a staunch supporter of the Jewish state. But soon he found himself questioning the very beliefs and ideals of his parents.In Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me, the final graphic memoir from the man who defined the genre, Pekar explores what it means to be Jewish and what Israel means to the Jews. Over the course of a single day in his hometown of Cleveland, Ohio, Pekar and the illustrator JT Waldman wrestle with the mythologies and realities surrounding the Jewish homeland. Pekar interweaves his increasing disillusionment with the modern state of Israel with a comprehensive history of the Jewish people from biblical times to the present, and the result is a personal and historical odyssey of uncommon power. Plainspoken and empathetic, Pekar had no patience for injustice and prejudice in any form, and though he comes to understand the roots of his parents' unquestioning love for Israel, he arrives at the firm belief that all peoples should be held to the same universal standards of decency, fairness, and democracy.With an epilogue written by Joyce Brabner, Not the Israel My Parents Promised Me is an essential book for fans of Harvey Pekar and anyone interested in the past and future of the Jewish state. It is bound to create important discussions and debates for years to come.

    Drawing on history & popular culture, textual research & everyday beliefs, Heaven offers an understanding of one of the most shared ideals of spiritual life. Miller raises discussions not just about visions of the afterlife, but about how beliefs have influenced the societies we've built & the lifestyles to we've adopted, exploring the roots of beliefs in heaven & how these have evolved through the ages to offer hope. She also reveals how the notion of heaven has been used for manipulation, as inspiration for selfless behavior & as justification for mass murder. As she demonstrates, the desire for a celestial afterlife is shared by the faithful around the world & across religions. While there are many notions of what exactly heaven is & how to get there, Jews, Christians & Muslims all agree that heaven is god's home. From Revelation to the Left Behind series, Augustine to Osama bin Laden, Muslims in the W. Bank to Mormons baptizing the dead, Heaven is a look at a cherished religious ideal.IntroductionWhat is heaven?The miracleThe kingdom is near Green, green pastures ResurrectionSalvation VisionariesReunionsIs heaven boring?EpilogueAuthor's Note & AcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex

    Her experience clashes with her preconceived notions again and again, particularly when she tries to take a non-chaperoned excursion into the West Bank. As she struggles to "understand Israel," Sarah is forced to question first her beliefs, then ultimately her own identity.Sarah Glidden won the prestigious Ignatz Award for "Most Promising New Talent" as well as the Masie Kukoc Award for Comics Inspiration. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies.

    The daily devotional thoughts published in Our Daily Bread help readers spend time each day in God’s Word. This electronic edition of Our Daily Bread allows you to enjoy the same inspiring content found in the print edition of Our Daily Bread, but with many additional digital features: • 90 Digital Daily Devotionals • Includes Scripture Passages and Insights • Links to a Daily Bible Reading Plan • Links to Additional Topical Content Resources from Our Daily Bread Ministries • Our Daily Bread Author Biographies Our Daily Bread is published and distributed worldwide in more than 40 languages by Our Daily Bread Ministries offices around the globe. Our Daily Bread Ministries also produces a variety of other Bible resources, which are available for the asking. Our Daily Bread is distributed via print, large-print, radio, podcast, email, rss, and mobile. For social networking users, find Our Daily Bread on Twitter, Facebook, and Google+.

    She must pull together four choirs that hate each other for her husband, Pastor Myron Jones’ Pastor’s Anniversary Celebration. The Holy Missionary Mass Choir is filled with characters like Shonda, a single mother of six trying to keep her oldest son alive. Then there’s Donnell, the church playboy who is torn between three women. And no one can forget Mother Willie Mae Odell; whose sole mission in life is to take down Lady Deidra and the choir. First Lady Deidra Jones has a Hot Mess on her hands but will God be able to bring them all together or will they crash and burn like fire and brimstone?

    Sanders aims to:Consider methodologically how to compare two (or more) related but different religionsDestroy the view of Rabbinic Judaism which is still prevalent in much, perhaps most, New Testament scholarshipEstablish a different view of Rabbinic JudaismArgue a case concerning Palestinian Judaism as a wholeArgue for a certain understanding of PaulCarry out a comparison of Paul and Palestinian JudaismThis volume makes a contribution not only to the understanding of Paul and his relationship to Judaism, but also to the study of Judaism itself.

    Along the way he encounters Ram Dass and Richard Gere, and dialogues with leading rabbis and Jewish thinkers, including Zalman Schacter, Yitz and Blue Greenberg, and a host of religious and disaffected Jews and Jewish Buddhists. This amazing journey through Tibetan Buddhism and Judaism leads Kamenetz to a renewed appreciation of his living Jewish roots.

    Yet the literary landscape of this dynamic part of the world has been bound together not by borders and nationalities, but by a common experience of Western imperialism. Keenly aware of the collected scars left by a legacy of colonial rule, the acclaimed writer Reza Aslan, with a team of four regional editors and seventy-seven translators, cogently demonstrates with Tablet and Pen how literature can, in fact, be used to form identity and serve as an extraordinary chronicle of the disrupted histories of the region.Acting with Words Without Borders, which fosters international exchange through translation and publication of the world’s finest literature, Aslan has purposefully situated this volume in the twentieth century, beyond the familiar confines of the Ottoman past, believing that the writers who have emerged in the last hundred years have not received their full due. This monumental collection, therefore, of nearly two hundred pieces, including short stories, novels, memoirs, essays and works of drama—many of them presented in English for the first time—features translated works from Arabic, Persian, Urdu, and Turkish. Organized chronologically, the volume spans a century of literature—from the famed Arab poet Khalil Gibran to the Nobel laureates Naguib Mahfouz and Orhan Pamuk, from the great Syrian-Lebanese poet Adonis to the grand dame of Urdu fiction, Ismat Chughtai—connected by the extraordinarily rich tradition of resplendent cultures that have been all too often ignored by the Western canon.By shifting America’s perception of the Middle Eastern world away from religion and politics, Tablet and Pen evokes the splendors of a region through the voices of its writers and poets, whose literature tells an urgent and liberating story. With a wealth of contextual information that places the writing within the historical, political, and cultural breadth of the region, Tablet Pen is transcendent, a book to be devoured as a single sustained narrative, from the first page to the last. Creating a vital bridge between two estranged cultures, "this is that rare anthology: cohesive, affecting, and informing" (Publishers Weekly).

    Every crisis that has ripped through this region in the ensuing decades, from the Yom Kippur War of 1973 to the ongoing intifada, is a direct consequence of those six days of fighting. Michael B. Oren’s magnificent Six Days of War, an internationally acclaimed bestseller, is the first comprehensive account of this epoch-making event. Writing with a novelist’s command of narrative and a historian’s grasp of fact and motive, Oren reconstructs both the lightning-fast action on the battlefields and the political shocks that electrified the world. Extraordinary personalities—Moshe Dayan and Gamal Abdul Nasser, Lyndon Johnson and Alexei Kosygin—rose and toppled from power as a result of this war; borders were redrawn; daring strategies brilliantly succeeded or disastrously failed in a matter of hours. And the balance of power changed—in the Middle East and in the world. A towering work of history and an enthralling human narrative, Six Days of War is the most important book on the Middle East conflict to appear in a generation.

    One of his prisoners was Rafiq, a rising leader in the PLO. Overcoming their fears and prejudices, the two men began a dialogue that, over more than a decade, grew into a remarkable friendship. Now an award-winning journalist, Goldberg describes their relationship and their confrontations over religious, cultural, and political differences; through these discussions, he attempts to make sense of the conflicts in this embattled region, revealing the truths that lie buried within the animosities of the Middle East.From the Trade Paperback edition.

    With understanding and sensitivity, Shtetl limns the culture that influenced Christian villagers' decisions to conceal or betray Jewish neighbors when the Nazis invaded. A New York Times Notable Book.

    RECLAIM YOUR SPIRITUAL HERITAGEThrough God?s carefully ordered system of ceremonialworship,He revealed Himself most clearly to thenation of Israel.This is especially evident in the seven?Feasts of the LORD? as detailed in Leviticus 23:Passover, Unleavened Bread, First Fruits, Pentecost,Trumpets,Atonement, and Tabernacles.These feasts arepictures of a person, the Messiah, and represent sevenphases of spiritual growth in the life of the believer.JESUS REVEALED IN THE FEASTSGod gave these festivals as foreshadowings of Jesus andHis various works of grace in the lives of all believers.The author clearly depicts the unity found in God?sunfolding purposes for His people, be they Jew orGentile, from the new birth found in Passover and theCrucifixion, all the way to entering God?s rest found in