The first comprehensive resource for spiritual and pastoral caregivers—a vital resource for clergy, seminarians, chaplains, pastoral counselors and caregivers of all faith traditions. This essential resource integrates the classic foundations of pastoral care with the latest approaches to spiritual care. It is specifically intended for professionals who work or spend time with congregants in acute care hospitals, behavioral health facilities, rehabilitation centers and long-term care facilities. Offering the latest theological perspectives and tools, along with basic theory and skills from the best pastoral and spiritual care texts, research and concepts, the contributors to this resource are experts in their fields, and include eight current or past presidents of the major chaplaincy organizations.
In times of upheaval, many of us seek guidance from a spiritual mentor, someone who has confronted challenges and become a stronger person as a result. Here Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein draws from his own hard-won insights and personal experiences as a congregational rabbi, martial artist, FBI chaplain, and limit-pusher and interweaves them with the teachings of sages, biblical figures, and thinkers of all stripes to help us get beyond our own perceived limitations and face life’s challenges with fearlessness and fortitude. Goldstein identifies eight essential qualities that he believes we must cultivate to live a life of self-empowerment and then uses a programmatic approach to explore these qualities and the ways we can develop them in ourselves. Rabbi Goldstein is known for challenging himself physically, mentally, and spiritually. He counseled law enforcement officers at Ground Zero, has traveled to numerous remote and inhospitable places to learn and teach, and has sought out difficult experiences to rigorously test himself and the meaning of his faith.
Discover how to make virtually any moment in your day a significant part of a meaningful Jewish life. As we have discovered, and as our sages have long known, there is no experience in the life of a Jew that cannot be marked in Jewish ways.... The book you hold in your hands is the result of the kinds of rituals we have sculpted together over the years. It is not a prayer book or even a compendium of obligatory Jewish rituals. Rather, it is a source for all to use creatively. —from the Introduction Decades of experience by CLAL—The National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership in connecting spirituality with daily life come together in this one comprehensive handbook. In these pages, you have access to teachings that can help to sanctify almost any moment in your day. Offering a meditation, a blessing, a profound Jewish teaching, and a ritual for more than one hundred diverse everyday events and holidays, this guide includes sacred practices for: Lighting Shabbat candles Blessing your parents Running a marathon Visiting the sick Building a sukkah Seeing natural wonders Moving into a new home Saying goodbye to a beloved pet Making a shiva call Traveling ... and much more Drawing from both traditional and contemporary sources, The Book of Jewish Sacred Practices will show you how to make more holy any moment in your daily life.
How do you find meaning in your life? This book is intended to bring each weekly Torah reading to life with different ways to help you understand the deeper meaning of the words of Torah.
An engaging and sobering look at memorializing in Judaism and why memory—ours and God's—is so central to people. Through a series of lively introductions and commentaries, over thirty contributors—men and women, scholars, rabbis, theologians and poets, representing all Jewish denominations—examine the history and ideas behind Yizkor, the Jewish memorial service, and this fascinating chapter in Jewish piety. Featuring the traditional prayers—provided in the original Hebrew and a new and annotated translation—this fourth volume in the Prayers of Awe series explores the profound theological questions at the core of this service and our own humanity: What happens to us after we die? Is there really an afterlife? Does our fate after death depend on the goodness with which we have pursued our earthly life? And more. Prayers of Awe: A multi-volume series designed to explore the High Holy Day liturgy and enrich the praying experience for everyone—whether experienced worshipers or guests who encounter Jewish prayer for the very first time. Contributors: Yoram Bitton Dr. Annette M. Boeckler Dr. Marc Zvi Brettler Rabbi Lawrence A. Englander, CM, DHL Rabbi Edward Feinstein Rabbi Solomon B. Freehof, PhD (z"l) Dr. Eric L. Friedland Rabbi Shoshana Boyd Gelfand Rabbi Edwin Goldberg, DHL Rabbi Andrew Goldstein, PhD Dr. Joel M. Hoffman Rabbi Lawrence A. Hoffman, PhD Rabbi Walter Homolka, PhD, DHL Rabbi Delphine Horvilleur Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar Rabbi Daniel Landes Catherine Madsen Rabbi Jonathan Magonet, PhD Rabbi Dalia Marx, PhD Rabbi Charles H. Middleburgh, PhD Rabbi Jay Henry Moses Rabbi Aaron D. Panken, PhD Rabbi Jakob J. Petuchowski, PhD (z”l) Rabbi Jack Riemer Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso Rabbi David Stern Rabbi David A. Teutsch, PhD Rabbi Margaret Moers Wenig, DD Dr. Ron Wolfson Rabbi Daniel G. Zemel Dr. Wendy Zierler
54 practical ways you, and your congregation or organization, can make a meaningful difference in the lives of people living with illness. What do you need to know before you visit? What should you expect? How can you help without actually visiting someone living with illness? This book has the practical answers to these and many other questions.
54 practical ways you, and your congregation or organization, can make a meaningful difference in the lives of people living with illness. What do you need to know before you visit? What should you expect? How can you help without actually visiting someone living with illness? This book has the practical answers to these and many other questions.
How do you find meaning in your life? This book is intended to bring each weekly Torah reading to life with different ways to help you understand the deeper meaning of the words of Torah.
BACHYE’S “Guide to the Duties of the Heart” is the unique work that first linked the ethical science of the West with the emotional and spiritual morality of the East. It combines, in an artistic unity, elements drawn from the philosophy and contemplative mysticism of the Arabs, from Biblical and Rabbinic Judaism, and from Greek thought. By exhibiting the spiritual foundations of universal Ethics, and of the moral law of the Bible, in the light of pure reason, Bachye prepared the way for finding that common ground on which, wholly or in part, all the moral religions, and all the non religious systems of morality, are rooted. Therefore, although actually written in Spain, a land of the West, it forms a fitting opening volume for the “Wisdom of the East Series.” Only a small part of the original finds a place in the following pages; but I have in my translation—sometimes literal, now and again a summarised —endeavoured to give a selection of passages connected by the author’s central thought, and showing his line of argument and the aim and spirit of his work, instead of a mere collection of pithy sayings and isolated, beautiful, but disconnected reflections. This was the only way of doing justice to an author, some of whose reasonings are out of date, but the spirit of whose main contention is eternally valid; a teacher of virtue and duty, who did not attempt to inculcate this or that individual virtue, but aimed at the formation of character and conditions in which right conduct would be inevitable, so that details might well be left to take care of themselves. If the modern world owes its delight in physical beauty, and much of its sense of the true in Nature and in Art, to Greece; its ideal of goodness, and practically all the spiritual elements in our thought and feeling, our conception of holiness, and every moral characteristic of civilisation and of culture, have come to us from the Orient. For the form and system of Ethics we may be indebted to the few Hellenic thinkers whose sublime intellects raised them above the phenomenal world into a clear atmosphere of ideas, always suffused with the light of truth and justice; but all the permanent and vital contents of Ethics came, living and pulsating, with their vitalising possibilities, both into that atmosphere and into our life of to-day, with the glow of dawn from the East. Indeed, the two cardinal ideas essential to all present and future moral systems—the sanctity of human life as such, and the absolutely universal authority and validity of moral law and obligation—are entirely absent from even the writings of Plato, the greatest of the Greeks. These two are among the most definite colours that the prism of modern thought has enabled us to single out in our perception of the pure white light, from the sun of righteousness, that shone on Sinai. They are specially characteristic of the Hebrew moral teaching which the three great religions—Judaism, Christianity and Islamism—have spread throughout the world.
This volume is a compelling invitation to meditate on the deeper meaning of the fourteen verses of Psalm 27. During the month of Elul and the High Holy Day and Festival season, we reflect on our relationships, choices, beliefs, and practices, considering where to make repairs, adjustments, and atonement. Opening Your Heart with Psalm 27 provides gentle guidance through this journey of reflection, offering heartfelt insight, profound translation, and an invaluable framework for meaningfully participating in this annual spiritual practice.
Random thoughts on pastoral care. Every person derives the meaning of their lives from relationships with specific people, faith, work, leisure, family, an unfinished task or a discipline such as science, politics, drama or the visual arts to name only a few. These are spiritual resources that give meaning to the patient's life. Meaning usually refers to how the patient made a large or small difference in the life of others or in the world at large. When a person falls ill or is dying, these meaning making relationships or activities are lost or have become distant or strained, creating a crisis in the meaning of the life of the patient. It is the task of a chaplain or a pastoral care giver to encourage the ill or dying patient to discover or rediscover those sources of meaning that have been lost or from which the patient feels distant. These sources may be family relationships, life events, unfinished tasks, spiritual practices, real or unfinished work related tasks, or real objects in the patient's life from which the patient derives meaning. When a pastoral care giver or chaplain enters a patient's room, after following infection control protocols, the chaplain carefully listens to what the patient says about why the patient is in the hospital, what resources of meaning are available or not available and how the patient can reestablish those relationships while in hospital. The chaplain may derive spiritual interventions such as prayer, meditation, ritual objects, encouraging visits by important people in the patient's life, engaging in life review with the patient or simply encouraging hospital staff to be in contact with the patient who may feel left alone. This is the task of pastoral or spiritual care givers.
For people who don't believe that God can intervene in our lives, and why Judaism is still important. "Judaism has so much to teach us about how we treat ourselves, each other, and our planet.... Of course, you can learn these values elsewhere. But as a people, Jews have thousands of years of experience turning this kind of stuff over and over. [We’ve] had millions of users working to debug the system. Rather than look to other sources for guidance, let us turn to our own people’s past to discover what it has to say about our present and our future." —from the Introduction For some people, the biggest stumbling block in religion is God—even for an ordained rabbi who admits her rational mind “can’t buy into a God in the sky who writes down our deeds and rewards and punishes us accordingly.” But not being sold on an intervening God shouldn’t bar you from living a vibrant and fulfilling Jewish life. The God concept has seen many upgrades over the centuries and it is these reinterpretations that have kept Judaism relevant. In this provocative look at the ways in which God concepts have evolved and been upgraded through the centuries, Adventure Rabbi Jamie Korngold examines how our changing ideas of God have shaped every aspect of Judaism. With enthusiasm and humor, she shows that by aligning our understanding of God with modern sensibilities, Judaism can be made more meaningful, accessible and fully compatible with twenty-first-century life.
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