The Lubavitcher Rebbe's mystical teachings on the weekly Torah portions are widely studied by students and admirers around the world. The Rebbe saw the weekly Torah portion as an inexhaustable source of new ideas, insight into current issues, and profund relevance for daily life. He urged his followers, as well as everyone who came into contact with him, to seek daily inspiration from studying the Torah.This second volume of DAILY WISDOM, in the tradition of the highly acclaimed first volume of DAILY WISDOM, presents these daily inspirations in a clear, user-friendly format. Like its predecessor, this volume comprises 378 daily lessons, each of which offers a taste of the Rebbe's vast and deep teachings, filled with love for humanity, pragmatic optimism, and the conviction that evil and negativity will disappear when we learn to emphasize goodness and kindness. These ideas are woven together throughout the book, resulting in a precious daily resource that wiull enrich and elevate the lives of all readers.
In his discourses, translated here as, "The Teachings of the Rebbe," the Rebbe sheds light on the task and duty of our generation, the final generation of exile and the first generation of redemption, and the approach that we must adopt to attain and draw forth the revelation of HaShem, the Singular Intrinsic Unlimited Being Himself, blessed is He, in the here and now, culminating with the true and complete redemption for all mankind, literally.
These essays by Rabbi Menachem Creditor model the kind of fierce ethical commitment to justice - for women, for the poor, for victims of gun violence, for communities of color, for our cousins in Israel - that lies at the heart of Jewish teaching and scholarship. This book offers a roadmap into difficult conversations. Creditor's courage in marrying law to faith to social justice in these pages stands as an intense beginning to a dialogue; an invitation to speak out boldly about how the work of tikkun olam must proceed." - Dahlia Lithwick, Senior Supreme Court correspondent, Slate
Coincidence can color our experiences in ways that cannot be predicted. When the ordinary becomes the extraordinary, it transforms commonplace happenings and gives them new signifi cance and wonder. For half a century, Rabbi David H. Chanofsky has witnessed these transformative miracles, and here, he shares some of his favorite memories and lessons. He shares tales from his years of fighting anti-Semitism in America and of his efforts to defend the rights of Jews everywhere. Through the prism of humor and pathos as they relate to Jewish life, his experiences seek to inspire thought, laughter, tears, and debate. Is there such a thing as conservative and reform Judaism? How does Judaism view intermarriage? Why do so many people feel alone in a crowded synagogue? Is there a solution? What happens when religion and politics intersect in Israel? Who are your Jewish superheroes? The rabbi's early experiences gave him a lifelong commitment to Jewish survival and a zealous love of the United States. Judaism is central to his insights, and he approaches these issues with strong, often controversial points of view that he hopes will challenge your perceptions.
God gave the Torah to Moses and our ancestors at Mount Sinai thousands of years ago, and we’ve been studying it ever since. Rabbi Charna S. Klein continues the tradition in this scholarly work, interpreting the Torah’s fifty-four chapters in Inside the Torah. Klein presents interpretations from ancient Sages to modern commentators and adds original rabbinic interpretations on important topics such as creation, evolution, societal development, gender, sexual diversity, and more. The author also applies scientific lenses, including cultural, archeological, physical and medical anthropology to explicate hidden meanings in the Biblical text. Meant for Jews and non-Jews, the book is a significant contribution on the interpretation of the Torah from the perspectives of Chassidus and the Jewish mystical tradition of Kabbalah, its concepts, structures, and meaning. Rabbi Klein encourages the Jewish people as inheritors of the Mosaic tradition to connect with God and repair ourselves and the world. Awaken, know, delve deep and reach high to make yourself a vessel for good.
A comprehensive, inspiring and fascinating discovery of what Jews believe about the Messiah—and why you might believe in the Messiah, too. "The conviction that the Messiah is coming is a promise of meaning. It is a source of consolation. It is a wellspring of creativity. It is a reconciliation between what is and what should be. And it is perhaps our most powerful statement of faith—in God, in humanity and in ourselves." —from Chapter 1, “The Messiah Is Coming!” The coming of the Messiah—the promise of redemption—is among Judaism's gifts to the world. But it is a gift about which the world knows so little. It has been overshadowed by Christian belief and teaching, and as a result its Jewish significance has been all but lost. To further complicate matters, Jewish messianic teaching is enthralling, compelling, challenging, exhilarating—yet, up until now, woefully inaccessible. This book will change that. Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman brings together, and to life, this three-thousand-year-old tradition as never before. Rather than simply reviewing the vast body of Jewish messianic literature, she explores an astonishing range of primary and secondary sources, explaining in an informative yet inspirational way these teachings’ significance for Jews of the past—and infuses them with new meaning for the modern reader, both Jewish and non-Jewish.
In short, I believe, a little bit of religion is a good thing whether or not you fully embrace the idea of God. I believe that Judaism should accept this approach and help its adherents translate their deep, inherent religious needs with the symbols and practices of our ancient tradition. Judaism understands that not only does it have to adapt as part of its cultural dance, but it also has to choose and to create in order to complete its mission: to help modern Jews, the children of Spinoza, and the disciples of Einstein, to stay on course, to see the poetry written into the cosmos, and to help one another on the road to contentment with kindness, with concern and with love. Every once in a while, somebody comes to me and says: “Rabbi, I’m so glad I’m Jewish.” “Rabbi, I’m lucky. I have what I need. I have what I want.” And I smile and count my blessings, too.
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.
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