From the acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus comes an "engrossing and wonderful book" (The Washington Times) about the unexpected connections between Franz Kafka and Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav—and the significant role played by the imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience. Rodger Kamenetz has long been fascinated by the mystical tales of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. And for many years he has taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he thought about their lives and writings, the more aware he became of unexpected connections between them. Kafka was a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman was a religious mystic who used storytelling to reach out to secular Jews. Both men died close to age forty of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And both left strict instructions at the end of their lives that their unpublished books be burnt. Kamenetz takes his ideas on the road, traveling to Kafka’s birthplace in Prague and participating in the pilgrimage to Uman, the burial site of Rabbi Nachman visited by thousands of Jews every Jewish new year. He discusses the hallucinatory intensity of their visions and offers a rich analysis of Nachman’s and Kafka’s major works, revealing uncanny similarities in the inner lives of these two troubled and beloved figures, whose creative and religious struggles have much to teach us about the Jewish spiritual experience.
While accompanying eight high–spirited Jewish delegates to Dharamsala, India, for a historic Buddhist–Jewish dialogue with the Dalai Lama, poet Rodger Kamenetz comes to understand the convergence of Buddhist and Jewish thought. 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.
Winner of the 1997 National Jewish Book Award for Jewish Thought, "Stalking Elijah" traces Rodger Kamenetz's rollicking and profound cross-country journey in search of the great teachers revitalizing Judaism today.
Our Dreams Will Never Be the Same Again International bestselling author Rodger Kamenetz believes it is not too late to reclaim the lost power of our nightly visions. He fearlessly delves into this mysterious inner realm and shows us that dreams are not only intensely meaningful, but hold essential truths about who we are. In the end, each of us has the choice to embark on this illuminating path to the soul.
Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book...sings with dark wit the tales of tough family spirits. —Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Night Watchman. These are very exciting and original poems...a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew. —Yehuda Amichai, author of A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 and Open Closed Open: Poems
These are emotionally powerful poems that speak to the condition of midlife, of being in the narrow place, stuck between the present and the future, between the demands of work and family, between the hope for joy and the desolation of loss. The pain of broken marriage, the tragedy of daily life, the struggle for identity, and the self-doubt of middle age are multiplied into passionate voices that rage, plead, joke, and shout. The language, tough yet dynamic, wraps itself around the images, which are at times deeply disturbing, at times strangely humorous -- but always honest, open, and real.
From the acclaimed author of The Jew in the Lotus comes an "engrossing and wonderful book" (The Washington Times) about the unexpected connections between Franz Kafka and Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav—and the significant role played by the imagination in the Jewish spiritual experience. Rodger Kamenetz has long been fascinated by the mystical tales of the Hasidic master Rabbi Nachman of Bratslav. And for many years he has taught a course in Prague on Franz Kafka. The more he thought about their lives and writings, the more aware he became of unexpected connections between them. Kafka was a secular artist fascinated by Jewish mysticism, and Rabbi Nachman was a religious mystic who used storytelling to reach out to secular Jews. Both men died close to age forty of tuberculosis. Both invented new forms of storytelling that explore the search for meaning in an illogical, unjust world. Both gained prominence with the posthumous publication of their writing. And both left strict instructions at the end of their lives that their unpublished books be burnt. Kamenetz takes his ideas on the road, traveling to Kafka’s birthplace in Prague and participating in the pilgrimage to Uman, the burial site of Rabbi Nachman visited by thousands of Jews every Jewish new year. He discusses the hallucinatory intensity of their visions and offers a rich analysis of Nachman’s and Kafka’s major works, revealing uncanny similarities in the inner lives of these two troubled and beloved figures, whose creative and religious struggles have much to teach us about the Jewish spiritual experience.
I found that the challenge of precisely recording my dreams over the past fifteen years prompted the need to find a poetic language adequate to the actual encounters in the dream. (This is very different from making a smooth narrative or inter -pretation that ends up obscuring the dream). The challenge is to feel the image and then let the words arise from a deep enough place to respond. I found that certain nights or early mornings as I slipped out of dream-mind to record a dream, I felt an impulse to write a poem instead. And that is how Yonder (my first book in this series of works of mine) and now Dream Logic was born. I was still engaged with images moving in me, but now they were entering the space of the page, or more precisely, the space of the iPhone “notes.” Although awake, I was also still writing in the perfume of the dream, and carried along by that feeling, the language arose often full of imagery and eliding any secular logic. Rodger Kamenetz
Kamenetz's poems whirl and shake on the page. He is the poet of the living history of unspeakable names and his book...sings with dark wit the tales of tough family spirits. —Louise Erdrich, author of Love Medicine and The Night Watchman. These are very exciting and original poems...a secret and almost intimate meeting place of English and Hebrew. —Yehuda Amichai, author of A Life of Poetry, 1948-1994 and Open Closed Open: Poems
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