Download or read book Judaism Without Tribalism written by Rabbi Rami Shapiro and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2022-06-14 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Judaism Without Tribalism is a blessing, a much-needed challenge, and a deep well of wisdom and sanity." —Natalie Goldberg This book investigates Judaism at its best—and sanest. It strips away outdated and harmful beliefs that have accrued over the centuries and returns to the essential truths that are too-often ignored in favor of tradition, tribal identity, or the claims of the powerful. The result is a vibrant Judaism for the 21st century and beyond—a Judaism that draws deeply from history and scripture yet addresses the unmet needs of the present and the future. It is a Judaism that is open and accessible to everyone. Judaism without tribalism is a call to be a light unto the nations, and a blessing to all the people of the earth. It is a Judaism free from legalism and tribalism—a Judaism that refuses to serve patriarchy and power. Written by one of today's most respected—and most unconventional—Jewish thinkers, Judaism Without Tribalism is a manifesto, an invitation to completeness, and a call for inner and outer spiritual revolution. It is also a deeply practical guide to living authentically, breath by breath and day by day.
Download or read book Open Secrets written by Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2013-03-04 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “. . . a rare jewel, a powerhouse of spiritual wisdom that you can read and reread.”—Joan Borysenko, Ph.D. author of A Woman’s Journey to God and Seven Paths to God “[Open Secrets] invites us into the most intimate of settings, the whispered wisdom passed from an authentic Hasidic master to his student. It radiates warmth, passion for the divine, and earthy confidence in sacredness. A treasure for the spiritual seeker of any tradition.” —Judith Simmer-Brown, Naropa University, author of Dakini’s Warm Breath “Open Secrets is my favorite way to introduce readers to the essence and depth of Judaism.”—Bo Lozoff, author and founder of the Human Kindness Foundation “A master teacher.”—Thomas Keating "A prophetic voice for a 21st-century Judaism”—Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi The fictional East European Hasidic Master Reb Yerachmeil writes to his hasid Herschel who has moved to America, in response to his student’s perennial questions about God, what it means to be Jewish, whether all religions are true, about death, the soul, good deeds, intermarriage and more. The rebbe writes, “My Judaism seeks only the heart of the teaching and the essence of the practice and leaves the details to others.” At the urging of his own rebbe, Shapiro, through these letters, creates a “. . . a Judaism for people who wish to learn from it as they do from Buddhism or Sufism, a Judaism for everyone.” Rabbi Rami M. Shapiro is regarded as one of the most creative voices in contemporary American Judaism. He is an award-winning poet and essayist, and his liturgies are used in prayer services throughout North America. His previous books include Minyan: 10 Principles for Living a Life of Integrity and The Way of Solomon: Finding Joy and Contentment in the Wisdom of Ecclesiastes.
Download or read book The Thirteenth Tribe written by Arthur Koestler and published by . This book was released on 2014-05 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the history of the ancient Khazar Empire, a major but almost forgotten power in Eastern Europe, which in the Dark Ages became converted to Judaism. Khazaria was finally wiped out by the forces of Genghis Khan, but evidence indicates that the Khazars themselves migrated to Poland and formed the cradle of Western Jewry. To the general reader the Khazars, who flourished from the 7th to 11th century, may seem infinitely remote today. Yet they have a close and unexpected bearing on our world, which emerges as Koestler recounts the fascinating history of the ancient Khazar Empire. At about the time that Charlemagne was Emperor in the West. The Khazars' sway extended from the Black Sea to the Caspian, from the Caucasus to the Volga, and they were instrumental in stopping the Muslim onslaught against Byzantium, the eastern jaw of the gigantic pincer movement that in the West swept across northern Africa and into Spain. Thereafter the Khazars found themselves in a precarious position between the two major world powers: the Eastern Roman Empire in Byzantium and the triumphant followers of Mohammed. As Koestler points out, the Khazars were the Third World of their day. They chose a surprising method of resisting both the Western pressure to become Christian and the Eastern to adopt Islam. Rejecting both, they converted to Judaism. Mr Koestler speculates about the ultimate faith of the Khazars and their impact on the racial composition and social heritage of modern Jewry. He produces a large body of meticulously detailed research.
Download or read book Transcendental Judaism written by David L. Lieberman and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-06-12 with total page 117 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Is it really possible to connect with God? Can we find spirituality in Judaism? The answer to both these questions is yes. Traditionally, Judaism teaches that we connect with God through the performance of the commandments, the mitzvot (from the Aramaic word tzavta meaning connection). But what if we are not mitzvah-observant in the traditional ways? Can we still experience a palpable closeness to God and have a sense that we are all connected as one? To this question, our sages also answer yes. Through the meditative quieting of the mind, we can directly experience that "still small voice." It is the awesome voice of infinite intelligence that created and upholds our world with compassion and justice. When we repeatedly experience it, we enliven its qualities into our lives; we "walk in God's ways." When we do so, we uplift not only ourselves, but the world around us.
Download or read book Zen Mind Jewish Mind written by Rabbi Rami Shapiro and published by . This book was released on 2025-02-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A book for locating an authentic spirituality, realizing the deep I, eradicating the surface Me. With reference to Shunryu Suzuki Roshi's classic Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, Rami Shapiro begins with beginner's mind as "empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities. It is the kind of mind which can see things as they are, which step by step and in a flash can realize the original nature of everything." Then, Rami ponders beginner's mind in the child of the Passover Haggadah "who knows not how to ask." The parents of this child are told to open (patach) the child to the art of questioning. Asking questions is key to Jewish mind. The questioning perennial beginner is central to both Zen and Jewish, Rami demonstrates: a daring, iconoclastic, often humorous mind devoted to shattering the words, texts, isms, and ideologies on which expert mind--closed to inquiry--depends. Zen Mind / Jewish Mind is not a scholarly study of anything, let alone Zen or Judaism, and despite all the footnotes, the book rests solely on Shapiro's fifty-plus years of playing in the garden of Judaism, Zen, and advaita/nonduality. Chapters include "Dharma Eye, God's I" (1), "Koan and Midrash" (4), and "The Yoga of Conversation" (7).
Download or read book Suicide of the West written by Jonah Goldberg and published by Crown Forum. This book was released on 2020-01-14 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An urgent argument that America and other democracies are in peril because they have lost the will to defend the values and institutions that sustain freedom and prosperity. Now updated with a new preface! “Epic and debate-shifting.”—David Brooks, New York Times Only once in the last 250,000 years have humans stumbled upon a way to lift ourselves out of the endless cycle of poverty, hunger, and war that defines most of history. If democracy, individualism, and the free market were humankind’s destiny, they should have appeared and taken hold a bit earlier in the evolutionary record. The emergence of freedom and prosperity was nothing short of a miracle. As Americans we are doubly blessed, because the radical ideas that made the miracle possible were written not just into the Constitution but in our hearts, laying the groundwork for our uniquely prosperous society. Those ideas are: • Our rights come from God, not from the government. • The government belongs to us; we do not belong to it. • The individual is sovereign. We are all captains of our own souls, not bound by the circumstances of our birth. • The fruits of our labors belong to us. In the last few decades, these political virtues have been turned into vices. As we are increasingly taught to view our traditions as a system of oppression, exploitation, and privilege, the principles of liberty and the rule of law are under attack from left and right. For the West to survive, we must renew our sense of gratitude for what our civilization has given us and rediscover the ideals and habits of the heart that led us out of the bloody muck of the past—or back to the muck we will go.
Download or read book Jewish Megatrends written by Rabbi Sidney Schwarz, PhD and published by Turner Publishing Company. This book was released on 2013-01-15 with total page 291 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Visionary solutions for a community ripe for transformational change—from fourteen leading innovators of Jewish life. "Jewish Megatrends offers a vision for a community that can simultaneously strengthen the institutions that serve those who seek greater Jewish identification and attract younger Jews, many of whom are currently outside the orbit of Jewish communal life. Schwarz and his collaborators provide an exciting path, building on proven examples, that we ignore at our peril." —from the Foreword The American Jewish community is riddled with doubts about the viability of the institutions that well served the Jewish community of the twentieth century. Synagogues, Federations and Jewish membership organizations have yet to figure out how to meet the changing interests and needs of the next generation. In this challenging yet hopeful call for transformational change, visionary leader Rabbi Sidney Schwarz looks at the social norms that are shaping the habits and lifestyles of younger American Jews and why the next generation is so resistant to participate in the institutions of Jewish communal life as they currently exist. He sets out four guiding principles that can drive a renaissance in Jewish life and gives evidence of how, on the margins of the Jewish community, those principles are already generating enthusiasm and engagement from the very millennials that the organized Jewish community has yet to engage. Contributors—leading innovators from different sectors of the Jewish community—each use Rabbi Schwarz's framework as a springboard to set forth their particular vision for the future of their sector of Jewish life and beyond.
Download or read book Masculinity and the Making of American Judaism written by Sarah Imhoff and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2017-03-13 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An examination of how early twentieth-century American Jewish men experienced manhood and presented their masculinity to others. How did American Jewish men experience manhood, and how did they present their masculinity to others? In this distinctive book, Sarah Imhoff shows that the project of shaping American Jewish manhood was not just one of assimilation or exclusion. Jewish manhood was neither a mirror of normative American manhood nor its negative, effeminate opposite. Imhoff demonstrates how early twentieth-century Jews constructed a gentler, less aggressive manhood, drawn partly from the American pioneer spirit and immigration experience, but also from Hollywood and the YMCA, which required intense cultivation of a muscled male physique. She contends that these models helped Jews articulate the value of an acculturated American Judaism. Tapping into a rich historical literature to reveal how Jews looked at masculinity differently than Protestants or other religious groups, Imhoff illuminates the particular experience of American Jewish men. “There is so much literature—and very good scholarship—on Judaism and gender, but the majority of that literature reflects an interest in women. A hearty thank you to Sarah Imhoff for writing the other half of the story and for doing it so elegantly.” —Claire Elise Katz, author of Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism “Invariably lucid and engaging, Sarah Imhoff provides a secure foundation for how religion shaped American masculinity and how masculinity shaped American Judaism in the early twentieth century.” —Judith Gerson, author of By Thanksgiving We Were Americans: German Jewish Refugees and Holocaust Memory
Download or read book Choosing Life after Tragedy written by Anson Hugh Laytner and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2023-09-08 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A wave of disease and death in his immediate family led Rabbi Anson Laytner to question much of what he had learned about the meaning of suffering, the value of petitionary prayer, and the role of God in human life. As he struggled to deal with his grief and doubts, he gradually found a way forward. His spiritual healing process took him from intense grief to a renewed appreciation of life—and resulted in this book, a work of creative theology some eighteen years in the making. Choosing Life After Tragedy is written for people who struggle with the subjects of suffering, divine providence, God, and prayer; people who are looking for honest, thoughtful, provocative—and occasionally humorous—theological reflections, but no easy answers. Laytner intersperses his penetrating theological reflections with pertinent episodes from his life because, for him, theology is personal and experience-based. Trained as a liberal rabbi, Laytner riffs on Jewish themes to offer a universal message of hope in the face of suffering and loss, and of mutual support based on humanity’s various teachings of lovingkindness. This book will challenge you; it will sometimes amuse you; but you will not remain unmoved.
Download or read book The Art of Jeffrey Rubinoff written by James Fox and published by D & M Publishers. This book was released on 2016-09-03 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jeffrey Rubinoff is one of the great sculptors in steel of the second half of the twentieth century. In the 1970s and '80s he exhibited widely in the United States and Canada alongside Anthony Caro, Mark di Suvero and George Rickey, among others. However, in the early 1990s Rubinoff withdrew from the art world altogether and concentrated on creating an extraordinary sculpture park on Hornby Island. This book is the first major account of his remarkable career. The Art of Jeffrey Rubinoff considers Rubinoff's life, work and ideas from a variety of perspectives. Barry Phipps describes Rubinoff's working methods; James Purdon examines the meanings that derive from Rubinoff's use of steel; Joan Pachner focuses on the formative influence of the abstract Expressionist sculptor David Smith on his work; Maria Tippett examines Rubinoff through the lens of the broader arts scene in postwar Canada; and Aaron Rosen attempts to understand Rubinoff's values and ambitions in light of his Jewish heritage. Other contributing scholars include Alistair Rider, Mark E. Breeze, Tom Stammers, Alexander Massouras, David Lawless and Peter Clarke. The book's foreword is written by the distinguished Yale historian Jay Winter. Drawing on interviews and correspondence with Rubinoff himself, as well as uncatalogued archives and unpublished documents in the artist's possession, The Art of Jeffrey Rubinoff makes available for the very first time a significant quantity of primary material, both textual and visual, for scholars and students of the future.
Download or read book The Price of Whiteness written by Eric L. Goldstein and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2019-12-31 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What has it meant to be Jewish in a nation preoccupied with the categories of black and white? The Price of Whiteness documents the uneasy place Jews have held in America's racial culture since the late nineteenth century. The book traces Jews' often tumultuous encounter with race from the 1870s through World War II, when they became vested as part of America's white mainstream and abandoned the practice of describing themselves in racial terms. American Jewish history is often told as a story of quick and successful adaptation, but Goldstein demonstrates how the process of identifying as white Americans was an ambivalent one, filled with hard choices and conflicting emotions for Jewish immigrants and their children. Jews enjoyed a much greater level of social inclusion than African Americans, but their membership in white America was frequently made contingent on their conformity to prevailing racial mores and on the eradication of their perceived racial distinctiveness. While Jews consistently sought acceptance as whites, their tendency to express their own group bonds through the language of "race" led to deep misgivings about what was required of them. Today, despite the great success Jews enjoy in the United States, they still struggle with the constraints of America's black-white dichotomy. The Price of Whiteness concludes that while Jews' status as white has opened many doors for them, it has also placed limits on their ability to assert themselves as a group apart.
Download or read book A Temporary Affair written by David Radin and published by Monkfish Book Publishing. This book was released on 2022-08-02 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A Temporary Affair is a collection of talks given at Sunday morning sittings at the Ithaca Zen Center by Yoshin David Radin, abbot and founder of the Ithaca Zen Center for the past 40 years. The talks contained here were given at a time when Yoshin’s health was severely compromised by end stage renal failure. In February 2019, he received a kidney transplant from a member of Ithaca Zen Center, to whom the publication is dedicated. The collection of 31 talks contains the insight of the individual dharma talks themselves, as well as the underlying story of how the dharma teachings helped the author cope, and even thrive, with his continuing loss of kidney function. The talks go right up to the days before he was admitted to the hospital. The comfort and guidance he received from the dharma during the times when he was most ill have been a great inspiration to all who know him, as they will to readers. In his own words, “How extraordinary, how blessed, how wonderful, to have met the teachings that free us from suffering when in difficult places.” Through these talks the reader can clearly see how he put that wisdom to use in his own life situation, and how they can do so as well.
Download or read book What is Judaism written by Abram Samuel Isaacs and published by . This book was released on 1912 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Emergence of Tribalism in the Pentateuchal Narratives written by Dr Martin Sicker and published by Xlibris Us. This book was released on 2023-09-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tribalism in the twenty-first century, as it has since prehistoric times, implies the possession of a strong cultural or ethnic identity that separates one member of a group from the members of another group. Based on strong relations of proximity and kinship, as well as relations based on the mutual survival of both the individual members of the tribe and for the tribe itself, members of a tribe tend to possess a strong feeling of identity. In contemporary times, tribalism has been castigated as a primitive and regressive form of social structure that impedes national development, and numerous instances can be shown where this appears to be an accurate assessment. As will be pointed out in the following study of the origins of tribalism in ancient Jewish history, the biblical narrative appears to corroborate that assessment. However, when considering the more than three millennia of Jewish history, it can be argued that tribalism played a highly significant role in its perseverance from remote antiquity to the present day. Beginning with the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 586 BCE, and the subsequent dispersion of the children of Israel from their homeland to the diverse parts of the world since then, disconnected communities of Jews persisted in upholding the core teachings of Judaism based on the written laws originally transmitted by Moses, and augmented by differing traditions. In effect, the Jewish diaspora consisted of independent but nonetheless tribal clans predicated on common core biblical teachings distinct from those of the host entities. The present work focusses on the emergence of tribalism as implicitly recounted in the narratives of the Pentateuch. It begins with the first family and concludes with the era of Moses, as the children of Israel prepare to cross the Jordan to enter the land of Canaan as promised to the Patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. The matter of tribalism is not addressed as such by the biblical narrator, whose primary focus is on the relations and interactions between God and man. However, the subject of tribalism can be seen implicit in the narratives when considered from sociological and political perspectives.
Download or read book Nineteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1878 with total page 1194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Twentieth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1878 with total page 1200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Nineteenth Century written by and published by . This book was released on 1881 with total page 958 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
