Download or read book Sefer Meor Ha Berakhot Primary Source Edition written by BiblioBazaar and published by . This book was released on 2014-02 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a reproduction of a book published before 1923. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

Download or read book Sefer Ha berakhot written by Marcia Falk and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 580 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of blessings, poems, meditations, and rituals presented in English and Hebrew offers a traditional perspective to weekday, Sabbath, and New Moon festival observances.

Download or read book The Zohar written by Daniel Chanan Matt and published by Stanford University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This third volume of The Zohar: Pritzker Edition completes the Zohar's commentary on the book of Genesis. Here we find spiritual explorations of numerous biblical narratives, including Jacob's wrestling with the angel, Joseph's kidnapping by his brothers, his near seduction by Potiphar's wife, his interpretation of Pharaoh's dreams, and his reunion with his brothers and father. Throughout, the Zohar probes the biblical text and seeks deeper meaning--for example, the divine intention behind Joseph's disappearance, or the profound significance of human sexuality. Divine and human realities intertwine, affecting one another. Toward the end of Genesis, the Bible states: Jacob's days drew near to die--an idiomatic expression that the Zohar insists on reading hyperliterally. Each human being is challenged to live his days virtuously. If he does, those days themselves are woven into a garment of splendor; at death, they "draw near," enveloping him, escorting him to the beyond. Sefer ha-Zohar (The Book of Radiance) has amazed and overwhelmed readers ever since it emerged mysteriously in medieval Spain toward the end of the thirteenth century. Written in a unique Aramaic, this masterpiece of Kabbalah exceeds the dimensions of a normal book; it is virtually a body of literature, comprising over twenty discrete sections. The bulk of the Zohar consists of a running commentary on the Torah, from Genesis through Deuteronomy.

Download or read book Sefer Kitve ha Ri ba written by Yom-Ṭov ben Avraham Ashbili and published by . This book was released on 1956 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Three Blessings written by Yoel Kahn and published by OUP USA. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the traditional Jewish liturgy, a man thanks God daily for not having been made a gentile, a woman, or a slave. Yoel Kahn traces the history of this prayer from its extra-Jewish origins to the present, demonstrating how different generations and communities understood the significance of these words.Marginalized and persecuted groups used this prayer to mark the boundary between "us" and "them," affirming their own identity and sense of purpose. After the medieval Church seized and burned books it considered offensive, new, coded formulations of the three blessings emerged as forms of spiritual resistance. Book owners voluntarily expurgated the passage to save the books from being destroyed, creating new language and meaning while seeking to preserve the structure and message of the received tradition. During the Renaissance, Jewish women defied their rabbis and declared their gratitude at being "made a woman and not a man." And, as Jewish emancipation began in the nineteenth century, Jews again had to balance fealty to historical practice with their place in the world. Seeking to be recognized as modern and European, early modern Jews rewrote the liturgy to suit modern sensibilities and identified themselves with the Christian West against the historical pagan and the uncivilized infidel.The Three Blessings is an insightful and wide-ranging study of one of the most controversial Jewish prayers, showing its constantly evolving language, usage, and interpretation over the past 2,000 years.

Download or read book The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry written by Yosef Kaplan and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2017-05-08 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In The Religious Cultures of Dutch Jewry an international group of scholars examines aspects of religious belief and practice of pre-emancipation Sephardim and Ashkenazim in Amsterdam, Curaçao and Surinam, ceremonial dimensions, artistic representations of religious life, and religious life after the Shoa. The origins of Dutch Jewry trace back to diverse locations and ancestries: Marranos from Spain and Portugal and Ashkenazi refugees from Germany, Poland and Lithuania. In the new setting and with the passing of time and developments in Dutch society at large, the religious life of Dutch Jews took on new forms. Dutch Jewish society was thus a microcosm of essential changes in Jewish history.

Download or read book written by Aharon Zakai and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Jewish Life Cycle written by Ivan G. Marcus and published by University of Washington Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This original and sweeping review of Jewish culture and history examines how and why various rites and customs celebrating stages of the life cycle have evolved through the ages and persisted to this day.

Download or read book Mystical Bodies Mystical Meals written by Joel Hecker and published by Wayne State University Press. This book was released on 2005 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals is the first book-length study of mystical eating practices and experiences in the kabbalah. Focusing on the Jewish mystical literature of late-thirteenth-century Spain, author Joel Hecker analyzes the ways in which the Zohar and other contemporaneous literature represent mystical attainment in their homilies about eating. What emerges is not only consideration of eating practices but, more broadly, the effects such practices and experiences have on the bodies of its practitioners. Using anthropology, sociology, ritual studies, and gender theory, Hecker accounts for the internal topography of the body as imaginatively conceived by kabbalists. For these mystics, the physical body interacts with the material world to effect transformations within themselves and within the Divinity. The kabbalists experience the ideal body as one of fullness, one whose boundaries allow for the intake of divine light and power, and for the outward overflow of fruitfulness and generosity; at the same time, the body retains sufficient integrity to confer a sense of completeness, as the perfect symbol for the Divinity itself. Nourishment imagery is used throughout the kabbalah as a metaphor signifying the flow of divine blessing from the upper worlds to the lower, from masculine to feminine, and from Israel to the Godhead. The body's spiritual continuity allows for unions between the kabbalistic devotee and his food, table, chair, and wine and is exemplified in the practices and experiences surrounding the consumption of food; this continuity is also applicable to other aspects of embodiment, such as the kabbalist's union with his fellow man. Mystical Bodies, Mystical Meals underscores the homosocial quality of the kabbalistic fraternity, in which gendered hierarchies of master and disciple are linked to the imagery and dynamics of nourishment and sexuality. Bringing this entire spectrum into focus, Hecker ultimately considers how the oral cavity and stomach, even the emotions associated with festive meals, are mobilized to produce the soul of the mystical saint in medieval kabbalah.

Download or read book The Cultures of Maimonideanism written by James T. Robinson and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2009 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the history of Jewish thought, no individual scholar has exercised more influence than Maimonides (1138-1204) philosopher and physician, legal scholar and communal leader. This collection of papers, originating at the 2007 EAJS colloquium, places primary emphasis on this influence not on Maimonides himself but the many movements he inspired. Using Maimonideanism as an interpretive lens, the authors of this volume representing a variety of fields and disciplines develop new approaches to and fresh perspectives on the peculiar dynamic of Judaism and philosophy. Focusing on social and cultural processes as well as philosophical ideas and arguments, they point toward an original reconceptualization of Jewish thought.

Download or read book Women at Prayer written by Avraham Weiss and published by KTAV Publishing House, Inc.. This book was released on 2001 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Women's prayer groups have recently become a subject of controversy. These services, organized and attended by women who wish to become more actively involved in communal prayer while remaining faithful to Halakhah, are increasing in number and have come under attack from several points of view. In a source-filled and closely reasoned discussion of the obligations of women in regard to private and public prayer. Torah study, and aliyot, Rabbi Weiss analyzes the relevant passages in the Talmud and Rishonim. He concludes that there are no halakhic impediments to the functioning of such prayer groups. The expanded edition includes a section on the reading of the Megillah for women.

Download or read book The Sabbath in the Classical Kabbalah written by Elliot K. Ginsburg and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a critical study of the mystical celebration of Sabbath in the classical period of Kabbalah, from the late twelfth to the early sixteenth centuries. The Kabbalists' re-reading of the earlier Jewish tradition has been called a model of "mythopoeic revision," a revision rooted in a world-view that stressed the interrelation of all worlds and levels of being. This is the first work, in any language, to systematically collect and analyze all the major innovations in praxis and theology that classical Kabbalah effected upon the development of the Rabbinic Sabbath, one of the most central areas of Jewish religious practice. The author analyzes the historical development of the Kabbalistic Sabbath, constructs a theoretical framework for the interpretation of its dense myth-ritual structure, and provides a phenomenology of key myths and rituals. It is one of the first Kabbalistic studies to integrate traditional textual-historical scholarship with newer methods employed in the study of religion and symbolic anthropology.

Download or read book The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth written by S. Daniel Breslauer and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2012-02-01 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Seductiveness of Jewish Myth offers a panorama of diverse definitions of myth, understandings of Judaism, and competing evaluations of the "mythic" element in religion. The contributors focus on the problem of defining myth as a category in religious studies, examine modern religion and the role of myth in a "secularized" world, and look at specific cases of Jewish myth from biblical through modern times.

Download or read book Omnia in Eo written by Irene E. Zwiep and published by Peeters Publishers. This book was released on 2006 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 2005 the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana celebrated its 125th year as part of the University Library of the University of Amsterdam. Several events were held to mark this anniversary, including lectures and an exhibition. In this volume the history of the library is examined further with new and incisive articles on the life and work of many of its leading figures and an analysis of part of Leeser Rosenthal's original collection. In addition, new material is presented regarding the fate of the library during the Second World War. A year earlier, in 2004, Adri Offenberg retired as curator of the Bibliotheca Rosenthaliana. Alongside a review of his work at the library, this volume provides a complete bibliography of all his published work until 2006 and what has become known in English as a festschrift: a collection of studies in his honour by Dutch and international colleagues and fellow bibliophiles about items in the library collection, as well as topics relating to Jewish booklore unconnected with the library. This volume is a tribute to Adri Offenberg the curator, but above all to Adri Offenberg the groundbreaking researcher.

Download or read book Through a Speculum That Shines written by Elliot R. Wolfson and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2020-06-30 with total page 463 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive treatment of visionary experience in some of the main texts of Jewish mysticism, this book reveals the overwhelmingly visual nature of religious experience in Jewish spirituality from antiquity through the late Middle Ages. Using phenomenological and critical historical tools, Wolfson examines Jewish mystical texts from late antiquity, pre-kabbalistic sources from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, and twelfth- and thirteenth-century kabbalistic literature. His work demonstrates that the sense of sight assumes an epistemic priority in these writings, reflecting and building upon those scriptural passages that affirm the visual nature of revelatory experience. Moreover, the author reveals an androcentric eroticism in the scopic mentality of Jewish mystics, which placed the externalized and representable form, the phallus, at the center of the visual encounter. In the visionary experience, as Wolfson describes it, imagination serves a primary function, transmuting sensory data and rational concepts into symbols of those things beyond sense and reason. In this view, the experience of a vision is inseparable from the process of interpretation. Fundamentally challenging the conventional distinction between experience and exegesis, revelation and interpretation, Wolfson argues that for the mystics themselves, the study of texts occasioned a visual experience of the divine located in the imagination of the mystical interpreter. Thus he shows how Jewish mystics preserved the invisible transcendence of God without doing away with the visual dimension of belief.

Download or read book Rabbinic lay Relations in Jewish Law written by Walter Jacob and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 1993 with total page 148 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It seeks to provide an ongoing forum through symposia, colloquia and publications. The foremost halakhic scholars in the Reform, Liberal, and Progressive rabbinate along with some Conservative and Orthodox colleagues as well as university professors serve on our Academic Council.

Download or read book The Contemplative Soul written by Adena Tanenbaum and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2002-11-01 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Andalusian Jewish poets introduced philosophical theories into their devotional verse. This study explores the impact of their rich intellectual and cultural life on their Hebrew poems devoted to the soul.