Download or read book The House at the Center of the World Poetic Midrash on Sacred Space written by Abe Mezrich and published by Ben Yehuda Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 138 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ""According to the mystics, the Torah was engraved with black fire on white fire. These poetic midrash too." - Jay Michaelson, author of The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path" In his piercing debut collection, "The House at the Center of the World," poet and scholar Abe Mezrich offers a series of beautifully composed short insights on some of the most elusive passages of the Torah: the second half of Exodus, the entirety of Leviticus, and the beginning of Numbers. At once powerful close readings of the text and deeply spiritual literature, these roughly seventy short pieces "carry ethical implications all the way from the ancient era right to the present day" (Dan Friedman, Managing Editor of "The Forward"). "Direct and accessible," these poems "remind us that our Creator is forgiving, that the spiritual and physical can inform one another, and that the supernatural can be carried into the everyday." (Yehoshua November, author of "God's Optimism")
Download or read book Words for a Dazzling Firmament written by Abe Mezrich and published by Ben Yehuda Press. This book was released on 2022-06-04 with total page 133 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Abe Mezrich breathes new life into the first third of the Torah in this book of poetic midrash. "It would have been enough if Abe Mezrich only wrote midrashim (creative re-interpretations/rediscoveries of the Torah); it would have been enough if he only wrote poems; it would have been enough if he only wrote Zen koans. How fortunate are we that he has given us a work combines all three! Mezrich is a cultivated craftsman—interpretively astute, sonically deliberate, and spiritually cunning." —Zohar Atkins, author of Nineveh "Direct and accessible, Mezrich's midrashic poems often tease profound meaning out of his chosen Torah texts." —Yehoshua November, author of God's Optimism "Abe Mezrich cuts straight back to the roots of the Midrashic tradition, sermonizing as a poet, rather than ideologue. Best of all, Abe knows how to ask questions and avoid the obvious answers." —Jake Marmer, author of Cosmic Diaspora "Each installment of Abe's still small voice is a miniature jewel, poetically illuminating with its delicate facets otherwise hidden elements of each parsha." —Dan Friedman, managing editor, The Forward "According to the mystics, the Torah was engraved with black fire on white fire. These poetic midrash too. Read them slowly. Spend time in the white spaces. Let the foreignness of the text resonate in silence, and find yourself rewarded." —Jay Michaelson, author of The Gate of Tears: Sadness and the Spiritual Path
Download or read book Papers Read Before the Jews College Literary Society During the Session 1886 7 written by Jews' College (London, England). Literary Society and published by . This book was released on 1887 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Gate of Tears written by Jay Michaelson and published by . This book was released on 2015 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rabbi, meditation teacher, and scholar of religion, the author found himself returning to some of the core teachings of contemplative Judaism and Theravadan Buddhism after his mother passed away following a battle with cancer. The result is this collection of eighty meditations on spirituality, poetry, alchemy, and loss.--Adapted from publisher description.
Download or read book Analogy in Midrash and Kabbalah written by Maurizio Mottolese and published by . This book was released on 2007 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Sacred Trash written by Adina Hoffman and published by Schocken. This book was released on 2016-06-21 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL JEWISH BOOK AWARD FINALIST WINNER OF THE 2012 AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION’S SOPHIE BRODY AWARD FOR OUTSTANDING ACHIEVEMENT IN JEWISH LITERATURE Sacred Trash tells the remarkable story of the Cairo Geniza—a synagogue repository for worn-out texts that turned out to contain the most vital cache of Jewish manuscripts ever discovered. This tale of buried communal treasure weaves together unforgettable portraits of Solomon Schechter and the other modern heroes responsible for the collection’s rescue with explorations of the medieval documents themselves—letters and poems, wills and marriage contracts, Bibles, money orders, fiery dissenting religious tracts, fashion-conscious trousseaux lists, prescriptions, petitions, and mysterious magical charms. Presenting a panoramic view of almost a thousand years of vibrant Mediterranean Judaism, Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole bring contemporary readers into the heart of this little-known trove, whose contents have rightly been dubbed “the Living Sea Scrolls.” Part biography, part meditation on the supreme value the Jewish people has long placed in the written word, Sacred Trash is above all a gripping tale of adventure and redemption. (With black-and-white illustrations throughout.)
Download or read book 20th Century Jewish Religious Thought written by Arthur Allen Cohen and published by Jewish Publication Society. This book was released on 2009-02-01 with total page 1185 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: JPS is proud to reissue Cohen and Mendes-Flohr’s classic work, perhaps the most important, comprehensive anthology available on 20th century Jewish thought. This outstanding volume presents 140 concise yet authoritative essays by renowned Jewish figures Eugene Borowitz, Emil Fackenheim, Blu Greenberg, Susannah Heschel, Jacob Neusner, Gershom Scholem, Adin Steinsaltz, and many others. They define and reflect upon such central ideas as charity, chosen people, death, family, love, myth, suffering, Torah, tradition and more. With entries from Aesthetics to Zionism, this book provides striking insights into both the Jewish experience and the Judeo-Christian tradition.
Download or read book Sacred Body written by Roberta Sterman Sabbath and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-05-30 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Sacred Body: Readings in Jewish Literary Illumination provides fresh and insightful interpretations of Jewish texts, narratives, and cultural practices that show how these artifacts unhinge the “sacred” from the divine and focus instead on the “everyday sacred” of a dynamic earthly existence that emphasizes the body, celebrates life-affirming decisions, actions, and relationships, and avoids abstraction, metaphysics, and apocalypticism. Roberta Sabbath argues that a diverse array of Jewish artifacts, from sacred scripture to contemporary novels and ballet performance, articulate a tradition that has existed for millennia in mythic, proto-historic, legalistic, mystical, philosophical, and aesthetic expressions of Jewishness. The author refers to this tradition as Jewish literary illumination, and she deftly demonstrates how it illuminates the most salient message of Judaism: that earthly existence and the body are also the site of the spiritual and the sacred.
Download or read book Dirshuni written by Tamar Biala and published by Hbi Jewish Women. This book was released on 2022-04-05 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique compilation of contemporary women's midrashim. Dirshuni: Contemporary Women's Midrash, is the first-ever English edition of a historic collection of midrashim composed by Israeli women, which has been long-anticipated by multiple American audiences, including synagogues, rabbinical seminaries, adult learning programs, Jewish educators, and scholars of gender and religion. Using the classical forms developed by the ancient rabbis, the contributors express their religious and moral thought and experience through innovative interpretations of scripture. The women writers, from all denominations and beyond, of all political stripes and ethnic backgrounds, contribute their Torah to fill the missing half of the sacred Jewish bookshelf. This book reflects dramatic changes in the agency of women in the world of religious writings. The volume features a comprehensive introduction to Midrash for the uninitiated reader by the distinguished scholar Tamar Kadari and extensive annotation and commentary by Tamar Biala.
Download or read book Jerusalem and Other Holy Places as Foci of Multireligious and Ideological Confrontation written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2020-12-07 with total page 397 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Jerusalem and Other Holy Places as Foci of Multireligious and Ideological Confrontation demonstrates the variety in the study of holy places, as well as the flexibility of geographic and historical aspects of holiness.
Download or read book Figuring Jerusalem written by Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2022-04-22 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For two thousand years, Hebrew writers imagined Jerusalem from a distance and used exile as a license for invention. The question at the heart of Figuring Jerusalem is this: how did these writers bring their imagination "home" in the Zionist century? Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi, one of our leading scholars of modern Jewish literature, explores the perils of this newly acquired proximity to a people's sacred and inherited resources. Ezrahi finds that the same diasporic procedures-cultic, ethical, and aesthetic-that Hebrew writers practiced in exile were maintained throughout the first half of the twentieth century, even in proximity to the Temple Mount, while Jerusalem was under the successive control of the Ottomans, the British, and then the Jordanians. After 1948, when the state of Israel was founded but East Jerusalem and its holy sites remained under Arab control, Jerusalem continued to figure in the Hebrew imagination as mediated space. But after 1967, all this changed. Over the next half century, the claim to exclusive sovereignty reignited a messianic fervor that had been suppressed in Hebrew culture for two millennia. The temptations and dilemmas of proximity to the sacred would become acute in every area of Hebrew politics and culture. Figuring Jerusalem ranges from classical texts, biblical and medieval, to the post-1967 writings of work of S. Y. Agnon, and the uncrowned poet laureate of Jerusalem, Yehuda Amichai. Ezrahi shows, ultimately, that the wisdom Jews acquired through two thousand years of wandering and exile, as inscribed in their literary imagination, must be rediscovered if the diverse inhabitants of this City are not to slaughter each other once again in the name of an exclusive and vengeful God"--
Download or read book Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity written by Laura Suzanne Lieber and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Jewish Aramaic Poetry from Late Antiquity, Laura Suzanne Lieber offers annotated translations of sixty-nine poems written between the 4th and 7th century C.E. in the Land of Israel, along with commentaries and introductions. The poems celebrate a range of occasions from the ritual year and the life-cycle: Passover, Shavuot (Pentacost), the Ninth of Av, Purim, the New Moon of Nisan, the conclusion of the Torah, weddings, and funerals. Written in the vernacular of the Jews of living in Palestine after the Christianization of the Roman Empire, these works offer insight into lived Jewish experience during a pivotal age. The volume contextualizes the individual works so that readers from a range of backgrounds can appreciate the formal, linguistic, exegetical, theological, and performative creativity of these works. "Lieber has produced reliable renderings, as well as learned and helpful annotations, and has consistently expressed herself in clear and elegant fashion....Her volume is an important, scientific study in its own right, as well as a useful reference tool (if read alongside the Sokoloff-Yahalom edition), and certainly deserves a wide readership." - Stefan C. Reif, St John's College, Cambridge, UK, in: Journal of Jewish Studies 70.2 (2019) "Scholars of Judaism in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages will certainly appreciate Lieber’s effort in offering all of this textual material to them in conveniently accessible form. Almost every student of Judaism in those eras, regardless of academic specialty, is likely to find something of interest and value in the poems that she has translated." - Mose J. Bernstein, Yeshiva University, Speculum 95/3 (2020)
Download or read book The Bone Gatherers written by Nicola Denzey and published by Beacon Press. This book was released on 2007-07-01 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The bone gatherers found in the annals and legends of the early Roman Catholic Church were women who collected the bodies of martyred saints to give them a proper burial. They have come down to us as deeply resonant symbols of grief: from the women who anointed Jesus's crucified body in the gospels to the Pietà, we are accustomed to thinking of women as natural mourners, caring for the body in all its fragility and expressing our deepest sorrow. But to think of women bone gatherers merely as mourners of the dead is to limit their capacity to stand for something more significant. In fact, Denzey argues that the bone gatherers are the mythic counterparts of historical women of substance and means-women who, like their pagan sisters, devoted their lives and financial resources to the things that mattered most to them: their families, their marriages, and their religion. We find their sometimes splendid burial chambers in the catacombs of Rome, but until Denzey began her research for The Bone Gatherers, the monuments left to memorialize these women and their contributions to the Church went largely unexamined. The Bone Gatherers introduces us to once-powerful women who had, until recently, been lost to history—from the sorrowing mothers and ghastly brides of pagan Rome to the child martyrs and women sponsors who shaped early Christianity. It was often only in death that ancient women became visible—through the buildings, burial sites, and art constructed in their memory—and Denzey uses this archaeological evidence, along with ancient texts, to resurrect the lives of several fourth-century women. Surprisingly, she finds that representations of aristocratic Roman Christian women show a shift in the value and significance of womanhood over the fourth century: once esteemed as powerful leaders or patrons, women came to be revered (in an increasingly male-dominated church) only as virgins or martyrs—figureheads for sexual purity. These depictions belie a power struggle between the sexes within early Christianity, waged via the Church's creation and manipulation of collective memory and subtly shifting perceptions of women and femaleness in the process of Christianization. The Bone Gatherers is at once a primer on how to "read" ancient art and the story of a struggle that has had long-lasting implications for the role of women in the Church.
Download or read book Seeking out the Land Land of Israel Traditions in Ancient Jewish Christian and Samaritan Literature 200 BCE 400 CE written by Ze'ev Safrai and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-05-07 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Seeking out the Land describes the study of the Holy Land in the Roman period and examines the complex connections between theology, social agenda and the intellectual pursuit. Holiness as a theological concept determines the intellectual agenda of the elite society of writers seeking to describe the land, as well as their preoccupation with its physical aspects and their actual knowledge about it. Ze'ev Safrai succeeds in examining all the ancient monotheistic literature, both Jewish and Christian, up to the fourth century CE, and in demonstrating how all the above-mentioned factors coalesce into a single entity. We learn that in both religions, with all their various subgroups, the same social and religious factors were at work, but with differing intensity.
Download or read book The Torah written by Dr. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and published by CCAR Press. This book was released on 2017-12-04 with total page 2363 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking volume The Torah: A Women's Commentary, originally published by URJ Press and Women of Reform Judaism, has been awarded the top prize in the oldest Jewish literary award program, the 2008 National Jewish Book Awards. A work of great import, the volume is the result of 14 years of planning, research, and fundraising. THE HISTORY: At the 39th Women of Reform Judaism Assembly in San Francisco, Cantor Sarah Sager challenged Women of Reform Judaism delegates to "imagine women feeling permitted, for the first time, feeling able, feeling legitimate in their study of Torah." WRJ accepted that challenge. The Torah: A Women's Commentary was introduced at the Union for Reform Judaism 69th Biennial Convention in San Diego in December 2007. WRJ has commissioned the work of the world's leading Jewish female Bible scholars, rabbis, historians, philosophers and archaeologists. Their collective efforts resulted in the first comprehensive commentary, authored only by women, on the Five Books of Moses, including individual Torah portions as well as the Hebrew and English translation. The Torah: A Women's Commentary gives dimension to the women's voices in our tradition. Under the skillful leadership of editors Dr. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Rabbi Andrea Weiss, PhD, this commentary provides insight and inspiration for all who study Torah: men and women, Jew and non-Jew. As Dr. Eskenazi has eloquently stated, "we want to bring the women of the Torah from the shadow into the limelight, from their silences into speech, from the margins to which they have often been relegated to the center of the page - for their sake, for our sake and for our children's sake." Published by CCAR Press, a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis
Download or read book Torah of Reconciliation written by Sheldon Lewis and published by Gefen Publishing House Ltd. This book was released on 2012 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of 9/11, Rabbi Sheldon Lewis sought solace and a path to reconciliation in Jewish texts. Peacemaking is arguably the key pillar among Jewish values, and Torah of Reconciliation seeks to reveal this primary value in diverse scriptural and
Download or read book Contemporary Jewish Religious Thought written by Arthur Allen Cohen and published by New York : Free Press ; London : Collier Macmillan. This book was released on 1988 with total page 1188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of 140 essays by renowned figures on the fundamental concepts, beliefs and movements in historical and contemporary Jewish thought. Charity, chosen people, death, culture, family, freedom, history, love, immortality, myth, prayer, science, tradition and Torah are among the subjects addressed in this handbook of Jewish experience and thought.
