Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach was one of the most original and inspired Jewish personalities of the twentieth century. In this incredible volume, Yitta Halberstam Mandelbaum, a devoted student of Reb Shlomo, gathers dozens of stories about this charismatic, loving Jewish leader. The episodes retold here by Reb Shlomo's followers and admirers underscore his unfailing generosity, his capacity to love unconditionally, and his desire to reconnect every Jew with his or her heritage. As a whole, the collection reveals how many individuals were touched by Reb Shlomo, and serves as a moving tribute to the man many consider a tzaddik (righteous one).
See the divine in every human encounter. Be receptive to God's voice. Act out of faith. These are just a few of the life lessons Rabbi Shlomo Riskin imparts in this collection of personal stories. Rabbi Riskin takes us from his grandmother's Brooklyn Shabbat table to the vibrant community
The 1960s San Francisco spiritual revolution - a view from inside. Memoir about a spiritual teacher and a student in 1960s San Francisco, a colorful cast - including Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach, Timothy Leary, Richard Alpert, Allen Ginsburg, Murshid Samuel Lewis ("Sufi Sam"), Swami Satchidananda, Ajari Warwick, Rabbi Zalman Shalomi Schachter, and many more - and lives that were changed forever. Aryae Coopersmith, a 22-year old college student in 1960s San Francisco, meets the charismatic rabbi and folk singer Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach and decides to start a community for him. He rents a house and moves in with his best friends. Before long they find themselves - and their house - at the center of the San Francisco spiritual revolution as thousands of young people - Jews, Christians, Buddhists, Sufis, and followers of countless gurus - flood in through their doors. Giving concerts to packed halls all over the world, Shlomo is recognized as Judaism's most influential musician, and one of its greatest spiritual leaders, of the late 20th century. Their house - the House of Love and Prayer - becomes an historic part of the legend of 1960s San Francisco. Aryae and his fellow students who are running other spiritual communities bring their teachers and gurus together to create a big San Francisco event - the Meeting of the Ways - to celebrate the oneness of the world's spiritual traditions and all the world's people. Aryae's best friends Efraim and Leah leave San Francisco and head to Jerusalem, where they become ultra-Orthodox Hasidim. Many others from the "House" follow. Aryae stays behind and settles into a secular life as a Silicon Valley business owner. After Shlomo dies, Aryae feels compelled to tell the story. To try to understand the lives of his old friends and pull together the scattered fragments of his own, he travels to Jerusalem. This profoundly moving memoir tells a story of grace, loss, redemption, and ultimately of acceptance. It invites us to reflect on how the 1960s spiritual revolution - with its vision of the oneness of us all - has impacted each of our lives.
A historical tour de force, The Invention of the Jewish People offers a groundbreaking account of Jewish and Israeli history. Exploding the myth that there was a forced Jewish exile in the first century at the hands of the Romans, Israeli historian Shlomo Sand argues that most modern Jews descend from converts, whose native lands were scattered across the Middle East and Eastern Europe. In this iconoclastic work, which spent nineteen weeks on the Israeli bestseller list and won the coveted Aujourd'hui Award in France, Sand provides the intellectual foundations for a new vision of Israel's future.
Shlomo Sand was born in 1946, in a displaced person’s camp in Austria, to Jewish parents; the family later migrated to Palestine. As a young man, Sand came to question his Jewish identity, even that of a “secular Jew.” With this meditative and thoughtful mixture of essay and personal recollection, he articulates the problems at the center of modern Jewish identity. How I Stopped Being a Jew discusses the negative effects of the Israeli exploitation of the “chosen people” myth and its “holocaust industry.” Sand criticizes the fact that, in the current context, what “Jewish” means is, above all, not being Arab and reflects on the possibility of a secular, non-exclusive Israeli identity, beyond the legends of Zionism.
There is a little land. In that little land, there is a little city. In that city there is a little street, and on that street there is a little wall. When you stand by that Holy Wall, you can hear the footsteps of our father Abraham, and you can hear the trumpet of the Great Day to come. You hear the past and you can hear the future. You can hear the singing of the Levites. Or, you can hear us crying, going into exile. You can hear the six million crying out of the gas chambers, and you can hear the trumpet of the Great Day to come. I was standing one early morning by the Holy Wall, and I was saying Kaddish for my father. But when you stand by that Holy Wall, you say Kaddish for the whole world. Sometimes you feel like saying Kaddish for your own soul, and sometimes you feel like saying Kaddish for tomorrow. Then you hear the words “Yisgadal V’yiskadash Shmei Raba — May G-d’s Name become great and sanctified,” and you remember there is one G-d, and you know that the Great Morning is coming. You know that day and night will get together. The living and the dead, we and the whole world. This is my song, the song of tears, because on that Great Day the tears will march through the world, and the whole world will join them. The tears will clear the world and prepare the world. Everything will come together. We will all come together. It will be a new morning – a new beginning. In this remarkable and life-changing work, the reader is transported to the Holy Temple in Jerusalem to be inspired by the teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach zt”l. Masterfully adapted by Rabbi Shlomo Katz (renowned musician and creator of the best-selling and acclaimed The Soul of Chanukah: Teachings of Rabbi Shlomo Carlebach), these teachings touch the soul.
This broad selection of the short stories of SY Agnon winner of the 1966 Nobel prize for literature presents a panoramic and probing vision of the writer as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emergent society of modern Israel.