A practical and engaging guide to reinvigorating Jewish community life, with strategies for reviving the Jewish spiritual centers at the heart of Jewish tradition and tips on sustainable transformation, inspiring leadership and inviting sacred spaces.
In a time where radical and extreme religion threatens to destroy the entire world, Rav Kooks spiritual revolution provides a much needed answer, combining a deep love of God with an uncompromising compassion for all human beings. A person who reads the writings of Rav Kook will discover a man who rejected superficial labels of religious verses secular, right wing verses left wing. Rav Kook was one of the most spiritual and open minded thinkers in modern Jewish history. Gods presence in the world was so real to Rav Kook that he believed spirituality must focus on the transformation of the individual, the nation, humanity, and all of existence.
Prepare to revive your Jewish community with the transformative power of the Divine spirit. "Rabbi Baruch HaLevi and Ellen Frankel have correctly identified Ruakh as a key missing ingredient in Jewish institutional life, especially in the synagogue. Their call is for a revolution of spirit, a rejuvenation of our purpose, our worship, even our sacred spaces. It is recognition that the craving for community can bring people back to our institutions, if we welcome, engage and inspire them." —from the Foreword by Dr. Ron Wolfson In this practical and engaging guide to reinvigorating Jewish life, Rabbi Baruch HaLevi and Ellen Frankel identify the difference between a living synagogue and a dying one, and offer methods for reviving the Jewish spiritual centers—federations, community centers, institutions and synagogues—that serve as the heart of Jewish tradition and your life. They offer practical strategies for sustaining and expanding transformation, including tips for providing impassioned leadership, inspired programming and inviting sacred spaces. Whether you are clergy, congregant or community member, this guide will help you awaken your spirit and enliven your journey to a Ruakh-filled life.
Spanning over 2,000 years, this study looks at the complex relationship between Jewish and Catholic thought from a social and historical perspective. Examining different significant moments for both religions throughout the centuries, this book analyzes and explains the conflicts that have arisen between the two religions since their beginnings.
A paradigm-shifting account of the modern Jewish experience, from one of the most creative young historians of his generation To understand the organizing framework of modern Judaism, Eliyahu Stern believes that we should look deeper and farther than the Holocaust, the establishment of the State of Israel, and the influence and affluence of American Jewry. Against the revolutionary backdrop of mid-nineteenth-century Europe, Stern unearths the path that led a group of rabbis, scientists, communal leaders, and political upstarts to reconstruct the core tenets of Judaism and join the vanguard of twentieth-century revolutionary politics. In the face of dire poverty and rampant anti-Semitism, they mobilized Judaism for projects directed at ensuring the fair and equal distribution of resources in society. Their program drew as much from the universalism of Karl Marx and Charles Darwin as from the messianism and utopianism of biblical and Kabbalistic works. Once described as a religion consisting of rituals, reason, and rabbinics, Judaism was now also rooted in land, labor, and bodies. Exhaustively researched, this original, revisionist account challenges our standard narratives of nationalism, secularization, and de-Judaization.
In 1965 the Second Vatican Council declared that God loves the Jews. Yet the Church had taught for centuries that Jews were cursed by God, and had mostly kept silent as Jews were slaughtered by Nazis. How did an institution whose wisdom is said to be unchanging undertake one of the largest, yet most undiscussed, ideological swings in modern history?
The spiritual revival that is sweeping the Soviet Union today had its genesis in the religious renaissance of the early 20th century. In both cases, it was lay intellectuals, disenchanted with simplistic positivism and materialism, who adapted Russian orthodoxy to modern life. Their ideas reverberated, not only in religion and philosophy, but in art, literature, painting, theater and film. Banned by the Soviet government in 1922, the writings of the religious renaissance were rediscovered in the Brezhnev era by a new generation of Soviet intellectuals disillusioned with Marxism. Circulating from hand to hand in illegal typewritten editions (samizdat), they exerted an evergrowing influence on Soviet society, from the very top down to ordinary people. Under the new policy of glasnost, the government itself is currently reprinting their works. The selections included in this volume reflect the profundity and breadth of their thought and are presented in English for the first time. The recognition of the universal need and significance of spiritual values and ideals united this otherwise heterogeneous group and bears witness to the diversity of their approach to the basic issues of the human condition. The centrality of these lay intellectuals' concerns transcends the specifics of the historical situation in early 20th century Russia and makes their writings relevant to the universal human condition. In order of appearance, the selections are: VLADIMIR SOLOVYOV, The Enemy from the East, The Russian National Ideal; NIKOLAI GROT, On the True Tasks of Philosophy; SERGEI DIAGHILEV, Complex Questions; VASILLY V. ROZANOV, On Sweetest Jesus and the Bitter Fruits of the World; NIKOLAI BERDIAEV, Socialism as Religion; SERGEI BULGAKOV, An Urgent Task; VIACHISLAV IVANOV, Crisis of Individualism, GEORGII CHULKOV, On Mystical Anarchism; DMITRI S. MEREZHKOVSKY, Revolution and Religion, The Jewish Question As a Russian Question; GEORGII FLOROVSKY, In the World of Quests and Wanderings; PAVEL NOVGORODTSEV, The Essence of the Russian Orthodox Consciousness; PETR STRUVE, The Intelligentsia and the National Face; ANDREI BELY, Revolution and Culture; ALEKSANDR BLOK, Catiline; EVGENY TRUBETSKOI, The Bolshevist Utopia and the Religious Movement.
For millennia, messianic visions of redemption have inspired men and women to turn against unjust and oppressive orders. Yet these very same traditions are regularly decried as antecedents to the violent and authoritarian ideologies of modernity. Informed in equal parts by theology and historical theory, this book offers a provocative exploration of this double-edged legacy. Author Jayne Svenungsson rigorously pursues a middle path between utopian arrogance and an enervated postmodernism, assessing the impact of Jewish and Christian theologies of history on subsequent thinkers, and in the process identifying a web of spiritual and intellectual motifs extending from ancient Jewish prophets to contemporary radicals such as Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Zizek.
"For over four decades, Richard Schwartz has engaged with two ethically rich ways of living that, as he charts in this book, he came to appreciate in middle age: Judaism and veganism. Having been born into a secular Jewish family, it was his marriage and an increasing commitment to social justice that propelled him to study and rediscover the essence of his Jewish faith. That sense of social justice further raised his awareness of the environmental movement, and, ultimately, to animal rights and veganism. In Vegan Revolution: Saving Our World, Revitalizing Judaism, Schwartz shows how, now perhaps more than ever, veganism offers a pathway for all of us of whatever faith (or no faith) to reduce hunger, conserve the environment, save water, reinstitute justice, and care for animals and the Earth. It is no coincidence, as Schwartz demonstrates, that many of these ideas are mandates in Jewish scripture, and that reincorporating a care for the world (tikkun olam) can itself reinvigorate the spirit of a faith and galvanize its practitioners to act"--
In “And They Shall Be One Flesh”: On the Language of Mystical Union in Judaism, Adam Afterman offers an extensive study of mystical union and embodiment in Judaism. Afterman argues that Philo was the first to articulate the notion of unio mystica in Judaism and is the source of the henōsis mysticism in the later Neoplatonic tradition. The study provides a detailed analysis of the Jewish medieval trends that developed different forms of mystical union and mystical embodiment through the divine name and spirit. The book argues that the development of unitive mysticism in Judaism is the fruit of the creative synthesis of rabbinic Judaism and Hellenistic and Arab philosophy, and a natural outcome of the theological articulation of the idea of monotheism itself.