Overview

Drawing from both traditional and contemporary Jewish sources, this book explores Jewish life-cycle passages such as birth, bar/bat mitzvah, conversion, marriage, illness, and the end of life. Using profound insights, meditations and poetry on the events and rites that frame Jewish life, Rabbi Schulweis provides insight and a greater sense of the meaning behind these rites of passage. It is precisely these life-cycle events and the rituals that accompany them that help us connect to one another and to the Image of God within ourselves and others. Deals with the peaks and valleys of life Uses prose and poetic meditations Draws from both traditional and contemporary Jewish sources Rabbi Harold Schulweis is known and respected as one of modern Judaism's most significant and creative thinkers and authors. He is the senior rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, CA, and the founder of the Jewish Foundation of the Rescuers.

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9780807407646

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Throughout his life, Harold Schulweis has dared to speak truths no one else would acknowledge. Now he confronts the twin enemies of meaningful ritual: riteless passages and passageless rites. His solution is the passionate and profound celebration of the sacred in this moving book of poems, prayers, and meditations that reconnects us with the Image of God and thereby helps us find each other in the sacred moments that matter. -- Dr. Lawrence Hoffman, Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, New York This is a rich and exciting religious phenomenology of the different moments in a Jew's life when he acts out the tradition's symbolic drama. The rituals of birth, bar-mitzvot, weddings and burial are the shared symbolic language of the Jewish people. Schulweis offers one of the profound understandings of the human significance of this drama and enables the individual Jew to feel connected to community not out of guilt, not out of respect for tradition, but out of a deep inner yearning for human fulfillment. -- Rabbi David Hartman, The Shalom Hartman Institute, Jerusalem A splendid and luminous book! No one speaks to the mind and soul of the questing Jew as eloquently as Harold Schulweis. -- Rabbi Harold Kushner, Author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People

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