[PDF] Tablets Shattered eBook

Author : Joshua Leifer
Publisher : Penguin
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 34,20 MB
Release : 2024-08-20
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0593187199

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From esteemed journalist Joshua Leifer, a definitive look at the history and future of American Jewish identity and community from the tipping point we are living in. Tablets Shattered is Joshua Leifer’s lively and personal history of the fractured American Jewish present. Formed in the middle decades of the twentieth century, the settled-upon pillars of American Jewish self-definition (Americanism, Zionism, and liberalism) have begun to collapse. The binding trauma of Holocaust memory grows ever-more attenuated; soon there will be no living survivors. After two millennia of Jewish life defined by diasporic existence, the majority of the world’s Jews will live in a sovereign Jewish state by 2050. Against the backdrop of national political crises, resurgent global antisemitism, and the horrors of the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza, Leifer provides an illuminating and meticulously reported map of contemporary Jewish life and a sober conjecture about its future. Leifer begins with the history of Jewish immigrants in America, starting with the arrival of his great-grandmother Bessie from a shtetl in Belarus and following each subsequent generation as it conformed to the prevailing codes of American Jewish life. He then reports on the state of today’s burning Jewish issues. We meet millennial Jewish racial justice organizers, Orthodox political activists, young liberal rabbis looking to “queer” the Torah through exegesis, Haredi men learning full-time at the world’s largest yeshiva, progressive anti-Zionists attempting to separate Judaism from nationalism, and right-wing Israeli public intellectuals beginning to imagine a future without American Jews. As it traverses today’s Jewish landscape through uncommon personal familiarity with the widest range of Jewish experience, Tablets Shattered also charts the universal quest to build enduring communities amid historical and political rupture.

Author : Rachel S. Mikvah
Publisher : Turner Publishing Company
Page : 183 pages
File Size : 40,2 MB
Release : 2012-12-06
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1580237029

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Let the Ten Commandments command your imagination ... and enrich your life. When the Holy One gave the Torah, no bird chirped, no fowl flew, no ox lowed, not one angel stirred its wing or sang its song. The sea did not roar, creatures did not speak—the whole world was hushed into breathless silence; it was then that the voice went forth: "I am the Lord your God..." —Exodus Rabba 29:9 Even people who claim not to be “religious” will generally maintain that they do observe the Ten Commandments. Why is it that these ten statements, thousands of years old, continue to have such a special hold on us? Here, twelve outstanding spiritual leaders from across the spectrum of Jewish thought bring us to the life and soul of the Ten Commandments' unusual power. In voices that are personal and diverse, they help us take a closer look at the ten utterances that not only touch every aspect of our lives, but also present each of us with a profound challenge. Contributors include: Eugene B. Borowitz • Leonard Fein • Nancy Fuchs-Kreimer • Laura Geller • Lawrence A. Hoffman • Menachem Kellner • Peter S. Knobel • Richard N. Levy • Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi • Levi Weiman-Kelman

Author : David Klinghoffer
Publisher : Image
Page : 258 pages
File Size : 49,39 MB
Release : 2007-08-21
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0385521898

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Is morality based on some essential truth or is it defined by society? In this highly original critique of American social mores and popular culture, David Klinghoffer argues that the Ten Commandments are essential to maintaining a morally healthy society. With the meticulousness of a scholar, he begins by excavating the meaning of the Commandments. Drawing on the millennia-old rabbinical work Mechilta, he explains that the Decalogue was written on two tablets to show that when a country neglects the Commandments written on the first tablet—those having to do with the relationship between God and people—the interpersonal relationships described on the second tablet suffer irreparable damage as well. Addressing such timely topics as the controversy over public displays of the Commandments and the battles over intelligent design, Klinghoffer demonstrates that Christians and Jews are united in their opposition to the pagan aspects of our culture. In the tradition of Hebrew prophets like Jeremiah and Isaiah, he describes our failings with humor and compassion but also with anger and disappointment. An unusual, incisive perspective on the role of religion in society, Shattered Tablets is sure to spark debate. In the end Klinghoffer argues that by shrugging off the Bible as a guide and turning toward secularism, America has created a crude, cruel, and dishonest national life.

Author : Charles S. Sherman
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 224 pages
File Size : 50,61 MB
Release : 2015-03-10
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1451656238

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"A wise, uplifting memoir about a rabbi's search for understanding and his discovery of hope and joy after his young son suffered a catastrophic brain-stem stroke that left him a quadriplegic and dependent on a ventilator for each breath."--Amazon.com.

Author : Jeffrey K. Salkin
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 180 pages
File Size : 21,15 MB
Release : 2022-05-17
Category : Religion
ISBN : 0827614330

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The story of Abraham smashing his father's idols might be the most important Jewish story ever told and the key to how Jews define themselves. In a work at once deeply erudite and wonderfully accessible, Rabbi Jeffrey K. Salkin conducts readers through the life and legacy of this powerful story and explains how it has shaped Jewish consciousness. Offering a radical view of Jewish existence, The Gods Are Broken! views the story of the young Abraham as the "primal trauma" of Jewish history, one critical to the development of a certain Jewish comfort with rebelliousness and one that, happening in every generation, has helped Jews develop a unique identity. Salkin shows how the story continues to reverberate through the ages, even in its connection to the phenomenon of anti-Semitism. Salkin's work--combining biblical texts, archaeology, rabbinic insights, Hasidic texts (some never before translated), philosophy, history, poetry, contemporary Jewish thought, sociology, and popular culture--is nothing less than a journey through two thousand years of Jewish life and intellectual endeavor.

Author : Karmen Mackendrick
Publisher : Fordham Univ Press
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 46,15 MB
Release : 2013
Category : Philosophy
ISBN : 0823242897

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Divine Enticement argues for a reconception of theology and it subject matter as modes of seduction, of both body and mind. Theological language as evocation opens onto rereadings of faith, sacrament, ethics, prayer and scripture. The conclusion argues for a sense of theology as calling upon infinite possibility.

Author : Abraham Joshua Heschel
Publisher : A&C Black
Page : 876 pages
File Size : 31,77 MB
Release : 2005-01-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9780826408020

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his most ambitious scholarly achievement, his three-volume study of Rabbinic Judaism, is only now appearing in English.

Author : Sue Levi Elwell
Publisher : Wipf and Stock Publishers
Page : 227 pages
File Size : 33,80 MB
Release : 2013-11-01
Category : Religion
ISBN : 1620320134

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"Chapters of the Heart: Jewish Women Sharing the Torah of Our Lives invites readers into the lives of twenty women for whom Jewish language and texts provide a lens for understanding their experiences. The authors don't just use religious words (texts, theologies, or liturgies) like a cookbook. Instead they serve readers something closer to a real meal, prepared with love and intention. Each essay shares one piece of its writer's heart, one chapter of experience as refracted through the author's particular Jewish optic. The authors write about being daughters, mothers, sisters, partners, lovers, and friends. They share their experiences of parenting, infertility, and abortion. One describes accompanying her young husband through his life-threatening illness. Another tells of her daughter's struggle with an eating disorder. Still another reflects on long decline of a parent with Alzheimer's. All these writers wrestle with Jewish texts while growing as rabbis, as feminists, and as interfaith leaders. They open their hearts and minds, telling when Jewish tradition has helped make meaning and, on occasion, when it has come up empty. The results are sometimes inspiring, sometimes provocative. Readers will find new insights into God, into Judaism, and into themselves. "

Author : J. Raven
Publisher : Springer
Page : 308 pages
File Size : 17,71 MB
Release : 2004-01-31
Category : History
ISBN : 0230524257

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This pioneering volume of essays explores the destruction of great libraries since ancient times and examines the intellectual, political and cultural consequences of loss. Fourteen original contributions, introduced by a major re-evaluative history of lost libraries, offer the first ever comparative discussion of the greatest catastrophes in book history from Mesopotamia and Alexandria to the dispersal of monastic and monarchical book collections, the Nazi destruction of Jewish libraries, and the recent horrifying pillage and burning of books in Tibet, Bosnia and Iraq.

Author : James L. Kugel
Publisher : BRILL
Page : 632 pages
File Size : 10,77 MB
Release : 2004
Category : Religion
ISBN : 9789004136304

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In this Festschrift, James Kugel's creative scholarship in biblical interpretation provides the inspiration for a wide-ranging collection of essays that treat the history of Jewish and Christian scriptural interpretation from antiquity to the present