Judaism

Daily Prayer
Talking to God: Personal Prayers for Times of Joy, Sadness, Struggle, and Celebration
by Naomi Levy
Daily prayer is the hardest form of prayer. It's natural to turn to God when things go wrong-when you are in pain or when you are frightened or depressed. It's easy to turn to God in times of joy-at a birth or a wedding, or on a holiday.

Free Will: The Price of Being Human
Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost
by Rabbi Balfour Brickner
Rational faith rests on the pillar of free will. Unless we are free to make choices in our lives, we are only puppets operating at the will of some other force, and we are not responsible for our behavior.

Scruples
Devil in the Details
by Jennifer Traig
My father and I were in the laundry room and we were having a crisis. It was the strangest thing, but I couldn't stop crying. And there were a few other weird things: I was wearing a yarmulke and a nightgown, for one, and then there were my hands, red

Fall
Living a Year of Kaddish: A Memoir
by Ari L. Goldman
The best-selling author of The Search for God at Harvard continues his spiritual quest in this heartfelt and poignant account of the year he spent saying kaddish for his father. The day after Ari Goldman celebrated his fiftieth birthday his father died of

New York City, July 13, 1999
Journey from the Land of No : A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
by Roya Hakakian
In Journey from the Land of No Roya Hakakian recalls her childhood and adolescence in prerevolutionary Iran with candor and verve. The result is a beautifully written coming-of-age story about one deeply intelligent and perceptive girl's attempt to find

Judaism
by Israel Abrahams, M.A.
The aim of this little book is to present in brief outline some of the leading conceptions of the religion familiar since the Christian Era under the name Judaism. The word 'Judaism' occurs for the first time at about 100 B.C., in the Graeco-Jewish

Family
The Ten Commandments of Character: Essential Advice for Living an Honorable, Ethical, Honest Life
by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
Dear Joseph, My boyfriend is a Catholic, and I am a Buddhist. To me, this is absolutely no problem. Recently, however, he told me that we cannot get married unless I get baptized. I am more than willing to do so, but isn't that hypocritical?

The Partnership
Finding God in the Garden: Backyard Reflections on Life, Love, and Compost
by Rabbi Balfour Brickner
One of Judaism's more audacious theological principles is that God and humanity need each other to complete the creative process. It is an empowering thought. Instead of seeing ourselves as yet another life form to be redeemed by some other

The Treasure in the Oven
Be Still and Get Going: A Jewish Meditation Practice for Real Life
by Rabbi Alan Lew
For the past ten years, Rabbi Alan Lew has been teaching his congregation how two ancient traditions - classical Jewish writings and Zen meditation - can shed light on each other in electrifying ways.

Psychology and Spirituality: The Bridge
Connecting to God
by Rabbi Abner Weiss, Ph.D.
A century of clinical psychology has made therapy a household concept in the Western world. More people than ever before have experienced psychotherapy. More methods for achieving psychological well-being are available.

The Blessing of Acceptance: Discovering Your Unique and Ordinary Child
The Blessing of a Skinned Knee
by Wendy Mogel, Ph.D.
I recently read a third-grade school newsletter that used the word special five times on two pages. The Thanksgiving Sing was special. So was the Spellathon. The Emerging Artists exhibition was special.

Day 1, Day 3
The Book of Jewish Values: A Day-by-Day Guide to Ethical Living
by Rabbi Joseph Telushkin
Sunday. On Hearing a Siren. What is your reaction when you are talking with a friend and your conversation is suddenly interrupted by the piercing wail of an ambulance siren? Is it pure sympathy for the person inside - or about to be picked up by

The Man Who Dared to Dream
Overcoming Life's Disappointments
by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner
From Harold S. Kushner, the author of When Bad Things Happen to Good People, a book that shows us how to be our best selves even when things don't turn out as we had hoped - that is, how we can overcome life's disappointments.

The Soul Stretches Out to Contain Itself
This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation
by Rabbi Alan Lew
There are times in life when we are caught utterly unprepared: a death in the family, the end of a relationship, a health crisis. These are the times when the solid ground we thought we stood on disappears beneath our feet, leaving us reeling

Who Are the Jews and Why Are They Still Here?
Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.
Other people have suffered greatly; others have survived. But the Jews seem to garner a kind of attention focused on no other people. They may be unique in their accomplishments and so have often been targets of envy.

Who Are the Jews, Part 3
Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.
At seventeen, in the throes of the sixties, I may have thought that both sectarianism and God were on the way out, but at thirty I knew better. At thirty-two, when my first child was born, I was ready for some kind of Jewish reawakening.

His Voice
The New Rabbi
by Stephen Fried
The center of this compelling chronicle is Har Zion Temple on Philadelphia's Main Line, which for the last seventy-five years has been one of the largest and most influential congregations in America.

Genesis
Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.
Whatever else we may or may not know about the Jews, it is likely that in their earliest generations as an identifiable people, they were already telling this story. By the time they had really become Jews they had written it down, and the pale

Genesis, Part 5
Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.
Now consider the saga on its merits for a moment, as if there were no archeology or history and the Bible did in fact reveal a word-for-word truth. According to Torah, the first Jew, Abraham, was a wandering Aramean, a tribal chieftain who rebelled

Who Are the Jews, Part 2
Unsettled; An Anthropology of the Jews
by Melvin Konner, Ph.D., M.D.
Greek culture was more tempting than Babylon's, and the spectrum of adaptations from isolation to apostasy set the precedent for all future Jewish cultural encounters. But Greek anti-Semitism set limits on assimilation, and rabbinical Judaism was born.