Judaism Books

Book SynopsisIn this unprecedented masterwork, The Scholar's Haggadah: Ashkenazic, Sephardic, and Oriental Versions, Heinrich Guggenheimer presents the first Haggadah to treat the texts of all Jewish groups on an equal footing and to use their divergences and concurrences as a key to the history of the text and an understanding of its development.

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Book SynopsisExplores the intriguing concept of reincarnation as taught by the masters of the "Kabbalah" and as analyzed by major Jewish thinkers throughout history.

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Book SynopsisReaders of this book will emerge with a new awareness of what we as Jews are doing when we pray, why we are doing it, how we are supposed to be affected by prayer, how the prayers came to be as they are today, and how they differ among the major movements of American Judaism. The traditional Jewish liturgy, if properly understood, is a deep and powerful technique for spiritual transformation. However, spiritual depth of prayer has been progressively reduced over the past 2000 years as the underlying currents of the Siddur, the Jewish prayerbook, have been lost to the majority of worshippers. This book explains the Jewish liturgy prayer by prayer, according to what, in the context of ancient and medieval Judaism, was its raison d''tre: a structure for transforming one''s mind and way of life. The author writes: The crisis Judaism now faces, while genuine, is due not to a lack of depth in the traditional Jewish prayer service, but to a profound and almost universal lack of understandin

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Book SynopsisHermann Cohen''s Religion of Reason, Out of the Sources of Judaism (first published in 1919) is widely taken to be the greatest work in Jewish philosophy and religious thought since Maimonides'' Guide to the Perplexed. It is at once a Jewish book and a philosophical one: Jewish because it takes its material from the literary tradition that extends from the bible to the rabbis to the great medieval philosophers; philosophical because it studies that material in order to construct a worldview that is rational in the broadest sense of the term. This edition reprints a 1972 introduction by Leo Strauss and includes an essay on the work by Steven Schwarzchild. A new introduction by Kenneth R. Seeskin situates Cohen''s masterwork in the history of modern philosophical and religious thought.

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Book SynopsisThis book brings together Jewish and Christian scholars engaged in fresh thinking about the relation of their respective covenant communities. Speaking theologically and ecumenically, the contributors introduce readers to current attempts to construct a Jewish theology of Christianity and a Christian theology of Judaism.

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