Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook: A Guide to Understanding, Exploring and Living a Spiritual Life

What is "Jewish Spirituality"? How do I make it part of my life? Today's foremost spiritual leaders share their ideas and experience.

Whether you are just curious, intently searching for greater personal meaning, or actively seeking ideas, information, practices and inspiration to enrich your spiritual life, The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook is the ideal companion for your journey as it explores:

• Awakening the Possibilities: What Is Jewish Spirituality?
• The Worlds of Your Life: Where Is Spirituality Found?
• The Times and Seasons of Your Life: When Does Spirituality Enter?
• Swords and Plowshares: How to Forge the Tools that Will Make It Happen
• So What Do You Do With It? Why Spirituality Should Be Part of Your Life

Fifty of our foremost spiritual leaders invite you to explore every aspect of Jewish spirituality--God, community, prayer, liturgy, healing, meditation, mysticism, study, Jewish traditions, rituals, blessings, life passages, special days, the everyday, repairing the world and more--offering, in one place, everything you need to discover all the directions that Jewish spirituality can go and can take you.

Contributors:

Isa Aron - Miriam Carey Berkowitz - Ellen Bernstein - Sylvia Boorstein - Eugene B. Borowitz - Anne Brener - Norman J. Cohen - David A. Cooper - Avram Davis - Wayne Dosick - Edward Feld - Nancy Flam - Tamar Frankiel - Nan Fink Gefen - Neil Gillman - Elyse Goldstein - Arthur Green - Judy Greenfeld - David Hartman - Mark Hass - Lee Myerhoff Hendler - Lawrence A. Hoffman - Karyn D. Kedar - Lawrence Kushner - Jane Rachel Litman - Daniel C. Matt - Levi Meier - James L. Mirel - Rebbe Nachman of Breslov - Kerry M. Olitzky - Jonathan Omer-Man - Debra Orenstein - Daniel F. Polish - Jack Riemer - Debra Judith Robbins - Jeffrey K. Salkin - Sandy Eisenberg Sasso - Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi - Dannel I. Schwartz - Sharon L. Sobel - Rifat Sonsino - Elie Kaplan Spitz - Nathaniel Stampfer - Ira F. Stone - Leora Tanenbaum - Arthur Waskow - Karen Bonnell Werth - Ron Wolfson - David Zeller - Sheldon Zimmerman

The royalties from The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook are donated by the contributors and publisher to America's Jewish seminaries.

Neil Gillman, rabbi and PhD, is professor of Jewish philosophy at The Jewish Theological Seminary in New York, where he has served as chair of the Department of Jewish Philosophy and dean of the Rabbinical School. He is author of Believing and Its Tensions: A Personal Conversation about God, Torah, Suffering and Death in Jewish Thought; The Death of Death: Resurrection and Immortality in Jewish Thought, a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year"; The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism; The Jewish Approach to God: A Brief Introduction for Christians; Traces of God: Seeing God in Torah, History and Everyday Life (all Jewish Lights); and Sacred Fragments: Recovering Theology for the Modern Jew, winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein, one of the leading rabbis of a new generation, is director of Kolel: The Adult Center for Liberal Jewish Learning, a full-time progressive adult Jewish learning center. Goldstein lectures frequently throughout North America. She is also editor of The Women's Torah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Torah Portions; and The Women's Haftarah Commentary: New Insights from Women Rabbis on the 54 Weekly Haftarah Portions, the 5 Megillot and Special Shabbatot; and author of the award-winning New Jewish Feminism: Probing the Past, Forging the Future and ReVisions: Seeing Torah through a Feminist Lens (all Jewish Lights).

Rabbi Elyse Goldstein is available to speak on the following topics:

• Women and Judaism
• Reform Judaism
• Jewish Parenting
• General Judaica

Arthur Green, PhD, is recognized as one of the world's preeminent authorities on Jewish thought and spirituality. He is the Irving Brudnick professor of philosophy and religion at Hebrew College and rector of the Rabbinical School, which he founded in 2004. Professor emeritus at Brandeis University, he also taught at the University of Pennsylvania and the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, where he served as dean and president.

Dr. Green is author of several books including Ehyeh: A Kabbalah for Tomorrow; Seek My Face: A Jewish Mystical Theology; Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer; and Tormented Master: The Life and Spiritual Quest of Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav (all Jewish Lights). He is also author of Radical Judaism (Yale University Press) and co-editor of Speaking Torah: Spiritual Teachings from around the Maggid's Table. He is long associated with the Havurah movement and a neo-Hasidic approach to Judaism.

Judy Greenfeld, second invested cantor at Temple Emanuel in Beverly Hills, California. She leads the New Emanuel minyan, a weekly progressive prayer service.

A world-renowned philosopher and social activist, Dr. David Hartman (z"l) is the founder and president emeritus of the Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. Named after his late father, the Institute is dedicated to developing a new understanding of classical Judaism that provides moral and spiritual direction for Judaism's confrontation with modernity.

Presently professor emeritus at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, he received his rabbinic ordination from Yeshiva University's theological seminary in New York City. He is the author of many award-winning books, including A Living Covenant: The Innovative Spirit in Traditional Judaism (Jewish Lights) and Maimonides: Torah and Philosophic Quest, both winners of the National Jewish Book Award; A Heart of Many Rooms: Celebrating the Many Voices within Judaism (Jewish Lights), finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Publishers Weekly "Best Book of the Year"; and Love and Terror in the God Encounter: The Theological Legacy of Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik (Jewish Lights).