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HH: Rabbi Nachman of Breslov lived over 200 years ago. His great grandfather, the Baal Shem Tov had already brought radical reform and revitalization to the world and Judaism, but Rabbi Nachman did not suffice with this spiritual inheritance, rather he sought out anew the very core fundamental essence and source of existence with the Holy Merciful One G-d. Countless times, every single day, he would start completely new, throwing his complete devotion in seeking true life and bonding with the Creator. Although he was blessed with extraordinary brilliance and genius, he shunned sophistication and even put erudition second to prayer. He championed simple devotions, he prized heartfelt prayer a...
The Life of the Soul surveys the wide-ranging theories Jewish mystics have offered to the vexing question – what precisely transpires after we die? A common element in their theories is that human life is a part of a larger ecosystem of being which also includes plants, animals, and inanimate things, like rocks. They further maintained that the soul does not perish with the demise of the body, but is rather renewed and recycled into new forms of embodied existence in the lower world. Each essay highlights how reincarnation, also known as metempsychosis or the transmigration of souls, is not a marginalized concept but is instead central to understanding a variety of perplexing issues in Jud...
Rejoice in the stories of Rebbe Nachman of Breslov—for their insight into the human condition and the realm of the mysterious. When Rabbi Nachman first started telling his stories, he declared: "Now I am going to tell you stories." The reason he did so was because in generations so far from God the only remedy was to present the secrets of the Torah—including even the greatest of them—in the form of stories. —from the Preface For centuries, spiritual teachers have told stories to convey lessons about God and perceptions of the world around us. Hasidic master Rebbe Nachman of Breslov (1772–1810) perfected this teaching method through his engrossing and entertaining stories that are fast-moving, brilliantly structured, and filled with penetrating insights. This collection presents the wisdom of Rebbe Nachman, translated by Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan and accompanied by illuminating commentary drawn from the works of Rebbe Nachman's pupils. This important work brings you authentic interpretations of Rebbe Nachman’s stories, allowing you to experience the rich heritage of Torah and Kabbalah that underlies each word of his inspirational teachings.
HH “This is the gateway to G-d, the righteous come through (/with) it!” (Psalms 118:20). Many great and famous tzaddikim (righteous/saints) asserted that they did not attain their lofty standing, except through this practice of personal prayer and dialog conducted frequently and constantly with G-d, especially in seclusion (Likutay Moharan, vol. 2, Torah 25). Whether one is G-d forbid in the utter abyss of hell and still sinking, May the Holy Merciful One G-d save us, or soaring and aspiring towards the utmost holiness, his entire survival and success is contingent on the words he pours out to G-d. The words are the paradigm of the soul, their expression will be the soul's determination....
One of the most famous teachings of Rabbi Nachman is to find a good point and see everything through that vantage point. Rabbi Nachman assures that through this the good will reign supreme. It is the way of powerful encouragement and renewed inspiration, and it is the way to joy and song, and bringing rectification to the world (tikun olam). In this booklet I present the original teaching from Likutay Moharan, accompanied with notes, the events of the time of its revelation, much of the Breslov lore regarding this holy teaching, many excerpts from the awesome book Blossom of the Spring - letters written to the President of Israel, Mr. Zalman Shazar, and the special prayer by Rabbi Nussun in Likutay Tefilos to merit to fulfill this teaching. The translation is most precise, authentic, and loyal to the original texts. Also included is the booklet Rabbi Nachman of Breslov; Who He Was and What He Said, which includes a very user friendly phonetic Teekoon Haklalee - the general rectification revealed by Rabbi Nachman. Na Nach Nachma Nachman MeUman!
The second volume of Shmuel Feiner's The Jewish Eighteenth Century covers the period from 1750 to 1800, a time of even greater upheavals, tensions, and challenges. The changes that began to emerge at the beginning of the eighteenth century matured in the second half. Feiner explores how political considerations of the Jewish minority throughout Europe began to expand. From the "Jew Bill" of 1753 in Britain, to the surprising series of decrees issued by Joseph II of Austria that expanded tolerance in Austria, to the debate over emancipation in revolutionary France, the lives of the Jews of Europe became ever more intertwined with the political, social, economic, and cultural fabric of the continent. The Jewish Eighteenth Century, Volume 2: A European Biography, 1750–1800 concludes Feiner's landmark study of the history of Jewish populations in the period. By combining an examination of the broad and profound processes that changed the familiar world from the ground up with personal experiences of those who lived through them, it allows for a unique explanation of these momentous events.
To reference death as sleep is commonplace. Indeed, so usual is the use of the terminology of rest, repose, and slumber to denote the process of dying and, indeed, death itself, that such linguistic turns barely call attention to themselves at all: to wish aloud that a deceased individual rest in peace could hardly be more ordinary a prayer even for moderns little given to lyrical expression or to the use of metaphor in daily speech. But to approach the equation from the other direction—and so to assert that, no less than death is sleep, sleep is death, or at least death dialed down sufficiently to deprive it of its permanence and awful finality—is less common a thing to say...and it is even less common than that actually to believe. Indeed, although the Talmud, speaking with strange precision, asserted long centuries ago that sleep is precisely one-sixtieth of death, it is hard to find moderns who comfortably or naturally think of awakening from a night’s sleep as a kind of daily resurrection.1 Consider, for example, the undeservedly obscure prayer of Sir Thomas Browne, the seventeenth-century English polymath, who movingly wrote:
A contemporary guide for Jewish ethical behavior and moral living that explores subjects such as the appeal of evil, the value of good deeds, and the implications of gossip. Rabbis Olitzky and Sabath recommend actions that we can take to help strengthen and heal ourselves and our world.
Hasidism, Haskalah, Zionism reveals how political and literary dialogues and conflicts between the Hebrew literature of the Hasidism, the Jewish Enlightenment, and Zionism interacted with each other in the nineteenth century. Hannan Hever uses postcolonial theories and theories of nationality to analyze how Jews used literature to make sense of hostility directed toward Jews from their European "host" countries and to set forth their own ideas and preferences regarding their status, control, and treatment. In doing so, Hever theorizes the Enlightenment's intellectual aims and cultural influences, tracking how the models of integration crucial to Haskalah gave way to Jewish nationalism in the twentieth century. The readings in this book are theoretically informed, setting forward novel claims based on detailed textual analyses of hasidic tales, Haskalah satires, and Zionist narratives. Thus, this book tackles a major interpretative problem visible at the core of modern Hebrew literature--its radical difficulty in distinguishing between the theological components of modern Jewish discourse and its national identity.
Why do we think differently from one another? Why do religious people adhere to their faith even against reason, whilst atheist thinkers label it “nonsense”? Why do some judges turn more to moral values and others less? Why do we attach different meanings to the same words? These questions can be tackled on psychological or sociological levels, but we can also analyze the subjects on the epistemological level. That is the purpose of this book. Thoughts and Ways of Thinking offers Source Theory as a single explanation for epistemic processes and their religious, legal and linguistic derivatives. The idea is simple: our senses, our understanding, our memory, the testimonies that we trust, ...