This volume examines the spiritual shortfalls of our current healing environment and explores how midrash can help you see beyond the physical aspects of healing to tune in to your spiritual source.

This is a translation of the 1911 Biblisch-Talmudiesche Medizin , an extensively researched text that gathers the medical and hygienic references found in the Jewish sacred, historical, and legal literatures, written by German physician and scholar Julius Preuss (1861-1913).

Judaism itself is a language, a group's way of expressing beliefs, longings, aspirations and dreams. The vocabulary of Jewish life is the framework that Jews use to hand their past down to their children. It is, also, the vocabulary that people of other faiths need to know to understand Judaism and Jewish life. In this revised edition of the ultimate Jewish primer, one of the greatest spiritual teachers of our time takes readers on a historical and spiritual journey through Judaism.

Where Judaism and health intersect, healing may begin. Essential reading for people interested in the Jewish healing, spirituality and spiritual direction movements, this groundbreaking volume explores the Jewish tradition for comfort in times of illness and Judaism’s perspectives on the inevitable suffering with which we live. Pushing the boundaries of Jewish knowledge, scholars, teachers, artists and activists examine the aspects of our mortality and the important distinctions between curing and healing. Topics discussed include: The Importance of the Individual Health and Healing among the Mystics Hope and the Hebrew Bible From Disability to Enablement Overcoming Stigma Jewish Bioethics Drawing from literature, personal experience, and the foundational texts of Judaism, these celebrated thinkers show us that healing is an idea that can both soften us so that we are open to inspiration as well as toughen us—like good scar tissue—in order to live with the consequences of being human.

For people who don't believe that God can intervene in our lives, and why Judaism is still important. "Judaism has so much to teach us about how we treat ourselves, each other, and our planet.... Of course, you can learn these values elsewhere. But as a people, Jews have thousands of years of experience turning this kind of stuff over and over. [We’ve] had millions of users working to debug the system. Rather than look to other sources for guidance, let us turn to our own people’s past to discover what it has to say about our present and our future." —from the Introduction For some people, the biggest stumbling block in religion is God—even for an ordained rabbi who admits her rational mind “can’t buy into a God in the sky who writes down our deeds and rewards and punishes us accordingly.” But not being sold on an intervening God shouldn’t bar you from living a vibrant and fulfilling Jewish life. The God concept has seen many upgrades over the centuries and it is these reinterpretations that have kept Judaism relevant. In this provocative look at the ways in which God concepts have evolved and been upgraded through the centuries, Adventure Rabbi Jamie Korngold examines how our changing ideas of God have shaped every aspect of Judaism. With enthusiasm and humor, she shows that by aligning our understanding of God with modern sensibilities, Judaism can be made more meaningful, accessible and fully compatible with twenty-first-century life.

This volume is a festschrift in honor of Steven Fraade, the Mark Taper Professor of the History of Judaism at Yale University. The contributions to the volume, written by colleagues and former students of Professor Fraade, reflect many of his scholarly interests. The scholarly credentials of the contributors are exceedingly high. The volume is divided into three sections, one on Second Temple literature and its afterlife, a second on rabbinic literature and rabbinic history, and a third on prayer and the ancient synagogue. Contributors are Alan Applebaum, Joshua Burns , Elizabeth Shanks Alexander , Chaya Halberstam , John J. Collins, Marc Bregman, Aharon Shemesh, Ishay Rosen-Zvi, Vered Noam, Robert Brody, Albert Baumgarten, Marc Hirshman, Moshe Bar-Asher, Aaron Amit, Yose Yahalom, Lee Levine, Jan Joosten, Daniel Boyarin, Charlotte Hempel, David Stern, Beth Berkowitz, Azzan Yadin, Joshua Levinson, Elitzur Bar-Asher Siegal, Michal Bar-Asher Siegal, Tzvi Novick, Devora Diamant, Richard Kalmin, Carol Bakhos, Judith Hauptman, Jeff Rubenstein, Martha Himmelfarb, Stuart Miller, Esther Chazon, James Kugel, Chaim Milikowsky, Maren Niehoff, Peter Schaefer, and Adiel Schremer.

An eminent authority on the Talmud offers here an analysis of classical rabbinic texts that illuminates the nature of Midrash, Mishnah, and Gemara, and highlights a fundamental characteristic of Jewish law. Midrash is firmly based on—draws its support from—Scripture. It thus projects the idea that law must be justified. The concept, David Weiss Halivni demonstrates, is at the heart of Jewish law and can be traced from the Bible (especially evident in Deuteronomy) through the classical commentaries of the Talmud. Only Mishnah is—like other ancient Near Eastern law—apodictic, recognizing no need for justification. But Midrash existed before Mishnah and its law served as grounding for the non-justificatory Mishnaic texts. Indeed, Halivni argues, Mishnah was a deviant form and consequently short-lived and never successfully revived, a response to particular religious and political conditions after the destruction of the Temple in 70 CE. He chronicles the persistence of justificatory Midrash, the culmination of its development in Gemara in the fifth and sixth centuries, and its continuation down through the ages. David Weiss Halivni has given us a lucid and compelling picture of the several modes of rabbinic learning and disputation and their historical relation to one another.

In the incomparable manner of his award-winning "The Book of Letters: A Mystical Alphabet", Kushner now lifts up and shakes the dust off 30 primary religious words used to describe the spiritual dimension of our lives.

How encounters with the Roman Empire compelled the Jews of antiquity to rethink their conceptions of Israel and the Torah Throughout their history, Jews have lived under a succession of imperial powers, from Assyria and Babylonia to Persia and the Hellenistic kingdoms. Jews and Their Roman Rivals shows how the Roman Empire posed a unique challenge to Jewish thinkers such as Philo, Josephus, and the Palestinian rabbis, who both resisted and internalized Roman standards and imperial ideology. Katell Berthelot traces how, long before the empire became Christian, Jews came to perceive Israel and Rome as rivals competing for supremacy. Both considered their laws to be the most perfect ever written, and both believed they were a most pious people who had been entrusted with a divine mission to bring order and peace to the world. Berthelot argues that the rabbinic identification of Rome with Esau, Israel's twin brother, reflected this sense of rivalry. She discusses how this challenge transformed ancient Jewish ideas about military power and the use of force, law and jurisdiction, and membership in the people of Israel. Berthelot argues that Jewish thinkers imitated the Romans in some cases and proposed competing models in others. Shedding new light on Jewish thought in antiquity, Jews and Their Roman Rivals reveals how Jewish encounters with pagan Rome gave rise to crucial evolutions in the ways Jews conceptualized the Torah and conversion to Judaism.

Rabbinic midrash included Egyptian religious concepts. These textual images are compared to Egyptian culture. Midrash is analyzed from a cross-cultural perspective utilizing insights from the discipline of Egyptology. Egyptian textual icons in rabbinic texts are analyzed in their Egyptian context. Rabbinic knowledge concerning Egypt included: Alexandrian teachers are mentioned in rabbinic texts; Rabbis traveled to Alexandria; Alexandrian Jews traveled to Israel; trade relations existed; Egyptian, as well as Roman and Byzantine, artifacts relating to Egypt. Egyptian elements in the rabbinic discourse: the Nile inundation, the Greco-Roman Nile god, festivals, mummy portraits, funeral customs, language, Pharaohs, Cleopatra VII, magic, the gods Isis and Serapis. The hermeneutical role of Egyptian cultural icons in midrash is explored. Methods applied: comparative literature; semiotics; notions of time and space; the dialectical model of Theodor Adorno; theories of cultural identity by Jürgen Habermas; iconography (Mary Hamer); landscape theory; embodied fragments of memory (Jan Assmann).