Create a meaningful and happy Hanukkah in your home with story, celebration, food and song.

This newly-designed, easy-to-use edition of a classic spiritual sourcebook offers updated information, more family ideas, and new resources for every aspect of your holiday celebration.

Information on every aspect of Hanukkah is covered, including: The story of Hanukkah Celebrating for families of every constellation Songs and prayers in English, Hebrew, and Yiddish (with clear transliterations) Recipes for traditional and modern Hanukkah foods December Dilemmas coping with other traditions celebrations Firsthand explanations and ideas from real-life families around America

Hands-on advice and practical suggestions invite families into Hanukkah s spirituality and joys, from the making of luscious latkes and Hanukkah crafts to the stories of the heroism and the miracle that are remembered every year with the lighting of the "hanukkiyah."

Celebrate the Mystery, Compassion Wonder and Beauty of Animals

Take a spiritual journey through this beautiful collection of blessings, prayers and meditations about the creatures, wild and tame, that inhabit our world. These moving contributions about all types of animals playful dogs and beloved cats, giant whales and powerful elephants, tiny insects and delicate birds are drawn from many faith traditions, including Native American, Christian, Muslim, Jewish, Hindu and Buddhist.

A special section also provides animal blessing ceremonies you can use to memorialize the loss of a companion animal, offer prayers for an animal suffering illness or injury or simply recognize the spiritual connection we create when we fully appreciate another member of God's creation.

Contributors include: Basho Elizabeth Barrett Browning Feng Chih James Dickey Meister Eckhart St. Francis of Assisi Joy Harjo Stanley Hauerwas Jane Hirshfield Galway Kinnell D. H. Lawrence John Muir Rumi Albert Schweitzer Rabindranath Tagore Evelyn Underhill Walt Whitman and many more"

With diverse and robust voices, women are reclaiming their place at the seder table. This complete sourcebook and guide shows you how to do it, too. For the first time, contemporary Jewish women's writings on the Passover seder are gathered in one comprehensive and compelling sourcebook an unprecedented and powerful resource for those planning a women s seder and those seeking to infuse their Passover celebration with the creative and courageous voices of Jewish women. Arranged according to the order of the seder, this practical guide gathers the voices of more than one hundred women in readings, personal and creative reflections, commentaries, blessings and ritual suggestions that can be incorporated into your Passover celebration as supplements to or substitutes for traditional passages of the haggadah. It also includes a detailed guide to planning a women s seder, based on information from successful seder organizers around the world. Whether you are organizing a women s seder in your community or planning a family seder in your home, this inspiring and accessible resource will help you take an active role in re-creating the educational and spiritual experience of Passover and in shaping Judaism s future. Contributors include: Dr. Rachel Adler Dr. Rebecca T. Alpert Rabbi Renni S. Altman Zoe Baird Dr. Evelyn Torton Beck Susan Berrin Senator Barbara Boxer Dr. Esther Broner Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin Tamara Cohen Anita Diamant Dr. Carol Diament Rabbi Sue Levi Elwell, PhD Eve Ensler Dr. Marcia Falk Merle Feld Rabbi Susan P. Fendrick Rabbi Tirzah Firestone Dr. Ellen Frankel Nan Fink Gefen Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb Dr. Susannah Heschel Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar Rabbi Naamah Kelman Naomi Klein Irena Klepfisz Maxine Kumin Rabbi Noa Rachel Kushner Rabbi Joy Levitt Hadassah Lieberman Ruth W. Messinger Dr. Faye Moskowitz Joan Nathan Dr. Alicia Suskin Ostriker Dr. Judith Plaskow Marge Piercy Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen Anne Roiphe Danya Ruttenberg Rabbi Sandy Eisenberg Sasso The Honorable Jan Schakowsky Rabbi Susan Schnur Rabbi Susan Silverman Dr. Ellen M. Umansky Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg Dr. Chava Weissler Cantor Lorel Zar-Kessler"

An accessible introduction to the concepts of Jewish mysticism, their religious
and spiritual significance, and how they relate to our lives.

"The Way Into Jewish Mystical Tradition" allows us to experience and understand mysticism s inexpressible reverence before the awe and mystery of creation, and celebrate this rich tradition s quest to transform our ordinary reality into holiness.

Many people are reluctant to approach prayer on a personal level, speaking directly to God, because we have never been encouraged to do so or are intimidated by the prospect of creating spontaneous prayer. But as we grow spiritually, it becomes clear that traditional or rote prayers are not sufficient to express the deepest longings and feelings of our connection with the Divine. Whatever your faith tradition, this unique and inspiring book helps you connect by giving you the tools you need to speak directly to God in prayer, without relying on traditional written prayers or formulas. Accessible and from a multifaith perspective, it distinguishes among prayer, contemplation, and meditation, and then encourages you to engage in various forms of prayer involving the spirit and the physical body. It draws on prayer practices from many different traditions and offers concrete suggestions and exercises for how to incorporate those practices into your own tradition on a regular basis.

An accessible introduction to the reasons for and the ways of Jewish prayer.

"The Way Into Jewish Prayer" helps us to explore the reasons for and the ways of Jewish prayer. It opens the door to 3,000 years of Jewish prayer, making available all you need to feel at home in the Jewish way of communicating with God.

Often when people have become alienated from their religious backgrounds, they access their traditions through lifecycle events such as marriage. At times, modern values such as gender equality may be at odds with some of the traditions; many of which have always been in a state of flux in relationship to changing social, economic and political realities. Traditional Jewish marriage is based on the man acquiring the woman, which has symbolic and actual ramifications. Grounded in the traditional texts yet accessible, this book shows how the marriage is an acquisition and contextualises the gender hierarchy of marriage within the rabbinic exclusion of women from Torah study, the highest cultural practice and women's exemption from positive commandments. Melanie Landau offers two alternative models of partnership that partially or fully bypass the non-reciprocity of traditional Jewish marriage and that have their basis in the ancient rabbinic texts.

Voices of the Ritual analyzes the revival of rituals performed at female saint shrines in the Middle East. In the midst of turbulent political contention over land and borders, Nurit Stadler shows, religious minorities lay claim to space through rituals enacted at sacred spaces in the Holy Land. Using ethnographic analysis, Stadler explores the rise of these rituals, their focus on the body, female materiality, and their place in the Israeli-Palestinian landscape. Stadler examines the varied features of the practice and implications of the rituals, looking at themes of femininity and material experience. She considers the role of the body in rituals that represent the act of birth or the circle of life and that aim to foster an intimate connection between the female saint and her worshippers. Stadler underscores the political, cultural, and spatial elements of this practice, bringing attention to how religious minorities (Jews, Christians, Muslims, and Druze, among others) have utilized these rituals to assert their right to the land. Voices of the Ritual offers a valuable assessment of religious ritual practice that encrypts female themes into a landscape that has historically been defined by war and conflict.

The 'Science of properties' represents a large and fascinating part of Arabic technical literature. The book of 'Isa ibn 'Ali (9th cent.) 'On the useful properties of animal parts' was the first of such compositions in Arabic. His author was a Syriac physician, disciple of Hunayn ibn Ishaq, who worked at the Abbasid court during the floruit of the translation movement. For the composition of his book, as a multilingual scholar, he collected many different antique and late antique sources. The structure of the text itself-a collection of recipes that favoured a fluid transmission-becomes here the key to a new formal analysis that oriented the editorial solutions as well. The 'Book on the useful properties of animal parts' is a new tile that the Arabic tradition offers to the larger mosaic representing the transfer of technical knowledge in pre-modern times. This text is an important passage in that process of acquisition and original elaboration of knowledge that characterized the early Abbasid period.

Different forms of religious worship and ritual are present throughout the development of human beings, from early stone-age ritual, nature religion and ancestor worship, to faiths from which Christianity and the Eucharist emerge. In this book, Bastiaan Baan traces the origins and metamorphosis of human religion in historical, theological and humanistic terms, examining its significance for human life on earth and in the spiritual world.

Each year, more than two million pilgrims from over 100 countries converge on the holy city of Mecca to reenact the ritual dramas that Muslims have been performing for centuries. Making the hajj is one of the most important duties in the life of a Muslim. The pilgrimage-and its impact on international politics-is enormous and growing every year, yet Westerners know virtually nothing about it. What is the hajj and what does it mean? Who are the hajjis? What do they do and say in Mecca and how do they interpret their experiences? Who runs the hajj and what are their political objectives? How does the hajj encourage international cooperation among Muslims and can it also promote harmony between Islam and the West? In Guests of God, Robert R. Bianchi seeks to answer these and many other questions. While it is first and foremost a religious festival, he shows, the hajj is also very much a political event. The Muslim world's leading multinational organization, the Organization of the Islamic Conference, has established the first international regime explicitly devoted to pilgrimage. Every large Muslim nation has developed a comprehensive hajj policy and a powerful bureaucracy to enforce it. Yet, Bianchi argues, no authority- secular or religious, national or international-can really control the hajj. Pilgrims believe that they are entitled to travel freely to Mecca as "Guests of God"-not as guests of any nation or organization that might wish to restrict or profit from their efforts to fulfill a fundamental religious obligation. Drawing on his personal experience as a pilgrim and a wealth of data gathered over the course of ten years of research, Bianchi has produced a fascinating look at the hajj filled with personal, candid stories from political and religious leaders and hajjis from all walks of life. A wide-ranging study of Islam, politics, and power, Guests of God is the most complete picture of the hajj available anywhere.

The Tibetan district of Tsari with its sacred snow-covered peak of Pure Crystal Mountain has long been a place of symbolic and ritual significance for Tibetan peoples. In this book, Toni Huber provides the first thorough study of a major Tibetan Buddhist pilgrimage center and cult mountain, and explores the esoteric and popular traditions of ritual there. The main focus is on the period of the 1940s and '50s, just prior to the 1959 Lhasa uprising and subsequent Tibetan diaspora into South Asia. Huber's work thus documents Tibetan life patterns and cultural traditions which have largely disappeared with the advent of Chinese colonial modernity in Tibet. In addition to the work's documentary content, Huber offers discussion and analysis of the construction and meaning of Tibetan cultural categories of space, place, and person, and the practice of ritual and organization of traditional society in relation to them.

The British explorer Sir Richard F. Burton (1821 90) was a colourful and often controversial character. A talented linguist and keen ethnologist, he worked in India during the 1840s as an interpreter and intelligence officer for General Sir Charles Napier, and published several books about his experiences in 1851 2. He first gained celebrity, however, for his adventurous 1853 trip to Mecca, under the disguise of a pilgrim, which is described in this lively three-volume publication (1855 6). Few Europeans had ever visited the Muslim holy places; one of them was John Lewis Burckhardt, whose 1829 account is also reissued in this series. Volume 2 of Burton's book vividly describes the heat and dangers of the journey to Medina, the behaviour and conversation of the pilgrims from many different tribes and nations, and the mosques, tombs and other sights of the bustling city, complete with traders and beggars.

Give the moms in your life a beautiful gift of encouragement, reassurance, and peace amidst uncertainty. Jesus Calling for Moms features 50 relevant devotions from Sarah Young's New York Times bestseller Jesus Calling®, to celebrate mothers and their love, comfort, and strength, offering timely, biblical truth.

With 50 selections, you'll find devotions that speak to:

• the power of love
• the gift of strength
• courage in any season
• trusting Him during challenging times
• God's guidance and comfort
• joyous reasons to celebrate mothers and motherhood

Whether a gift for your own mom or for a mom who means so much to you, this is ideal for Mother's Day, birthdays, Valentine's Day, and more. Jesus Callingfor Moms will be a cherished favorite for years to come.

Based on the best selling book It's a Mitzvah by Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson, Making a Difference presents both ethical and ritual mitzvot, such as Rodef Shalom, Tzedakah, Kashrut, and Tefillah, as well as practical and creative suggestions on how to observe them. Students study the wisdom of Jewish sacred texts and examine through a Jewish lens who they are, the kind of adults they want to become, and how the mitzvot can help them achieve their goals. Each chapter presents a mitzvah and includes the following writing activities: Self-Portrait (exploring the mitzvah in personal terms) You Don't Say (finding meaning in the wisdom of ancient and modern sages) It's a Dilemma (responses to real-life situations) Mitzvah Journal (a record of each teen's experience of observing the mitzvah) In addition, the book presents the stories of Jewish teens who have made a difference in their communities through mitzvah projects, such as spending a month teaching in Cuba's Jewish community and creating a mural in a children's hospital. The book uses the same dynamic graphics and layout that teens respond to in popular magazines and on websites. More than 130 photographs illustrate and enrich the text. Contents: Getting Connected Taking Action Tzedakah: Giving Justly Rodef Shalom: Peacemaking Shabbat: An Extraordinary Day Ahavat Tziyon: For the Love of Israel Bal Tashhit: Every Day Is Earth Day Kashrut: You Are What You Eat Sh'mirat Habriyut: Be Your Best Friend Bikkur Holim: Reach Out and Touch Someone Kibbud Av Va'em: The Most Difficult Mitzvah? Sh'mirat Halashon: Weigh Your Words Tefillah: An Open Line Talmud Torah: Learning Matters Going Forward Resources

The story of each holiday is presented along with the rituals symbols traditions and legends. Blessings and key vocabulary is taught.

Narasimha is one of the least studied major deities of Hinduism. Furthermore, there are limited studies of the history, thought, and literature of middle India. Lavanya Vemsani redresses this by exploring a range of primary sources, including classical Sanskrit texts (puranas and epics), and regional accounts (sthalapuranas), which include texts, artistic compositions, and oral folk stories in the regional languages of Telugu, Oriya, and Kannada. She also examines the historical context as well as contemporary practice. Moving beyond the stereotypical classifications applied to sources of Hinduism, this unique study dedicates chapters to each region of middle India bringing together literary, religious, and cultural practices to comprehensively understand the religion of Middle India (Madhya Desha). Incorporating lived religion and textual data, this book offers a rich contribution to Hindu studies and Indian studies in general, and Vaishnava Studies and regional Hinduism in particular.

Mecca is the heart of Islam. It is the birthplace of Muhammad, the direction towards which Muslims turn when they pray and the site of pilgrimage which annually draws some three million Muslims from all corners of the world. Yet Mecca's importance goes beyond religion. What happens in Mecca and how Muslims think about the political and cultural history of Mecca has had and continues to have a profound influence on world events to this day. In this captivating book, Ziauddin Sardar unravels the significance of Mecca. Tracing its history, from its origins as a 'barren valley' in the desert to its evolution as a trading town and sudden emergence as the religious centre of a world empire, Sardar examines the religious struggles and rebellions in Mecca that have powerfully shaped Muslim culture. Interweaving stories of his own pilgrimages to Mecca with those of others, Sardar offers a unique insight into not just the spiritual aspects of Mecca - the passion, ecstasy and longing it evokes - but also the conflict between heritage and modernity that has characterised its history. He unpeels the physical, social and cultural dimensions that have helped transform the city and also, though accounts of such Orientalist travellers as Richard Burton and Charles Doughty, the strange fascination that Mecca has long inspired in the Western imagination. And, ultimately, he explores what this tension could mean for Mecca's future. An illuminative, lyrical and witty blend of history, reportage and memoir, this outstanding book reflects all that is profound, enlightening and curious about one of the most important religious sites in the world.

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This book""examines the pilgrimages to China from Taiwan in the late 1980s and early 1990s and offers a wide-ranging account of urban planning statements, arguments about ritual propriety, and the material culture of pilgrimage. "Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China" argues that as Taiwanese pilgrims and their Chinese hosts translated values produced in ritual contexts into the terms of economic and political reform, they became complicit in a shared project of composing historical truth. With its attention to pilgrimages at a possible center of geopolitical conflict, "Taiwanese Pilgrimage to China" provides an account of how shared frameworks for action grow and advances anthropological understandings of conflict resolution.