Patajali's Yogasutra is an ancient canonic Indian text composed in Sanskrit in the 3rd or 4th century. Belonging to a very different cultural milieu, this multi-layered text is philosophical, psychological and practical in nature. Offering a philosophical reading of Pata jali's Yogasutra, this book discusses themes such as freedom, self-identity, time and transcendence, and translation between languages, cultures and eras. Drawing substantially upon contemporary Indian materials, it discusses for the first time classical yoga as reflected upon by Daya Krishna (1924-2007) with constant reference to Krishna Chandra Bhattacharyya's (1875-1949) studies in yoga philosophy. The genuine attempt on behalf of these two original thinkers to engage philosophically with Patajala-yoga sets the tone of the textual exploration provided here. This book features a new annotated translation of the Yogasutra, and the author provides a useful background to the extensive Samkhya terminology employed by Patajali. Daniel Raveh also offers a close reflection of the very act of translation, and the book concludes with suggestions for further reading and a glossary of central notions.

The Koren Sacks Siddur is the first new Orthodox Hebrew/English siddur in a generation. The Siddur marks the culmination of years of rabbinic scholarship, exemplifies Koren's tradition of textual accuracy and intuitive graphic design, and offers an illuminating translation, introduction and commentary by one of the world's leading Jewish thinkers, Rabbi Sir Jonathan Sacks. Halakhic guides to daily, Shabbat, and holiday prayers supplement the traditional text. Prayers for the State of Israel, its soldiers, and national holidays, for the American government, upon the birth of a daughter and more reinforce the Siddur's contemporary relevance. A special Canadian Edition is the first to include prayers for the Canadian government within the body of the text.

Night of Beginnings is a groundbreaking new haggadah for the Passover seder from acclaimed poet, translator, and liturgist Marcia Falk, beautifully designed and illustrated with original color drawings by the author. Unlike both traditional and new haggadahs, which do not contain a full recounting of the biblical story, Night of Beginnings presents the Exodus narrative in its entirety, providing a direct connection to the ancient origins of the holiday. This retelling highlights the actions of its female characters, including Moshe's sister, Miriam; Pharaoh's daughter, who adopts the baby Moshe; and the midwives Shifrah and Pu'ah, who save the Hebrew male infants. Falk's revolutionary new blessings, in Hebrew and English, replace the traditional, patriarchal seder blessings, and her kavanot-meditative directions for prayer-introduce a genre new to the seder ritual. Poems, psalms, and songs are arranged to give structural coherence to the haggadah. A new commentary raises interpretive questions and invites us to bring personal reflections into the discussion. Like the author's widely acclaimed previous prayer books, The Book of Blessings and The Days Between, Falk's poetic blessings for the seder envision the divine as a Greater Whole of which we are an inseparable part. The inclusive language of Falk's blessings makes room for women to find and use their voices more full-throatedly than they were able to do with the male-centered prayers inherited from the early rabbis. Men, too, will encounter here a spiritually moving and thought-provoking experience.

The Return of the Absent Father offers a new reading of a chain of seven stories from tractate Ketubot in the Babylonian Talmud, in which sages abandon their homes, wives, and families and go away to the study house for long periods. Earlier interpretations have emphasized the tension between conjugal and scholarly desire as the key driving force in these stories. Haim Weiss and Shira Stav here reveal an additional layer of meaning to the father figure's role within the family structure. By shifting the spotlight from the couple to the drama of the father's relationship with his sons and daughters, they present a more complex tension between mundane domesticity and the sphere of spiritual learning represented by the study house. This coauthored book presents a dialogic encounter between Weiss, a scholar of rabbinic literature, and Stav, a scholar of modern Hebrew literary studies. Working together, they have produced a book resonant in its melding of the scholarly norms of rabbinics with a literary interpretation based in feminist and psychoanalytic theory.

An Invitation to Biblical Poetry is an accessibly written introduction to biblical poetry that emphasizes the aesthetic dimensions of poems and their openness to varieties of context. It demonstrates the irreducible complexity of poetry as a verbal art and considers the intellectual work poems accomplish as they offer aesthetic experiences to people who read or hear them. Chapters walk the reader through some of the diverse ways biblical poems are organized through techniques of voicing, lineation, and form, and describe how the poems' figures are both culturally and historically bound and always dependent on later reception. The discussions consider examples from different texts of the Bible, including poems inset in prose narratives, prophecies, psalms, and wisdom literature. Each chapter ends with a reading of a psalm that offers an acute example of the dimension under discussion. Students and general readers are invited to richer and deeper readings of ancient poems and the subjects, problems, and convictions that occupy their imagination.

This commentary on the Greek text of the Jewish-Hellenistic Sentences of Pseudo-Phocylides, a sapiential poem of the first century BCE or first century CE, offers a full treatment of its sources, structure, perspective, and purpose as well as a verse-by-verse translation and analysis. The Greek text is given in an appendix. The cross-cultural nature of these moral teachings is emphasized through extensive reference to Biblical, Hellenistic Jewish, and Greco-Roman comparative materials. Key Features First commentary on Pseudo-Phocylides in 20 years Standard reference work also for private libraries Third volume of the new series Commentaries on Early Jewish Literature (which also includes Allison: Testament of Abraham; Fitzmyer: Tobit)

The Quran teaches that "God does not change people's condition unless they change their inner selves. The change has to occur inside us first, in our beliefs and attitudes, only then can it be seen on the outside. It also teaches how we can change our inner selves and thus improve our circumstances.
This book brings together a number of verses from the Quran that teach methods of personal change. Each verse is accompanied by advice on how to use its wisdom in daily life. The principles of personal growth taught in the Quran are simple but they are amazingly powerful, and they can be used by anyone who wishes to transform his or her life from mediocre existence to fulfillment and achievement.
A sentence in the Quran is called an aya, or a sign. It is a sign pointing to a deep truth that we need to focus on, decipher and learn to use in our lives.
The essays in this book were used to teach the Quran at weekly meetings of Muslim Reform Movement in Brookville, New York, www.mrmo.org. Each provides personal tools on how to apply the aya's wisdom to uplift one's life.

New volume in the TNTC revision and replacement programme

This book opens windows onto various aspects of Jewish legal culture. Rather than taking a structural approach, and attempting to circumscribe and define 'every' element of Jewish law, Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture takes a dynamic and holistic approach, describing diverse manifestations of Jewish legal culture, and its general mind-set, without seeking to fit them into a single structure. Jewish legal culture spans two millennia, and evolved in geographic centers that were often very distant from one another both geographically and socio-culturally. It encompasses the Talmud and talmudic literature, the law codes, the rulings of rabbinical courts, the responsa literature, decisions taken by communal leaders, study of the law in talmudic academies, the local study hall, and the home. But Jewish legal culture reaches well beyond legal and quasi-legal institutions; it addresses, and is reflected in, every aspect of daily life, from meals and attire to interpersonal and communal relations. Windows onto Jewish Legal Culture gives the reader a taste of the tremendous weight of Jewish legal culture within Jewish life. Among the facets of Jewish legal culture explored are two of its most salient distinguishing features, namely, toleration and even encouragement of controversy, and a preference for formalistic formulations. These features are widely misunderstood, and Jewish legal culture is often parodied as hair-splitting argument for the sake of argument. In explaining the epistemic imperatives that motivate Jewish legal culture, however, this book paints a very different picture. Situational constraints and empirical considerations are shown to provide vital input into legal determinations at every level, and the legal process is revealed to be attentive to context and sensitive to cultural concerns.

Created in honor of the work of Professor Tova Forti, this collection considers the natural world in key wisdom books - Proverbs, Job and Qoheleth/Ecclesiastes, Ben Sira and Song of Songs/Solomon - and also examines particular animal and plant imagery in other texts in the Hebrew Bible. It crucially involves ancient Near Eastern parallels and like texts from the classical world, but also draws on rabbinic tradition and broader interpretative works, as well as different textual traditions such as the LXX and Qumran scrolls. Whilst the natural world, notably plants and animals, is a key uniting element, the human aspect is also crucial. To explore this, contributors also treat the wider concerns within wisdom literature on human beings in relation to their social context, and in comparison with neighbouring nations. They emphasize that the human, animal and plant worlds act together in synthesis, all enhanced and imbued by the world-view of wisdom literature.

In 1896, Rabbi Solomon Schechter of Cambridge University stepped into the attic of the Ben Ezra Synagogue in Cairo and there found the largest treasure trove of mediaeval and early manuscripts ever discovered. He had entered the synagogue's genizah - its repository for damaged and destroyed Jewish texts - which held nearly 300,000 individual documents, many of which were over 1,000 years old.