This book is not just for Jewish people.It is for all people who would gain strength to heal and insightfrom the Jewish tradition.

Using a one-day-at-a-time monthly format, a spiritual leader who continues to reach out to addicted people, and all those seeking spiritual renewal, reflects on the rhythm of the Jewish calendar with recovering people and other teachers. Together they bring insight to recovery from addictions and compulsive behaviors of all kinds. This sensitive volume soars with the spirit of the Jewish soul and year. Its "exercises" help us move from thinking to doing.

A Probing and Powerful Look at the Role You Play
in Shaping Your Relationship with God

No matter how hard we look, the God of Israel cannot be seen. Looking is not seeing, and seeing God is not like seeing an apple. It is much more like making a medical diagnosis on the basis of looking at a complex set of symptoms. Each of the symptoms is a dot. We can look at the dots and still miss the pattern. from Part I

The Torah is replete with references to hearing God but precious few references to seeing God. Seeing is complicated. What we look for and see are traces of God s presence in the world and in history, but not God. In order to identify those traces as reflections of divine presence, we need to re-examine how we see, what we see, and how we interpret that information.

In this challenging and inspiring look at the dynamics of the religious experience, award-winning author and theologian Neil Gillman guides you into a new way of seeing the complex patterns in the Bible, history, and everyday experiences and helps you interpret what those patterns mean to you and your relationship with God.

Examining faith and doubt, revelation and law, suffering and redemption, Gillman candidly deconstructs familiar biblical moments in order to help you develop and refine your own spiritual vision, so that you are able to discern the presence of God in unanticipated ways."

A comprehensive, inspiring and fascinating discovery of what Jews believe about the Messiah and why you might believe in the Messiah, too.

"The conviction that the Messiah is coming is a promise of meaning. It is a source of consolation. It is a wellspring of creativity. It is a reconciliation between what is and what should be. And it is perhaps our most powerful statement of faith in God, in humanity and in ourselves." from Chapter 1, The Messiah Is Coming

The coming of the Messiah the promise of redemption is among Judaism's gifts to the world. But it is a gift about which the world knows so little. It has been overshadowed by Christian belief and teaching, and as a result its Jewish significance has been all but lost. To further complicate matters, Jewish messianic teaching is enthralling, compelling, challenging, exhilarating yet, up until now, woefully inaccessible. This book will change that.

Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman brings together, and to life, this three-thousand-year-old tradition as never before. Rather than simply reviewing the vast body of Jewish messianic literature, she explores an astonishing range of primary and secondary sources, explaining in an informative yet inspirational way these teachings significance for Jews of the past and infuses them with new meaning for the modern reader, both Jewish and non-Jewish."

A Revolution in Human Self-Understanding Is Underway
What Does It Mean for Religion and Our Belief in God?

The brain and consciousness are themselves awe-inspiring. So learning about them no more undermines religion than learning about how symphonies and paintings are crafted takes away from our appreciation of music and art. Science alone does not provide the ultimate answers or firmly rooted values for which we yearn. But religion alone does not have all the answers either. We are blessed, as moderns, with both.from the Introduction

This is a groundbreaking, accessible look at the implications of cognitive science for religion and theology, intended for laypeople. Avoiding neurological jargon and respectful to all faiths, it examines: Current theory on how our brains construct our world in order to guide us safely through life, creating and appreciating meaning as we go. What religious experience is as it plays out in our brains. How modern science challenges historic ideas about free will and undermines the religious concept of the soul as a meta-physical entity separable from the body. What cognitive science reveals about our need for community. Why we should be loyal to one faith if, in fact, all major religious traditions deal effectively with universal human needs.

A Probing and Powerful Look at the Role You Play
in Shaping Your Relationship with God

No matter how hard we look, the God of Israel cannot be seen. Looking is not seeing, and seeing God is not like seeing an apple. It is much more like making a medical diagnosis on the basis of looking at a complex set of symptoms. Each of the symptoms is a dot. We can look at the dots and still miss the pattern. from Part I

The Torah is replete with references to hearing God but precious few references to seeing God. Seeing is complicated. What we look for and see are traces of God s presence in the world and in history, but not God. In order to identify those traces as reflections of divine presence, we need to re-examine how we see, what we see, and how we interpret that information.

In this challenging and inspiring look at the dynamics of the religious experience, award-winning author and theologian Neil Gillman guides you into a new way of seeing the complex patterns in the Bible, history, and everyday experiences and helps you interpret what those patterns mean to you and your relationship with God.

Examining faith and doubt, revelation and law, suffering and redemption, Gillman candidly deconstructs familiar biblical moments in order to help you develop and refine your own spiritual vision, so that you are able to discern the presence of God in unanticipated ways."

An intimate and candid examination of the changing nature of belief and where it can lead us from the life experience of one of Judaism's leading thinkers.

For over five decades, Rabbi Neil Gillman has helped people think through the most challenging questions at the heart of being a believing religious person. In this intimate rethinking of his own theological journey he explores the changing nature of belief and the complexities of reconciling the intellectual, emotional and moral questions of his own searching mind and soul.If what we have in recognizing, speaking of and experiencing God is a wide-ranging treasury of humanly crafted metaphors, what, then, is the ultimate reality, the ultimate nature of God? What lies beyond the metaphors?If humanity was an active partner in revelation if the human community participated in what was revealed and gave it meaning what then should be the authority of Jewish law?How do we cope intellectually, emotionally and morally with suffering, the greatest challenge to our faith commitment, relationship with God and sense of a fundamentally ordered world?Death is inevitable but why is it built in as part of the total life experience?"

An Intellectually Rich and Challenging Exploration of Modern Jewish Theology

"How we deal with revelation determines how we handle the issue of authority in belief and practice. How we understand authority determines how we deal with the claims of the tradition on us; how we deal with those claims determines how we shape our own Judaism. That conclusion opens the gate to a reconsideration of all of Judaism's theology, in particular how we understand God, for God is at the heart of Torah." from the Introduction

With clarity and passion, award-winning teacher, author and theologian Neil Gillman captures the power of Jewish theological claims and reveals extraordinary insights into Jewish identity, the purpose of religion, and our relationship with God.

Drawing from Judaism s sacred texts as well as great thinkers such as Mordecai Kaplan, Abraham Joshua Heschel, and Paul Tillich, Gillman traces his theological journey over four decades of study, beginning with his own understanding of revelation. He explores the role of symbol and myth in our understanding of the nature of God and covenant. He examines the importance of community in both determining authority and sanctifying sacred space.

By charting the development of his own personal theology, Gillman explores the evolution of Jewish thought and its implications for modern Jewish religious identity today and in the future."

A window into the Jewish understanding of God throughout
history and today written especially for Christians.

In Jewish Scripture Christianity's foundation God's presence is everywhere: in nature, in history, and in the range of human experience. Yet the Torah, Maimonides, and 4,000 years of Jewish tradition all agree on one thing: that God is beyond any form of human comprehension. How, then can Judaism be so crowded with descriptions and images of God? And what can they mean to the ways Christians understand their own faith?

In this special book, Rabbi Neil Gillman guides you through these questions and the countless different ways the Jewish people have related to God, how each originated and what each may mean for you. Whether you are Christian, Muslim, or even Jewish, this nuts-and-bolts introduction will both answer your questions and stimulate new ones.

A theologian who writes as a great teacher, Gillman addresses the key concepts at the heart of Judaism s approach to God. From Ein Sof (Infinity) to Shekhinah (Presence), Gillman helps you understand what the search for knowing God itself says about Jewish tradition and how you can use the fundamentals of Judaism to strengthen, explore, and deepen your own spiritual foundations. God Is Echad (Unique) God Is Power God Is Person God Is Nice Sometimes God Is Not Nice Sometimes God Can Change God Creates God Reveals God Redeems

An accessible introduction to the Jewish understanding of God
throughout history and today.

The Way Into Encountering God in Judaism is an accessible introduction to the Jewish understanding of God throughout history and today."

The author of "The Death of Death, " a "Publishers Weekly" "Best Book of the Year, " explains how Jews have encountered God throughout Jewish history--and today--by exploring the many metaphors for God in the Jewish tradition, how they originated, and what they mean.

Does death end life, or is it the passage from one stage of life to another?

In "The Death of Death, " noted theologian Neil Gillman offers readers an original and compelling argument that Judaism, a religion often thought to pay little attention to the afterlife, not only presents us with rich ideas on this subject but delivers a deathblow to death itself.

Combining astute scholarship with keen historical, theological and liturgical insights, Gillman outlines the evolution of Jewish thought about bodily resurrection and spiritual immortality. Beginning with the near-silence of the Bible on the afterlife, he traces the development of these two doctrines through Jewish history. He also describes why today, somewhat surprisingly, more contemporary Jewish scholars including Gillman have unabashedly reaffirmed the notion of bodily resurrection.

In this innovative and personal synthesis, Gillman creates a strikingly modern statement on resurrection and immortality.

"The Death of Death" gives new and fascinating life to an ancient debate. This new work is an intellectual and spiritual milestone for all of us interested in the meaning of life, as well as the meaning of death.

This anthology of addresses and essays by former Jewish Theological Seminary Chancellor Gerson D. Cohen is written in a popular style and is intended for a wide audience. The pieces offer an overview of Gerson D. Cohen's thoughts on such topics as the centrality of religion to Judaism, eschatology, Jewish history in its cultural context, Jewish scholarship and Zionism. In the book's Foreword, Rabbi Gillman writes: "I envy the readers who will encounter Gerson Cohen for the first time through the pages of this book."

The modern Jew, living in a world of shattered beliefs and competing ideologies, is often confronted with questions of faith. Sacred Fragments is for those who still care enough to continue the struggle. In forthright, nontechnical language the author addresses the most difficult theological questions of our time and shows that there are still viable Jewish answers for even the greatest skeptics.