Jewish Renewal: A Path to Healing and TransformationIn Jewish Renewal, Lerner helps us reunderstand the classic Jewish texts, presents a startling new approach to God and prayer, and offers a masterly reinterpretation of Jewish history and destiny from the ancient world through the Holocaust and contemporary Israel. Finally, his book opens to us the process of Jewish renewal, which is today bringing thousands of Jews back to a Judaism that they are both discovering and helping create. Lerner maintains that there are two voices in the Torah that have contended with each other throughout Jewish history: the voice of accumulated pain and cruelty that is passed from generation to generation and that masquerades as a patriarchal god, and the voice of God, whose massage of healing and compassion insists the world can be fundamentally transformed. Neoconservatives and some right-wing Israelis have used the Holocaust to justify a Judaism that is cynically "realistic" and demeaning of non-Jews. But that tendency to do unto others what was done to us can be overcome, Lerner says, and Jewish renewal attunes us to the voice of God and strengthens our ability to recognize the image of the divine in every human being. Jewish Renewal is more than a rethinking of Judaism - it is also a concrete and empathic guide to building a spiritually rich Jewish life. Its ideas are at the vanguard of Jewish thought, but its style assumes no previous knowledge and thus makes it a perfect introduction to what is most exciting in Jewish thought. |
Contents
Why Jews Left Judaism | 1 |
PARTI The Metaphysics of Healing and Transformation | 21 |
Childhood | 39 |
Copyright | |
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Abraham Abraham Joshua Heschel accept actually allow Amalek anger anti-Semitism Arab B'Tselem bat mitzvah become celebration commitment compassion consciousness contemporary created cruelty culture deeply develop distortions dominated economic embody energy ethical and spiritual evil experience feel Force fundamental God's halakhic healing and repair hear Hebrew Holocaust human imagine individual insist Israel Israeli Jewish community Jewish history Jewish renewal Jewish tradition Jewish world Jewish-renewal communities Jews Judaism kashrut kind language liberation lives meaning Midrash mitzvot moral Moses movement neocons non-Jews one's oppression Orthodox ourselves pain Palestinians peace political poskim possible prayer prophets Purim rabbis reality recognize reject religion responsibility revolutionary ritual ruling elites secular seemed sense settlers Shabbat Shavuot social social-change society story struggle Sukkot synagogues Talmud texts tikkun tikkun olam tion Torah transcendence transformation understand universe voice women YHVH Zalman Schachter-Shalomi Zionists