Sacred Writings category: 300 books

I have frequently been struck by the fact that the Psalms are difficult to read and understand. I am referring to the various existing translations into English. After joining a group that was studying the Psalms, I became so dismayed by the translations we were using that I decided to try my hand...

Beautifully illustrated tales of women from the Hebrew Bible with literary commentary by a renowned scholar Shimmering with gold and rich color, Debra Band's illuminated Hebrew/English paintings illustrate three biblical stories of women who stood up at crucial moments to take actions that not only...

The central element of Jewish worship is the yearly cycle of reading the first five books of the Bible, the Five Books of Moses, called the Torah in Hebrew. Torah Today, a compilation of fifty-four essays that grew out of Pinchas Peli's Torah column in the Jerusalem Post, comments upon the weekly readings...

Browse discussion questions Ruth Calderon has recently electrified the Jewish world with her teachings of talmudic texts. In this volume, her first to appear in English, she offers a fascinating window into some of the liveliest and most colorful stories in the Talmud. Calderon rewrites talmudic...

Often we find it difficult to concentrate on the prayers we recite, due partly to a lack of understanding of the biblical poetry in the tefillot. This book aims to unlock the mystery of the various psalms which comprise the tefillah. The book begins with an introduction to prayer, Tehillim, and biblical...

The discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls in the Judaean desert between 1947 and 1956 transformed our understanding of the Hebrew Bible, early Judaism and the origins of Christianity. These extraordinary manuscripts appear to have been hidden in the caves at Quumran by members of the Essene community,...

  Celebrate one of the world’s greatest collections of pure literature   In Hebrew, the word Torah means instruction, and throughout thousands of years this collection of writing has offered just that—instruction in the central beliefs of three world religions: Judaism,...

Why does the Torah begin with the letter beit, the second letter of the Hebrew alphabet? In seeking answers to this question, Michael J. Alter has gathered a wealth of material drawing from the Oral Law (Mishnah and Talmud), the Midrash, anonymous kabbalistic texts, and the works of many prominent rabbis, scribes, and writers spanning the past 2,000 years.

We now walk on the path of Zain, the 7th letter of the Hebrew alphabet which is associated with the sign of Gemini. It is the path that connects the second sphere of Binah to the 6th sphere of Tiphereth. Zain whose number is six has a symbol of the hexagram, the two interlace triangle of...

The newest book in Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg’s award-winning series of commentaries on the hebrew bible. The book of Numbers is the narrative of a great failure. What should have been for the Israelites a brief journey from Mount Sinai to the Holy Land becomes a forty-year death march. Both...

Illuminating the ethical legacy of the biblical prophets, Path of the Prophets identifies the prophetic moment in the lives of eighteen biblical figures and demonstrates their compelling relevance to us today. While the Bible almost exclusively names men as prophets, Rabbi Barry L. Schwartz...

In this now-classic work, E. P. Sanders argued against prevailing views regarding the Judaism of the Second Temple period, for example, that the Pharisees dominated Jewish Palestine or that the Mishnah offers a description of general practice. In contrast, Sanders carefully shows that what was important...

The Jewish prayer book, the siddur, nourishes a vibrant interface connecting the praying person, Jewish history and redemptive contemporary living. Long description: What is the mystery of the Jewish people? How has Jewish spirituality triumphed over times of persecution as well as the enticements...

For too many Jewish young people, bar/bat mitzvah has been the beginning of the end of their Jewish journeys. When students perceive the Torah as incomprehensible or irrelevant, many form the false impression that Judaism has nothing to say to them. Enter the game-changer: the JPS B’nai Mitzvah...