Judaism Study

The co-editors of Gnosis magazine explore the many esoteric traditions that Western culture has to offer. While terms from Eastern spiritual practices such as Zen, mantra, and karma have become part of our daily lexicon, the traditions of Western spirituality have been largely unexplored by people searching for non-mainstream routes to spiritual experience. But for those who identify with Western culture, Western religious traditions have their own wisdom teachings that are more suitable to their needs and expectations.

From one of our most trusted spiritual advisers, a thoughtful, illuminating guide to that most fascinating of biblical texts, the book of Job, and what it can teach us about living in a troubled world.

The similarities the Samaritan Pentateuch (SP) shares with the Dead Sea Scrolls (DSS), as well as many similarities with the Septuagint (LXX), challenge the longstanding view that the Samaritan Pentateuch is a later, borrowed, and altered form of the Masoretic Text (MT). The historical devaluation of the Samaritan Pentateuch requires reevaluation, based upon the contextual cohesiveness of the Samaritan Pentateuch, agreement with the most ancient texts of the DSS and LXX, and the uninterrupted and non-dispersed oral transmission of the Ancient Israelite Samaritans.

In How to Read the Bible, Harvard professor James Kugel leads the listener chapter by chapter through the "quiet revolution" of recent biblical scholarship, showing time and again how radically the interpretations of today''s researchers differ from what people have always thought.

If Jews and Christians both believe in the same God, why is there such division? Why is history littered with deathly accounts of this division, from the early Jewish persecution of Christians to the Crusades' slaughtering of Jews? The Lion of Judah unpacks the roots of this division, showing how jealousy, theology, the law, and the integration of Gentile believers into what was once a predominantly Jewish early church contributed to the schism. It then goes on to reveal how Jesus magnificently fulfilled every word in the Bible.

The first definitive biography of Moses Maimonides, one of the most influential intellects in all of human history, illuminates his life as a philosopher, physician, and lawgiver. Recalling such bestsellers as David McCullough's John Adams and Walter Isaacson's Einstein, Maimonides is a biography on a grand scale, brilliantly explicating one man's life against the background of his time.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award for History. This book discusses the troubling and possibly irreconcilable split between Jewish memory and Jewish historiography.

For centuries translations of the Bible have obscured our understanding and appreciation of the original text. Now And God Said provides listeners with an authoritative account of significant mistranslations and shows how new translation methods can give listeners their first glimpse into what the Bible really means.

Distinguished philosopher Hilary Putnam, who is also a practicing Jew, questions the thought of three major Jewish philosophers of the 20th century - Franz Rosenzweig, Martin Buber, and Emmanuel Levinas -- to help him reconcile the philosophical and religious sides of his life. An additional presence in the book is Ludwig Wittgenstein, who, although not a practicing Jew, thought about religion in ways that Putnam juxtaposes to the views of Rosenzweig, Buber, and Levinas.

In 2007, two Israeli news publications, Israel Today and News First Class, reported that the most famous rabbi in Israel's modern history, 108-year-old Yitzhak Kaduri, had left a cryptic death note revealing the name of the long-awaited Messiah. Within a year after the rabbi's death, the note was reported to have been verified as authentic by some of Kaduri's closest followers and then placed on Kaduri's own website (Kaduri.net).

This dynamic radical departure from traditional Kabbalah books takes you into the Tree of Life not as an observer but as an active participant who engages with its sephirot. Presenting dozens of rituals, meditations, memoirs, and hands-on activities, Falling Through the Tree of Life immerses you in living, breathing magic, transforming the Tree from a complex topic into an embodied dance of love and learning. No matter your experience level, author Jane Meredith helps you explore each sephira in depth and use its real-world lessons to grow your practice.

In Egypt to Canaan, John Ritchie traces the epic journey of the Israelites from their redemption by blood all the way to the promised land. These incidents in Israel's history are illustrative pictures, or "types" (in the book of Hebrews they are called patterns, figures, and shadows), from which God will teach us important spiritual lessons if we are willing to learn them.

Why has Christianity, a religion premised upon neighborly love, failed in its attempts to heal social divisions? In this ambitious and wide-ranging work, Willie James Jennings delves deep into the late medieval soil in which the modern Christian imagination grew, to reveal how Christianity's highly refined process of socialization has inadvertently created and maintained segregated societies.

Throughout the New Testament, the apostles draw on the book of Exodus as a book of types concerning the believers' corporate experience of God's salvation. Paul speaks of "our Passover, Christ" (1 Cor. 5:7). He says that Israel was "baptized...in the sea", that Israel ate the "same spiritual food", and that Israel "drank of a spiritual rock which followed them", which rock "was Christ" (1 Cor. 5:7; 10:2-4). The Lord Jesus similarly says that He is "the living bread which came down out of heaven", the fulfillment of the manna in the wilderness (John 6:51).

America's Book shows how the Bible decisively shaped American national history even as that history influenced the use of Scripture. It explores the rise of a strongly Protestant Bible civilization in the early United States that was then fractured by debates over slavery, contested by growing numbers of non-Protestant Americans, and torn apart by the Civil War.

Offering rare insights into this iconic and enduring book, Larrimore reveals how Job has come to be viewed as the Bible's answer to the problem of evil and the perennial question of why a God who supposedly loves justice permits bad things to happen to good people.

The JPS TANAKH: The Jewish Bible, audio version is a recorded version of the JPS TANAKH, the most widely read English translation of the Hebrew, or Jewish, Bible. Produced and recorded for The Jewish Publication Society (JPS) by The Jewish Braille Institute (JBI), this oimplete, unabridged audio version of the Book of Psalms features over four and a half hours of readings by seven narrators.

The Ten Commandments are the first direct communication between a people and God. Designed to elevate our lives above mere frantic, animal existence to the sublime levels humanity is capable of experiencing, they are the blueprint of God's expectations of us and his plan for a meaningful, just, loving, and holy life. Each commandment asserts a principle, and each principle is a moral focus point for real-life issues relating to God, family, sex, work, charity, property, speech, and thought.

Although most people acknowledge that Jesus was a first-century Jew, interpreters of the Gospels often present him as opposed to Jewish law and customs—especially when considering his numerous encounters with the ritually impure. Matthew Thiessen corrects this popular misconception by placing Jesus within the Judaism of his day. Thiessen demonstrates that the Gospel writers depict Jesus opposing ritual impurity itself, not the Jewish ritual purity system or the Jewish law.

At a moment when the world is asking, "Can the religions get along?" one figure stands out as the shared ancestor of Jews, Christians, and Muslims. One man holds the key to our deepest fears and our possible reconciliation. Abraham.