The Rituals & Practices of a Jewish Life: A Handbook for Personal Spiritual Renewal

Rating:
Summary: An easy-to-follow, step-by-step, guidebook
Review: Collaboratively compiled and edited by Rabbis Kerry Olitzky and Daniel Judson, The Rituals & Practices Of Jewish Life: A Handbook For Personal Spiritual Renewal is a straightforward and practical instructional guide to the origin, manner, and modern-day practice of ten areas of Jewish ritual: Upon Rising and Going to Bed; Covering the Head; Blessings throughout the Day; Daily Prayer; Tefillin; Tallit and Tallit Katan; Talmud Torah; The Continuum of Kashrut; Mikvah; and Entering Shabbot. Enhanced with an informative foreword by Vanessa L. Ochs, and illustrations by Joel Moskowitz, The Rituals & Practices Of Jewish Life is a useful and "user friendly", easy-to-follow, step-by-step, guidebook which is most especially recommended for readers who may have little to no understanding of the proper ritual performance and what it means, yet who want to incorporate more of the Jewish traditions into their daily lives.

Rating:
Summary: "Golden Bits and Pieces"
Review: If any book better documents the increasingly halachic turn of the liberal Jewish movements in Norht America, I would be hard pressed to find one. The editors, who also have written articles in the text, do an excellant job of providing, perhaps for the first time in a few decades, a guide to daily Jewish religious practice from a liberal, or more accurately, Reconstructionist, point of view. They include solid use of classical Jewish sources and a good basic bibliography with each section.

They discuss all the most important basic subjects, such as daily prayer, the rituals of laying on tallis, kippah and tefillin, daily Torah study, the Jewish dietary laws, use of the Ritual bath and the celebration of Shabbat. Equally critically, they talk about the psychology involved in these ritual observances, and their benefits from a spiritual point of view.
For anyone new to Jewish religious practice, this book is the place to start.

However, as with many books of this type, there is no effort made to show how the various practices so effectively described, fit into a more complete whole. While the authors and editors make repeated references to Jewish mysticism here and there, there is no even brief description of what it is, or how Jewish ritual serves as the foundation for Jewish mysticism. In addition, the authors stress psycological/spiritual benefits to Jewish practice, when there are those among us who have experienced many practical gains as well.

In order to find the connection between these practices and Judaism and its mysticism as a totality, the reader should combine reading the above work, with this writer's own critical description of Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, entitled "Jewish History and Divine Providence: Theodicy and the Oddyssey," available for purchase here on Amazon. This work, the only progressive, critical discussion of Jewish mysticism in English, unifies "The Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life" with their most potent rationale, and in history as well.