Conscious Community: A Guide to Inner Work

Rating:
Summary: good job on translation
Review: This book is a translaiton of a particularly challenging hebrew version. I am not certain how true the translation is to the author's original version, but I found the translation to be unusually lucid. Instead of losing the reader in the general difficulties associated with reading in translation, they packaged the words of the great Rabbi Shapira in a "new agey" relatable kind of lexicon. Most people are not aware that the Torah has expression as is described in this book.

Rating:
Summary: Graceful and inspiring
Review: This is Rabbi Andrea Cohen-Kiener's interpretive translation of a mid-20th century work found buried in the rubble of the Warsaw Ghetto. Reb Kalonymous Kalman Shapira, its author, came from a long line of distinguished Hassidic rabbis, and his writings show that he lived up to his birthright. Amid the degradation within the ghetto, he was able to write a manual for transforming one's emotions and perceptions to focus on the spiritual. Rabbi Cohen-Kiener's translation makes use of contemporary spiritual vocabulary (drawn in part from the Fourth Way tradition) to make Reb Kalman's thought accessible to a wider audience.