Powerfully and beautifully portrays a bygone Jewish culture.
The story about the life of the Jews in Eastern Europe which has come to an end in our days is what I have tried to tell in this essay. I have not talked about their books, their art or institutions, but about their daily life, about their habits and customs, about their attitudes toward the basic things in life, about the scale of values which directed their aspirations
.
"In this period our people attained the highest degree of inwardness
. It was the golden period in Jewish history, in the history of the Jewish soul."
from The Earth Is the Lord's
Blends history, theology, anthropology and spirituality to powerfully and beautifully portray the bygone era of Eastern European Jewish culture, which Abraham Joshua Heschel describes as "the golden period in the history of the Jewish soul."
Recenzijas
"Dr. Heschel re-creates the mind and character of a whole people and of an entire era. Not only Jews, but all who regard the culture of the inner life as important will find this book moving and meaningful." Virginia Kirkus
Dr. Heschel admirably succeeds in conveying much of the inner content and the glory of traditional Jewish culture as it grew and throbbed in the towns and villages of Central and Eastern Europe. In few and eloquent pages the world can learn what it has lost. Marvin Lowenthal, New York Herald Tribune Book Review
I do not know of any work in which the spiritual life of Eastern European Jewry is portrayed with such complete understanding and thorough appreciation. Dr. Louis Finkelstein
There are few books in English that plunge us so deeply into the depths of Jewish reality. Irving Kristol, Commentary
Preface
The Sigh
"With All Thy Heart"
The Two Great
For the People
The Luxuries of Learning
Pilpul
A World of Palimpsests
The Deed Sings
The Devout Men of Ashkenaz
Kabbalah
Hasidim
"Love the Wicked"
Thirty-six Zaddikim
"Guard My Tongue from Evil"
The Untold Story
Abraham Joshua Heschel was born in Poland in 1907, received his early education from a yeshiva (a school for Talmudic or rabbinical study) and earned his doctorate from the University of Berlin. In 1939, six weeks before the Nazi invasion of Poland, he left for London and then for the United States, where he taught at the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York City from 1945 until his death in 1972. An activist as well as a scholar and a teacher, Heschel was deeply engaged in social movements for peace, civil rights and interfaith understanding.
