Recommended Reading

Books

(13 April 1999)

This is a very preliminary list of recommended reading. Right now, it reflects my own interests in trying to gain an organic, unified intellectually rigorous and sophisiticated understanding of the world through our Torah tradition. I hope to add greatly to this, as well as include the recommendations of future rabbis and teachers on this site. Rabbi Harry Zeitlin

 

Contemporary

Marc-Alain Ouaknin, The Burnt Book

Emanuel Levinas, Beyond the Verse and Nine Talmudic Readings

Aryeh Kaplan, Jewish Meditation

Tsvi Kolitz, The Teacher

Jon Levenson, The Death and Resurrection of the Beloved Son and Creation and the Persistence of Evil

Adin Steinsaltz, The Thirteen-Petalled Rose

Aviva Gottlieb Zornberg, Genesis: The Beginning of Desire

Andre Neher, They Made Their Souls Anew

Anita Diamant, Saying Kaddish

Leon Wieseltier, Kaddish

Ted Falcon, AJourney of Awakening, 49 Steps from Enslavement to Freedom

Irving (Yitz) Greenberg, The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays

Zalman Shachter-Shalomi, Paradigm Shift

Traditional

Ramchal (Rabbi Moshe Chaim Luzatto), Derech Hashem (The Way of God)

Pinhas Kehati, The Kehati Mishna

Adin Steinsaltz, The Talmud, Steinsaltz Edition

Aryeh Kaplan, The Living Bible

Kalman Kalonymus Shapira - The Piazetzner Rebbe, Chovat Hatalmidim (The Student's Obligation) and Bnei Machshava Tova (Concious Community).

Siduro Shel Shabbat

Be'er Mayim Chayim

Maor Eynayim

Pela Yoetz

Netivot Shalom

Jewish (non-religious i.e. novels, etc.)

Anita Diamant, The Red Tent

Steve Stern, Wedding Jester , A Plague of Dreamers and Lazar Malkin Enters Heaven

Secular

M. Mitchell Waldrop, Complexity: The Emerging Science at the Edge of Order and Chaos

Richard Feynmann, The Feynmann Lectures in Physics

Werner Heisenberg, Physics and Philosophy

Connie Willis, Bellwether

Marlo Morgan, Mutant Message Down Under

Ken Wilber, A Brief History of Everything, The Marriage of Sense and Soul, No Boundaries, A Theory of Everything

James Austin, Zen and the Brain

Ernest Kurtz and Katherine Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection

 

I highly recommend traditional talmud study (the Kehati and the Steinsaltz are the best contemporary editions available in English) in order to develop a contemporary understanding of structures and reasoning styles of Jewish thought. Studies of Tanach is also essential. The Living Bible, the translation by Aryeh Kaplan, is excellent. Nothing can substitute, however, for a living teacher.


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Date Last Modified: 19/9/99

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