If you think "Torah doesn't relate to me or contemporary life", read this book!

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	• Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land Rabbi Shefa Gold Ben Yehuda Press, 2006 - 244 pages average customer review:based on 4 reviews view larger image
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If you think "Torah doesn't relate to me or contemporary life", read this book!

I am amazed at how perceptive,thought provoking and user friendly this book is. If you or someone you know thinks Judaism and Torah are outdated & don't relate to contemporary life, then this book is just what you (or they) need to read. It makes the Torah accessable, understandable and relevant. Finally, it also connects to spiritual aspects of Judaism and shows how all these things can come together in today's world and life.

Fantastic Journeys Through the Old Testament

Anyone who has ever wanted to read the Old Testament but found it too difficult to understand or to apply to will discover Rabbi Shefa Gold's new book, Torah Journeys, the perfect tool for comprehending and using the messages hidden there. Her book provides a portal from a surface reading into the deeper significance of the stories and their relevance to our lives today.

The Old Testament, also called the Five Books of Moses, the Bible or the Torah, is read by many religions. Although written from a Jewish perspective and set up to be used as a guide to the weekly Torah portions traditionally read by Jews, Torah Journeys easily can be used by Jew and non-Jew alike to make their reading of this holy text a fulfilling experience. Rabbi Gold has a unique ability to get to the core of a portion and to make it applicable to our lives here and now. Beginning readers of the Torah often complain that the stories within its pages seem removed from modern life. They tend to ask, "What does this have to do with me, now?" Rabbi Gold points them towards the answer to this question with insightful interpretations and useful suggestions on how to use the text in a personal context. For each parsha (portion), Rabbi Gold offers readers the chance to glean both the blessing and the challenge of the text as well as a practice to apply the lesson in a concrete manner. The practices range from meditations to visualizations to chants, all of which are meant to foster spiritual and transformative experiences.

I often have perused Rabbi Gold's website to glean insight into Torah portions. Now, I use her book, a more detailed version of her website information, as a handy guide. I also have had the pleasure and honor of knowing Rabbi Gold, an approachable and inspirational teacher and leader, for several years. She has helped me create Shabbat services based on her lovely chants, offered me insights into subjects I am researching and taught me about chant and meditation. Thus, I can personally recommend her work. So, if you want to bring the Old Testament to life in your own life, read Torah Journeys. In its pages Rabbi Gold shares her wide range of knowledge of Judaism, Torah and other religious and spiritual traditions as well as her insightful and practical approach to Bible study.

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How the Torah text reflects the text of our own lives

For about two decades, Rabbi Gold has been gifting the world with memorable sacred songs and chants. This is her first book, and it's been worth waiting for. In it, she relates to Torah with the same artistic sensibilities that have infused her music. She has a gift for articulating inner conversations, giving voice to the Work of being true to one's highest self. Perhaps this is why the prose is relatively vivid for a book dealing with Torah, and why it excels in its genre.

This book looks unblinkingly at Torah through the eyes of an earnest and experienced traveler on spiritual paths. She does not set herself up as a guru telling us what to think; rather, she models for us a process of textual encounter and introspection that we can make our own. With the highest respect for Torah and with a straightforward style that is never preachy, she shows us how to employ the biblical text as a mirror that we can turn on our inner selves, to help us see more clearly what we sometimes hide from our own view.

Many urbane, contemporary Jews find certain parts of the Torah boring, unredeemably sexist, or otherwise primitive; it is most instructive to see what Rabbi Gold makes of those aspects: she challenges herself to embrace all of Torah, to read it in such a way that makes the text sacred to her. One anecdote that she relates (p. 18) sums up well the noble goal of this book. One afternoon, she was describing to a friend what the ongoing discipline of writing this book was like: "You can't sit back and criticize . . . what you don't like in the Torah. Instead, you must search for those same difficulties in yourself and then engage in a process of healing and purification. Instead of blaming, you have to take responsibility." And as she was expounding thus, she heard "a voice speaking every so gently yet firmly" in her ear: "And you could live your whole life that way."

The book is at the same time a highly personal interpretation of Torah and a spiritual manual. It contains one chapter for each of the fifty-four "parashot" (the Hebrew term for the traditional segments of the Torah nominally studied and read by Jews according to an annual cycle). Each chapter distills from that biblical passage both a blessing and a spiritual challenge for one's life; it also offers concrete guidance for spiritual practice(s) that promise to help us appreciate the former while facing the latter. A multi-layered introduction and several practically oriented appendices round out the book.

Although the author often draws upon concepts from other faith traditions, and although she has academic training in Bible, this book's enterprise is thoroughly Jewish and religious in both language and scope. For example, it engages "the Torah" rather than "the Pentateuch." And it pays no regard to questions of the historical origin or development of the biblical text, which it takes as a given.

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Mining Torah's Riches

Torah Journeys represents Rabbi Shefa Gold's life work--not only the specific work of her own life, but also her template for a life of spiritual work based in the quintessential Jewish text, the Five Books of Moses, Chumash, or Torah, as it is variously known. As a student and teacher of Torah myself, I have long relied upon Rabbi Gold's fresh, embodied visions and powerful chants to take me deeper into Torah text, and then to turn me outward, back into my own life, with expanded awareness and with new spiritual tools.

Now she has gathered her years of teaching into a beautifully conceived and lovingly executed volume. Her writing is carefully crafted, poetic and evocative, bringing alive the spiritual qualities embedded in the Biblical text in a way that is both accessible and deep. Moving us through the year-long cycle of Torah readings, Reb Shefa reveals how, each week, we might wrest blessing, accept challenge, and receive guidance from words of sacred scripture that often seem, to our modern sensibility, opaque or even repulsive. There is great hope and great joy in this work, for it is predicated on the assumption that we human beings can grow, can expand our awareness, and move through difficult and painful patterns by mining layers of resonance already held in suspension within our own, time-honored traditions.

In fact, these pages dance alive the true meaning of the word "tradition"--from the Latin tradere, to "carry forward" or to "carry across." Indeed, Torah Journeys does carry us, again and again, into sparkling lands of clarity and grace, vast mind-spaces in which students and spiritual practitioners, Jew and non-Jew alike, can come to appreciate anew the riches of an ancient text through a lens that seeks always to transform challenge into blessing and questing into practice. This book can become a life companion, to be read and cherished year after year.

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Torah Journeys: The Inner Path to the Promised Land promises to turn the year-long cycle of Torah reading into a journey of personal spiritual growth.

The first book by Rabbi Shefa Gold, the popular teacher of chant and meditation, Torah Journeys is designed to be meaningful for those at any spiritual level.

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