Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook: A Guide to Understanding, Exploring and Living a Spiritual Life

What is "Jewish Spirituality"? How do I make it part of my life? Today's foremost spiritual leaders share their ideas and experience.

Whether you are just curious, intently searching for greater personal meaning, or actively seeking ideas, information, practices and inspiration to enrich your spiritual life, The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook is the ideal companion for your journey as it explores:

• Awakening the Possibilities: What Is Jewish Spirituality?
• The Worlds of Your Life: Where Is Spirituality Found?
• The Times and Seasons of Your Life: When Does Spirituality Enter?
• Swords and Plowshares: How to Forge the Tools that Will Make It Happen
• So What Do You Do With It? Why Spirituality Should Be Part of Your Life

Fifty of our foremost spiritual leaders invite you to explore every aspect of Jewish spirituality―God, community, prayer, liturgy, healing, meditation, mysticism, study, Jewish traditions, rituals, blessings, life passages, special days, the everyday, repairing the world and more―offering, in one place, everything you need to discover all the directions that Jewish spirituality can go and can take you.

Contributors:

Isa Aron • Miriam Carey Berkowitz • Ellen Bernstein • Sylvia Boorstein • Eugene B. Borowitz • Anne Brener • Norman J. Cohen • David A. Cooper • Avram Davis • Wayne Dosick • Edward Feld • Nancy Flam • Tamar Frankiel • Nan Fink Gefen • Neil Gillman • Elyse Goldstein • Arthur Green • Judy Greenfeld • David Hartman • Mark Hass • Lee Myerhoff Hendler • Lawrence A. Hoffman • Karyn D. Kedar • Lawrence Kushner • Jane Rachel Litman • Daniel C. Matt • Levi Meier • James L. Mirel • Rebbe Nachman of Breslov • Kerry M. Olitzky • Jonathan Omer-Man • Debra Orenstein • Daniel F. Polish • Jack Riemer • Debra Judith Robbins • Jeffrey K. Salkin • Sandy Eisenberg Sasso • Zalman M. Schachter-Shalomi • Dannel I. Schwartz • Sharon L. Sobel • Rifat Sonsino • Elie Kaplan Spitz • Nathaniel Stampfer • Ira F. Stone • Leora Tanenbaum • Arthur Waskow • Karen Bonnell Werth • Ron Wolfson • David Zeller • Sheldon Zimmerman

The royalties from The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook are donated by the contributors and publisher to America’s Jewish seminaries.

Stuart Matlins is founder, editor-in-chief and publisher of Jewish Lights Publishing and SkyLight Paths Publishing. Both imprints focus on religion and spirituality from a broad non-denominational perspective. He is author or editor of several books, including the best-selling How to Be a Perfect Stranger, 5th Edition: The Essential Religious Etiquette Handbook (SkyLight Paths); The Jewish Lights Spirituality Handbook: A Guide to Understanding, Exploring & Living a Spiritual Life (Jewish Lights); The Perfect Stranger's Guide to Wedding Ceremonies: A Guide to Etiquette in Other People's Religious Ceremonies; and The Perfect Stranger's Guide to Funerals and Grieving Practices: A Guide to Etiquette in Other People’s Religious Ceremonies (both SkyLight Paths).

Stuart was the 2006 recipient of the American Jewish Distinguished Service Award, an annual presentation of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion. He was a member of the First Catholic/Jewish Lay Conference at the Vatican in October 2007, an event under the auspices of the Interreligious Information Center.

Among his many speaking appearances, Stuart has been the scholar-in-residence or guest lecturer at the National Funeral Director’s Association convention, Temple Isaiah (Palm Springs, CA), The Jewish Center of the Hamptons (East Hampton, NY), Temple Sholom (Plainfield, NJ), Israel Congregation (Manchester, NH) and at the annual gatherings of the Jewish Community Centers Association and the Jewish Outreach Institute. He also has been a featured speaker or panel member at many Book Expo America conventions, and at the biennial Festival of Faith and Writing at Calvin College, as well as at churches and other conferences.

Before publishing took over his life, he was a management consultant for over thirty years as a managing partner with Booz Allen Hamilton, Inc. and then heading his own consulting firm.

He is the co-founder of an innovative synagogue in Woodstock, Vermont, with his wife, Antoinette Matlins, and served as lay spiritual leader for nineteen of its twenty-one years. He has served for almost twenty years on the Board of Governors of Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, and was chair of the Board of Overseers of its New York School.

He is listed in Who’s Who in America.

Isa Aron, PhD, is professor of Jewish education at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion's Rhea Hirsch School of Education. Founder and former director of the Experiment in Congregational Education (ECE), she now serves as senior consultant. She holds a PhD in philosophy of education from the University of Chicago, and her writing on education and congregational renewal has appeared in such journals as the American Journal of Education, Tikkun and the Journal of Reform Judaism. She is also author of Becoming a Congregation of Learners: Learning as a Key to Revitalizing Congregational Life and The Self-renewing Congregation: Organizational Stragegies for Revitalizing Congregational Life.

Isa Aron, PhD, is available to speak on the following topics:

• Synagogue Change (or Synagogue Renewal)
• Jewish Education
• Moral Education