How the Talmud Can Change Your Life
Surprisingly Modern Advice from a Very Old Book
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For numerous centuries, the Talmud--an extraordinary work of Jewish ethics, law, and tradition--has compelled readers to grapple with how to live a good life. Full of folk legends, bawdy tales, and rabbinical repartee, it is inspiring, demanding, confounding, and thousands of pages long. As Liel Leibovitz enthusiastically explores the Talmud, what has sometimes been misunderstood as a dusty and arcane volume becomes humanity's first self-help book. How the Talmud Can Change Your Life contains sage advice on an unparalleled scope of topics, which includes communicating with your partner, dealing with grief, and being a friend. Leibovitz guides readers through the sprawling text with all its humor, rich insights, compulsively readable stories, and multilayered conversations. Contemporary discussions framed by Talmudic philosophy and psychology draw on subjects ranging from Weight Watchers and the Dewey decimal system to the lives of Billie Holiday and C. S. Lewis. Chapters focus on fundamental human experiences--the mind-body problem, the power of community, the challenges of love--to illuminate how the Talmud speaks to our daily existence. As Leibovitz explores some of life's greatest questions, he also delivers a concise history of the Talmud itself, explaining the process of its lengthy compilation and organization. With infectious passion and candor, Leibovitz brilliantly displays how the Talmud's wisdom reverberates for the modern age and how it can, indeed, change your life.
About this Author
Liel Leibovitz is host of Tablet's daily Talmud podcast Take One and cohost of the Unorthodox podcast. Author of A Broken Hallelujah and Stan Lee and coauthor of The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, he lives in New York City.
Reviews
"Liel Leibovitz's inspired and inspiring volume...is itself alive with wisdom, humor, and the generous lightning energy that illuminates the world."
"According to Leonard Cohen, the Talmud is 'a manual for living with defeat.' Liel Leibovitz, a biographer of Cohen, shows us?in magnificent, hair-splitting detail?how that works in practice. With much learning, unfailing insight, and storytelling skill, Leibovitz unveils a fascinating world of ancient sages and colorful rabbis, of sinners and saints, of wisdom found and lost and then found again. Read this book. You may realize that you have been a Talmudist all your life without knowing it. Or else that you want to be one for the rest of your life."
"[A] stellar outing.... While the adjective 'talmudic' is often synonymous with 'abstruse' or 'hair-splitting,' [Liel] Leibovitz argues that the Talmud itself interrogates 'larger questions of what, if anything, this life is about,' tackling such evergreen topics as 'how to love, how to grieve, how to fight, how to be a better spouse, [and] how to fix the government,' without moralizing or leaning on cut-and-dried answers.... Meticulously analyzed and surprisingly accessible."
"We can understand reality, writes [Liel Leibovitz], as 'a biblical account, maddening and inscrutable and demanding that we investigate and complicate every intricacy until it makes sense to us, allowing us to grow the more we understand.' The Talmud, Leibovitz maintains, opens a path to self-knowledge.... An erudite and accessible examination of a baffling work."
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