A very well written and enjoyable account of a woman's experience trying to learn Torah in Jerusalem. The author portrays other women's attitudes towards Torah learning (which has traditionally been reserved for men throughout Jewish history) as she tries to formulate her own attitudes. The reader travels with Ms. Ochs as she goes from the highs of grasping a complicated Torah passage to the lows of realizing that some Torah ideas are just plain sexist (in her perception).

As a theology minor during university, I was assigned to teach this text for a women in northern american religion class. It so moved me, that not only did I go on to study Judaism, both on my own and with a rabbi, I also converted. Truly amazing.

Have you ever wondered what your birthday would be like without a cake, candles, gifts, or a birthday song? These are examples of rituals that we associate with the anniversary of our birth. Think about how many events in our lives we have ritualized. Thanks to Hallmark, most of these events include a greeting card.

In Judaism, we mark life's milestones with ritual. We bring babies into the fold with a naming ceremony. We are called up to the Torah for an aliyah on our wedding anniversary. We visit the graves of our loved ones before holidays. We crave ritual, and we seek new and different ritual acts for different occasions - imagine if we only recited the shehechiyanu for every milestone in our lives, how would we make
that event stand apart?

CLAL - the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership (full disclosure: I served an internship at CLAL in 2001) has been adding occasions to the list of ritualized events for several years, and now these sacred practices have been compiled into book form. While the book contains many of the acts that are already in the Jewish canon of ritual (e.g. fasting on Yom Kippur, Counting the Omer, and Studying Torah on Shavuot), the contributors, who are all CLAL faculty, put a new spin on these events. So, while we might have found putting up a sukkah to be a very ritualized act, chock-full of religious symbolism, this book offers a way to bring out the significance of taking our sukkah down at the end of the holiday.

Indeed, many of you have sent your children off to college or on a summer trip to Israel, and perhaps you would have liked to mark the occasion with a blessing or meditation. This book transforms these actions into sacred acts. Upon successfully quitting smoking, CLAL recommends reciting the blessing, "Blessed is the One who frees those who are held captive."

A meditation for starting to workout begins "each extra step on the treadmill or the Stairmaster, each lap in the pool or around the track, each turn of the pedal, each lift of the weights, each stretch of muscles long out of use... in each bead of sweat and panting breath I praise You-with all my bones. For each event included in the book, the sacred practice of a meditation, blessing, ritual, and teaching is included. The chapters are usefully divided by category (parents and children, relationships, special moments, healing, learning, etc.).

Many will undoubtedly find new rituals for which they have been wanting, such as saying good-bye to a beloved pet or honoring a teacher at the end of the year. However, it might never have occurred to anyone to recite a blessing or learn a piece of rabbinic text before preparing a family recipe or taking on a volunteer role in the community, but each of these new rituals helps us bring a bit more holiness into the seemingly mundane actions of our daily lives.

If each of us can find one new aspect of our lives to sanctify and make more meaningful through the aid of this book, then it is a most worthy and enriching addition to our bookshelves.

This book is really great for anyone interested in discovering new ways to celebrate not only the regular holidays, but also the sacred that can be found in everyday life. The way it is organized, readers can use the blessings just as written, or with the helpful background information, readers can create their own religious practices. A definite must for anyone interested in connecting to their Jewish inherited tradition both intellectualy and spiritually.

If any book better documents the increasingly halachic turn of the liberal Jewish movements in Norht America, I would be hard pressed to find one. The editors, who also have written articles in the text, do an excellant job of providing, perhaps for the first time in a few decades, a guide to daily Jewish religious practice from a liberal, or more accurately, Reconstructionist, point of view. They include solid use of classical Jewish sources and a good basic bibliography with each section.

They discuss all the most important basic subjects, such as daily prayer, the rituals of laying on tallis, kippah and tefillin, daily Torah study, the Jewish dietary laws, use of the Ritual bath and the celebration of Shabbat. Equally critically, they talk about the psychology involved in these ritual observances, and their benefits from a spiritual point of view.
For anyone new to Jewish religious practice, this book is the place to start.

However, as with many books of this type, there is no effort made to show how the various practices so effectively described, fit into a more complete whole. While the authors and editors make repeated references to Jewish mysticism here and there, there is no even brief description of what it is, or how Jewish ritual serves as the foundation for Jewish mysticism. In addition, the authors stress psycological/spiritual benefits to Jewish practice, when there are those among us who have experienced many practical gains as well.

In order to find the connection between these practices and Judaism and its mysticism as a totality, the reader should combine reading the above work, with this writer's own critical description of Jewish mysticism, or Kabbalah, entitled "Jewish History and Divine Providence: Theodicy and the Oddyssey," available for purchase here on Amazon. This work, the only progressive, critical discussion of Jewish mysticism in English, unifies "The Rituals and Practices of a Jewish Life" with their most potent rationale, and in history as well.

Collaboratively compiled and edited by Rabbis Kerry Olitzky and Daniel Judson, The Rituals & Practices Of Jewish Life: A Handbook For Personal Spiritual Renewal is a straightforward and practical instructional guide to the origin, manner, and modern-day practice of ten areas of Jewish ritual: Upon Rising and Going to Bed; Covering the Head; Blessings throughout the Day; Daily Prayer; Tefillin; Tallit and Tallit Katan; Talmud Torah; The Continuum of Kashrut; Mikvah; and Entering Shabbot. Enhanced with an informative foreword by Vanessa L. Ochs, and illustrations by Joel Moskowitz, The Rituals & Practices Of Jewish Life is a useful and "user friendly", easy-to-follow, step-by-step, guidebook which is most especially recommended for readers who may have little to no understanding of the proper ritual performance and what it means, yet who want to incorporate more of the Jewish traditions into their daily lives.