After World War II, Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich (1921–2007) published works in English and German by eminent Israeli scholars, in this way introducing them to a wider audience in Europe and North America. The series he founded for that purpose, Studia Judaica, continues to offer a platform for scholarly studies and editions that cover all eras in the history of the Jewish religion.

During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, great new trends of Jewish thought emerged whose widely varied representatives--Kabbalists, philosophers, and astrologers--each claimed that their particular understanding revealed the actual secret of the Torah. They presented their own readings in a coded fashion that has come to be regarded by many as the very essence of esotericism. Concealment and Revelation takes us on a fascinating journey to the depths of the esoteric imagination. Carefully tracing the rise of esotericism and its function in medieval Jewish thought, Moshe Halbertal's richly detailed historical and cultural analysis gradually builds conceptual-philosophical force to culminate in a masterful phenomenological taxonomy of esotericism and its paradoxes. Among the questions addressed: What are the internal justifications that esoteric traditions provide for their own existence, especially in the Jewish world, in which the spread of knowledge was of great importance? How do esoteric teachings coexist with the revealed tradition, and what is the relationship between the various esoteric teachings that compete with that revealed tradition? Halbertal concludes that, through the medium of the concealed, Jewish thinkers integrated into the heart of the Jewish tradition diverse cultural influences such as Aristotelianism, Neoplatonism, and Hermeticisims. And the creation of an added concealed layer, unregulated and open-ended, became the source of the most daring and radical interpretations of the tradition.

From one of the world's most famous and respected rabbis—"a practical explanation of Jewish worship from a spiritual slant" (Detroit Free Press). For both the novice and for those who have been engaged in prayer for years, here is the one guide needed to practice Jewish prayer and understand the prayer book. From the origins and meaning of worship to a step-by-step explanation of the daily prayers to the reason you're not supposed to chat with your friends during services, Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz answers many of the questions likely to arise about Jewish prayer. Here are chapters on daily prayer; Sabbath prayer; prayer services for the holidays; the yearly cycle of synagogue Bible readings; the history and makeup of the synagogue; the different prayer rites for Ashkenazim, Sephardim, Yemenites, and other cultural/geographic groupings; the role of the rabbi and the cantor in the synagogue; and the role of music in the service.

Presents the Jewish prayers in English with accompanying essays about the basis of prayer, prayer as visualization and the piety and devotion of Jewish life.

Rabbi Abrams walks us through tractate Megillah in a warm, unintimidating, and highly informed way.

Uri Ehrlich addresses a relatively neglected but central component of the act of prayer: its nonverbal aspects, represented by such features as the worshiper's gestures, attire and shoes, and vocal expression. In the first part of this book, the author engages in a two-tiered examination of nine nonverbal elements integral to the rabbinic Amidah prayer: a detailed historical-geographical consideration of their development, followed by an analysis of each gesture's signification, the crux of this study. Of all the possible models, it was the realm of interpersonal communication which had the strongest impact on this consideration of the rabbinic Amidah gesture system. The concluding chapters explore the broader rabbinic conception of prayer embodied in these nonverbal modes of expression. Unlike mainstream prayer studies, which concentrate on the textual and spoken facets of prayer, the holistic approach taken here views prayer as a complex of verbal, physical, spiritual and other attributes.