Bibles, Study Guides, and Accessories
Deciding which bibles and bible references and bible commentaries to stock is a challenge. I attempt a historical and a critical approach. We begin with the Hebrew and Greek originals. We move through the significant translations chronologically: the Geneva (with its sharp and learned Calvinist notes), the King James (safer for its sponsor), the New Revised Standard, and the excellent harvest of translations in the late 20th Century -- the New International, the English Standard, and the Common English.
Our dictionaries and handbooks tend to be a little conservative, mostly because I am skeptical of the confidence and the imagination of modern liberal scholars. Two thousand years of brilliant minds have thought about and written about scriptures (longer and more in the case of the Hebrew scriptures), and the humble approach with that perspective is useful and wise. The best approach is to begin with the basics and go from there.
On a less controversial note, protect your treasure of wisdom with a book cover or tote. We have several designs with neat features.
The Heart of Torah: Volume 2
The Heart of Torah: Volume 2
Essays on the Weekly Torah Portion: Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy
Rabbi Shai Held
Foreword by Rabbi Yitz Greenberg
In The Heart of Torah, Rabbi Shai Held’s Torah essays—two for each weekly portion—open new horizons in Jewish biblical commentary.
Held probes the portions in bold, original, and provocative ways. He mines Talmud and midrashim, great writers of world literature, and astute commentators of other religious backgrounds to ponder fundamental questions about God, human nature, and what it means to be a religious person in the modern world. Along the way he illuminates the centrality of empathy in Jewish ethics, the predominance of divine love in Jewish theology, the primacy of gratitude and generosity, and God’s summoning of each of us—with all our limitations—into the dignity of a covenantal relationship.