Books published by Hakodesh Press

Experiences of the divine, the sacred, and the holy, in nature and in the everyday unfolding of life, have inspired poets and spiritual seekers throughout the ages. Such poetic distillations, preserved in Jewish sacred literature in the Psalms, the lyrically erotic Song of Songs, the mystical visions of the prophets, and other ancient writings, form the bedrock of the traditional Jewish prayer liturgy. They give us tastes of the essence of religious experience, which Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel has described as "radical amazement" ¿ sheer wonder at the astonishing variety, beauty, awesomeness, ugliness, and fearsomeness of this cosmos. In Unbounded Heart Rabbi Diane Elliot shares encounters with traditional Jewish liturgy and sacred text, as well as with life's ordinary moments, seen through the lens of wonder and awe. Here each prayer becomes a poem, each poem a prayer meant to awaken eyes and ears, hearts and hands to "thisness," the mysterious and sacred Presence that radiates through all existence.

This penning brings to life an overlooked subject in contemporary Judaism ¿ how did the ancient Jewish tradition, rooted in the Temple rituals transform itself after the Destruction of the Second Temple. As you will find, this transformation did not occur immediately nor did the Rabbi¿s automatically accede to leadership. Indeed, competing sects of the Israelite religion vied for a leadership role. To understand, I have described the internecine fighting; the compromises of transforming the Jewish rites by including symbols of the Holy Temple; and its syncretization through the years. For one thousand years, the Israelites (Jews) worshipped in a Holy Space at the Temple in Jerusalem. Before the construction of the Temple ()there were two), the Holy of Holies, which contained the Law revealed to Moses and a small amount of manna), became the dwelling place for the Shechina (God¿s presence). Indeed, there was a cloud hovering over the holy of holies for the 40-year journey through the dessert and the years leading up to the construction of the First Temple.

Being able to find the humor in heartache, the transcendent in tragedy and the funny in folly is an ability that deserves more exercise from all of us. In this second collection of poems following the publication of The Sunset Years, Rabbi Bernstein-Goff shares some of his personal successes and failures in a world where truth is often elusive and deception is everywhere beginning with one¿s self. Thus Uncle Bernie humorously recalls the deception of an old family friend, while Jacob¿s Song reminds us that a biblical patriarch is not above using deception to get the blessing he wants to become. Poems like Russian Lullaby and The Meshugeneh explore how the avoidance of truth by the masking of personal pain can come back to haunt us, occasionally with a devastating finality. Many of the poems in this collection deal with family relationships and the bitter sweet realities that accompany the process of sharing our vulnerabilities and too often the failure to do so with those we love. Yet strangely enough, sometimes even failure creates opportunities for redemption. Finally, poems like The Shoe Box and Death Bed Daydream celebrate our living, our dying, and our death.

Philanthropic European Jewish Bankers, Clara and Baron Maurice De Hirsch benefactored hundreds of billions of today¿s dollars, principally for the emigration of Russian Jews to seek economic opportunity. Besides donating to Jewish European charities, they also undertook, in the Americas, the Jewish Farming movement as well as helping those who dwelt in cities. Baron de Hirsch's unprecedented experiments in South America and in the United States by the JAS, provided knowledge, energy and optimism that four Jewish national organization sculd produce the successful Agro-Joint project. Sometimes Russian Jewry "exported" ideas and practices. Other times it absorbed them from abroad. Through the interchange, Jewish communities on four continents became solidly intertwined.