Jewish Home Blessing - Jewish Doorways

  The philosophical endeavor to reconcile traditional religion with modern culture has long had a place in Jewish history. Philo of 1st century Alexandria, Rav Saadia Gaon of 10th century Babylonia, Maimonides of 12th century Spain and Egypt— all are great Jewish thinkers who have taken pains to integrate the Judaism of the Torah and the Talmud with the best of contemporary thought. Maimonides not only codified  Jewish Law  in his monumental work the  Mishneh Torah , he also wrote  Guide for the Perplexed , which addresses an educated audience perplexed by the contradictions of the Torah and Aristotelian philosophy. The book had a great influence on the development of  Jewish intellectual traditions . By the modern period, ideological syncretism became the norm for Jewish laity and scholars. Throughout the 17th and 18th centuries in cosmopolitan centers such as Amsterdam and Venice, many Jews began to participate in the life of the majority culture. Toward ...

Visiting the Sick ( bikkur cholim ) One aspect of this holy work of visiting those who are ill is coming to terms with our own health challenges and mortality. One of the most helpful ways is to start by trying to understand your personal death awareness by taking a moment and recalling the number of times today you’ve thought about your own — not someone else’s — death or limited span of life. Maybe you thought about your age and evaluated your own progress towards certain life goals. Or perhaps you briefly experienced a fear of dying. Some days you may act and think as if you’re going to live forever. The purpose of this exercise is to raise your personal death awareness so that you may begin to perceive an entire range of choices about your life and death that you might not have been aware of. From this perspective of humble awareness of one’s own limitations and mortality, we enter the world of those who are ill, and try as best we can to be there to support them, where they are, a...