Yearnings: Embracing the Sacred Messiness of Life by Irwin Kula, Linda Loewenthal

From the Publisher

The host of PBS's Simple Wisdom and The Wisdom of Our Yearnings explores life's most defining human experiences.

A perfect love, enduring happiness, discovering our purpose. Yearning for these experiences accompanies us through life, leading us to both joy and disappointment, and to a powerful vision of who we are, and who we can become. Far from being a burden, our yearnings can themselves become a path to blessing, prompting questions and insights, resulting in new ways of being and believing.

In Yearnings, renowned Rabbi Irwin Kula explores and celebrates seven of our deepest desires. He opens the spiritual toolbox of Jewish wisdom -- it has much to teach about the ambiguities and uncertainties we all encounter -- and takes us on an excursion into our age-old questions, merging ancient wisdom and stories with contemporary examples and insights. Whether it's a woman struggling with a breach in her marriage, a child wondering about the tooth fairy, or Moses yearning for answers in the story of the burning bush, Yearnings offers a broader perspective to enrich our search for meaning.

The practices and insights in this book are based on teachings that have evolved for over three thousand years, as generations have wrestled with the messiness and complexities of the human experience. Rabbi Kula invites us to do the same, urging us to seek answers to our deepest questions, to search for spiritual and personal fulfillment while knowing we will never finally get there, and to celebrate the discoveries we'll make along the way.

Spirituality & Health

This sagacious book will be a blessing to all who read its teachigns on the value of spiritual learning.

Library Journal

Rabbi Kula is something of a media phenomenon he is a frequent guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show and the star of the 2004 documentary Time for a New God and the public television series Simple Wisdom. In this book, cowritten with literary agent Lowenthal, Kula identifies seven "yearnings" shared by many modern Americans truth, meaning, The Way, love, creativity, happiness, and transcendence describing them with warmth and wit and showing how these yearnings can be not so much fulfilled as adjusted and transformed in the context of a real life. Highly recommended. Copyright 2006 Reed Business Information.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents