Your Word Is Fire: The Hasidic Masters on Contemplative Prayer (A Jewish Lights Classic Reprint)

Book Overview

These parables, prayers and aphorisms of the Hasidic masters pierce to the heart of the modern reader's search for God. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1879045257
• ISBN13: 9781879045255
• Release Date: November 1993
• Publisher: Jewish Lights Publishing
• Length: 160 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.8" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

MUST READ

Let me just say that if your reading this then buy this book now... fate has brought you here. Read this book over and over and be enriched and renewed angain and again---connected to the ONE source of ALL.

Prayer as the service of God

In their introduction to this volume the authors distinguish between the prayer of the practicioneers of Lurianic Kabbalah and the prayer of the Hasidic masters featured here. The complicated symbolism and learning of the Kabbalists is contrasted with the simplicity and directness of Hasidic prayer. The Kabbalists are opening complicated locks with hidden keys, while the Hasidic masters are smashing the lock open with their own broken hearts. The Kabbalists are focusing on some cosmological tikkun of the world as a whole, while the Hasidic masters are focusing on individual devekut individual clinging and attachment to God. The excerpts given here can help the reader realize that service of God which is the holy essential duty of every Jew.

Your Word is Fire - Is A Spiritural Retreat

The authors have managed to create in this small volume a source book of meditation. The words of the Hasidic Masters have carefully been selected in such a way that each page is a meditation.I have had this book in my library for many years,and return to it over an over again for comfort and wisdom.

Exploring the Mystery of Prayer

This is a wonderful, wonderful reader in Hasidic perspectives on prayer. The book blossoms with deep insights into the spiritual dynamic between God and humans. Please consider the following:"A father has a young child whom he greatly loves. Even though the child has hardly learned to speak, his father takes pleasure in listening to his words." (p. 102)There is something both bold and humbling about and such a perspective on prayer. God is not only King, but Father as well. The Infinite One is both large and small, far and near.Many of the different dynamics of prayer are explored in this work, each in its own section, and everything is referenced at the end of the book. The book opens with an academic essay that provides a good context for the Hasidic exploration of the vast sea of prayer, the experience of union with the Divine Presence (p. 80). As with most readers, any background knowledge of Hasidism is helpful, but at the same time not necessary to have in order to be touched by the wisdom of these mystics.I think, though, that this book needs to be approached as an open door to the myster of prayer. Rather than just being read, it should be tested: to approach God as a child who is unable to speak is a humbling thing. To persist, nonetheless, and draw close to God as God draws us and pulls us close is to experience God's love. The reader of this book will have some far reaching light as s/he travels and progresses down the path of such prayer.

Hasidic Devotional Prayer for the Masses

I first read this volume in college, well over 20 years ago, and I was pleased to see it back in print, and in an attractive new format with a useful introduction. Most people think of Hasidim as ultra-Orthodox, incredibly strict people who wear funny old fashioned clothes and have bushy beards. This volume reveals to the general reader the ecstatic and contemplative nature of the devotional practices of the early Hasidic masters. The content of the book is gleaned from a number of volumes of "theoretical Hasidism" (to use Gershom Scholem's phrase), all of which are highly inaccessible to anyone not well versed in Hebrew and Yiddish, Bible, Midrash, Talmud and Kabbalah. While perhaps a deep understanding is not available to we other folk, this volume is a portal into a powerful world of mystical attachment to a very personal Lord of the Universe.