Website of Rabbi Shai Gluskin

Support me! I'm cycling 110 miles in the Hazon New York Jewish Environmental Bike Ride on October 13-14. Support me in the cause for Jewish environmentalism. Click here.

Good Days of Awe Reading:

The Way of Man According to the Teaching of Hasidism by Martin Buber

This 41 page book has probably affected me more than any other I've read. I first read it 20 years ago and I keep coming back. Written in 1950 it's a "self-help" book by one of the leading philosophers of the 20th century.

Here is a sample quote:

'Where is the dwelling of God?'

This is the question with which the Rabbi of Kotzk surprised a number of learned men who happened to be visiting him.

They laughed at him: 'What a thing to ask! Is not the whole world full of his glory?'

Then he answered his own question:

'God dwells wherever man Iets him in.'

This is the ultimate purpose: to Iet God in. But we can let him in only where we really stand, where we live, where we live a true life. If we maintain holy intercourse with the little world entrusted to us, if we help the holy spiritual substance to accomplish itself in that section of Creation in which we are living, then we are establishing, in this our place, a dwelling for the Divine Presence.

Click here to go to a page at Amazon.com with the book. (I make no commission from Amazon. The link is for convenience.)