Elaine R. Glickman, “The Messiah and the Jews” (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013)

“The conviction that the Messiah is coming is a promise of meaning. It is a source of consolation. It is a wellspring of creativity. It is reconciliation between what is and what should be. And it is perhaps our most powerful statement of faith–in God, in humanity and in ourselves.”

–The Messiah and the Jews, Chapter 1: The Messiah is Coming

Written for Jewish and non-Jewish readers alike, Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman‘s The Messiah and the Jews: Three Thousand Years of Tradition, Belief and Hope (Jewish Lights Publishing, 2013) makes the 3000-year-old Jewish view of the messiah accessible and relevant to today’s reader.  Nearly unknown today, the Jewish concept of the Messiah–the promise of redemption–among Judaism’s gifts to the world -includes vivid accounts of the end of days, warriors, apocalypse, even the female heroine Hephzibah, mother of the messiah according to one rare but very important account.

Rabbi Glickman shares the Jewish tradition of the messiah in a very readable book that includes many memorable descriptions that enrich the reader’s  appreciation of Jewish tradition – explanations of traditions that readers may have experienced without having previously known of their relationship with Jewish yearning for the coming of the messiah. The book concludes with the concept that we can “make the vision of the universe redeemed a reality and provide a foretaste of redemption in our lives today. I recommend this book highly.

Rabbi Elaine Rose Glickman brings together, and to life, this three-thousand-year-old tradition. She explores for the English-language reader an astonishing range of primary and secondary sources many not accessible in English, explaining in an informative and even inspirational manner these teachings’ significance for Jews of the past, while at the same time she infuses them with new meaning for the modern reader, both Jewish and non-Jewish.

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