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The Shema: Spirituality and Law in Judaism is unavailable, but you can change that!

The Shema is the central prayer of the Jewish faith. Jews utter this single sentence, affirming God’s unity as their final words before dying, as well as at the beginning and ending of each day. Using the Shema as his focus, Lamm, prominent Orthodox scholar and long-time president of Yeshiva University, explores the relationship between spirituality and law in Judaism.

focused on Halakha as the totality of Judaism, thus reinforcing the Christian caricature of Judaism. But such a simplistic dualism misses the point. The life of the spirit need not be chaotic and undisciplined; the life of law, similarly, need not exclude the pulsing heart and soaring soul of the religious individual. In Judaism, spirituality is not antinomian, that is, the opposite of law and a structured approach to our duty under God. Halakha, a “way of life,” does not preclude the participation
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