Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life: A Jewish Father’s Ethical Will
Ebook
In the Jewish tradition, going back to Jacob, many fathers have written down whatever wisdom they might have attained in their lives in order to pass along that wisdom to their heirs. It is called an ethical will. Written as a testimony and a testament, in an epistolary format, this book is a compendium of the wisdom of a father, who has spent a lifetime studying the teachings of the Jewish tradition, as well as literary and philosophical traditions of the West. The insights taken from those traditions, which explore the life of the soul, are intended for anyone who has a soul. The book is organized around eighteen words that form the foundations of human life. The number eighteen is taken from the Hebrew word for "life," chai, which has a numerical value of eighteen. Among the words at the heart of these reflections are faith, goodness, responsibility, meaning, gratitude, prayer, love, and others.
“David Patterson’s profoundly Jewish book shows how deep-down, ethical understanding of eighteen key words including truth and goodness, responsibility and love, gratitude and peace can resist the destruction and despair that threaten human flourishing in the 2020s and beyond. Much needed, Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life is a gift for all seasons but especially timely, welcome, and urgent for ours now.”
—John K. Roth, author of The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities
“This is a wonderful, searching, learned, and necessary book—personal and personable, joyous and loving, transmitting and telling all in one. David Patterson offers us eighteen English words that wrap within them Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish teachings of Jewish life, about the life of a Jew, and surely about life itself. These richly evocative words and teachings are directed to his children and grandchildren. But they are clearly a gift to all of us as well.”
—Alan Rosen, author of The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy
- Title: Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life: A Jewish Father’s Ethical Will
- Author: David Patterson
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2023
- Logos Release Date: 2023
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9781666750959, 9781666750935, 166675093X, 9781666750942, 1666750948, 1666750956
- Resource ID: LLS:9781666750959
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2023-07-04T22:39:14Z
David Patterson holds the Hillel Feinberg Distinguished Chair in Holocaust Studies at the University of Texas at Dallas. A winner of the National Jewish Book Award and the Koret Jewish Book Award, he has published more than two hundred and fifty articles and chapters on philosophy, literature, Judaism, and Holocaust studies. His more than forty books include Judaism, Antisemitism, and the Holocaust; Shoah and Torah; Portraits: Elie Wiesel’s Hasidic Legacy; and The Holocaust and the Non-Representable.