Description

About the Author

Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz is internationally renowned as the author of a landmark commentary on the Talmud, twenty-two volumes of which have been published in English by Random House.  He is also the author of many books of Jewish thought, among them The Thirteen-Petalled Rose and, most recently, Simple Words.  Rabbi Steinsaltz lectures throughout the world and has been a resident scholar at both Yale University and the Institute for Advanced Study.  He lives in Israel with his family.

Praise for A Guide to Jewish Prayer…

No book is closer to the heart of the Jew than the Siddur; none has had such a profound influence [or been] so uniquely able to penetrate to the very depths of the soul.

For generations, the Siddur was the first book the Jewish child learned to read, and through the struggle to grasp the combinations of letters, he repeated and learned to recite its phrases by heart. This bond with the prayer book engendered a great intimacy between the Jew and the Siddur in both the emotional and intellectual spheres. But the bond is not only a primary, intimate one; it is an ongoing, lifelong process. While other books are used only as study texts which, once mastered, need not be read again, or are reread only after a long period, the Siddur accompanies the Jew throughout life. . . .

No other Jewish book contains the entirety of Judaism.  The Siddur is like a garland, intertwining all the strands of  Judaism and encompassing all fields of Jewish creativity in all their variegated forms. It includes sections that reflect the fundamentals of Jewish faith, and those relating to the field of  religious law. . . . [It] contains sections of exalted poetry, and matters of ritual procedure. There are prayers that deal with the most intimate details of individual needs and problems, supplications reflecting the sorrows and aspirations of the nation, and prayers that touch upon the entire cosmos.
--From A Guide to Jewish Prayer