Waiting for the Messiah


Book Description

Enigmatic and explosive, Irving Layton was indisputably one of this country's most controversial literary figures. His flamboyant style and outspokenness won him friends and enemies. His visceral and lyrical poetry earned him reverence and international acclaim. In Waiting for the Messiah, first published in 1985, Layton writes openly about his life and the discordant impulses that shaped him into the provocative poet and personality that he became. With the vitality, passion, and intimacy that characterizes his verse, his memoir -- covering the years between 1912 and 1946 -- sheds welcome light on Irving Layton's public persona, and gives further substance to one of the most impressive bodies of work in Canadian poetry. His self-portrait teems with insight and energy, and paints a picture of a colourful life, from its beginnings in Montreal's Jewish ghetto. As a high-spirited, life-loving, and sensual boy, he reacted against anti-Semitism and poverty that surrounded him, rejecting his parents' values and orthodox beliefs. He battled his way through an educational system that provided no outlet for his imagination. Layton's "crazy need for experience" drove him to embrace or challenge all that he encountered, and he recounts his first experiences with sex and death, his associations with literary friends and rivals, his relationships with women. Equally compelling is his description of Montreal in the forties as a city crackling with literary and political energies. It was in the ferment of this milieu that Layton ripened as a poet In Waiting for the Messiah, Layton unleashes his sparkling prose style. He is bold and revealing, scathing and witty. The result is a rich and entertaining memoir of a life which as "commuted daily between heaven and hell" and produced poems which have made a lasting contribution to Canadian literature.




Waiting for the Messiah


Book Description

When the Bolton Jewish Community converts a disused retirement home to a boarding school and hires a Russian refugee to direct it and the retirees as staff, the small town of Bolton, Pennsylvania celebrates the change. But when the director admits a Palestinian boy, schedules Palestine National Day and a fundraiser for a Catholic homeless shelter, the family that endowed the retirement home fifty years earlier sues to regain their trust fund. This action sets in motion a series of events that results in the notion that the school director might be Jesus Christ himself. But is he?Waiting for the Messiah, the sequel to the critically-acclaimed novel Lost and Found, is a modern-day imagining of the second coming of Christ to a small Jewish community. Full of warmth, humor and the celebration of the extraordinary in the ordinary, it appeals to the faithful of all religions and iconoclasts alike.




Jesus and the Dead Sea Scrolls


Book Description

A major new work on the Dead Sea Scrolls, the oldest sacred documents of Judaism, which reveals their surprising connections to early Christianity. “A luminous treatment of a fascinating subject! Highly recommended!”—Scott Hahn, author of The Fourth Cup From award-winning scholar John Bergsma comes an intriguing book that reveals new insights on the Essenes, a radical Jewish community predating Christianity, whose existence, beliefs, and practices are often overlooked in the annuls of history. Bergsma reveals how this Jewish sect directly influenced the beliefs, sacraments, and practices of early Christianity and offers new information on how Christians lived their lives, worshipped, and eventually went on to influence the Roman Empire and Western civilization. Looking to Hebrew scripture and Jewish tradition, Bergsma helps to further explain how a simple Jewish peasant could go on to inspire a religion and a philosophy that still resonates 2,000 years later. In this enriching and exciting exploration, Bergsma demonstrates how the Dead Sea Scrolls—the world's greatest modern archaeological discovery—can shed light on the Church as a sacred society that offered hope, redemption, and salvation to its member. Ultimately, these mysterious writings are a time machine that can transport us back to the ancient world, deepen our appreciation of Scripture, and strengthen our understanding of the Christian faith. “An accessible introduction . . . This is a handy entry point for readers unfamiliar with Essenes or those interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls.”—Publishers Weekly




A Fortress in Brooklyn


Book Description

The epic story of Hasidic Williamsburg, from the decline of New York to the gentrification of Brooklyn "A rich chronicle of the Satmar Hasidic community in Williamsburg. . . . This expert account enlightens."—Publishers Weekly “One of the most creative and iconoclastic works to have been written about Jews in the United States.”—Eliyahu Stern, Yale University The Hasidic community in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn is famously one of the most separatist, intensely religious, and politically savvy groups of people in the entire United States. Less known is how the community survived in one of the toughest parts of New York City during an era of steep decline, only to later resist and also participate in the unprecedented gentrification of the neighborhood. Nathaniel Deutsch and Michael Casper unravel the fascinating history of how a group of determined Holocaust survivors encountered, shaped, and sometimes fiercely opposed the urban processes that transformed their gritty neighborhood, from white flight and the construction of public housing to rising crime, divestment of city services, and, ultimately, extreme gentrification. By showing how Williamsburg’s Hasidim rejected assimilation while still undergoing distinctive forms of Americanization and racialization, Deutsch and Casper present both a provocative counter-history of American Jewry and a novel look at how race, real estate, and religion intersected in the creation of a quintessential, and yet deeply misunderstood, New York neighborhood.




Refuting Rabbinic Objections to Christianity & Messianic Prophecies


Book Description

For us, Jews who grew up in Israel, Jesus and His word were never part of the conversation. Not in our school system, not in our synagogues, and not in our media. Nor do we have easy access to the New Testament. Jesus has been studiously avoided, and hidden from our people. Today in Israel, 99.7% of the Jewish population, reject Jesus as the Messiah. How did our country, where the gospel first took place, come to be so adamantly against it?Within Judaism over the last two millennia, any kind of spiritual message had to go through the "gate keepers," the Orthodox Jewish Rabbis. The Rabbinic Judaism of the Orthodox comes directly from the sect of the "Pharisees," whom Jesus rebuked: "Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in." (Matthew 23:13)Ever since the days of Messiah, the Rabbis have set themselves in opposition to the gospel, blocking the message of Jesus from Israel. They deliberately prevent Jewish people from hearing about the free salvation offered to them in the death and resurrection of their own Jewish Messiah. They have gone to great lengths to conceal Jesus, and keep him the best kept secret in Judaism., keeping our people in spiritual darkness.But now the secret is out!After almost 2000 years, Jesus, or as we call him in Hebrew, Yeshua, can no longer be hidden from the people! Today, our ministry, ONE FOR ISRAEL, reaches Jewish and Arab Israelis exactly where they are - online. We no longer need the rabbis' permission for anything. We can go straight into the smartphones, tablets, and computers of every Israeli, sharing the saving good news of Yeshua the Messiah!In the past, the message of the gospel came to Israel from outside our borders, delivered by people who didn't understand our language, our culture, our heritage or our way of thinking. Today the messengers look very different. Now it is Jewish and Arab Israelis who are bringing the gospel back to where it started - back to our own people Israel. We can explain the gospel to our people in a way that makes sense to them, in our own native tongues of Hebrew and Arabic as only Israelis can, and help our people understand who Yeshua really is.The Orthodox rabbis in Israel operate an "anti missionary" organization called Yad L'Achim, specifically to fight against the spread of the gospel among the Jewish people. This very well-funded organization, works very closely with the Minister of Interior in the Israeli government. They seek to prevent Jewish people from leaving the confines of Rabbinic Judaism by any means necessary (not always legally), and relentlessly persecute us, the Jewish believers in Jesus in Israel. With over 90% of the names, photos and addresses of all the Messianic Jews in Israel on file, Yad L'Achim began sending a magazine called "Searching" to the homes of believers in Israel back in 2014. The magazine contains objections and refutations from Orthodox rabbis about the messiahship of Jesus, the credibility of the New Testament, and trying to ridicule and destroy the belief in Jesus. This caused several Jewish believers, even including some who had been missionaries, to deny their faith in Jesus and revert to rabbinic Judaism. Over the past five years, I decided to go over all of their magazines, books and videos, in order to answer their arguments and prove their objections false. Since 2015 we have released about 150 short videos where we share the gospel and directly refute these rabbinic objections to Jesus, New Testament and Christianity. This book is a compilation of transcripts from these videos, all in one place for your consideration. While the content of this book is based on five years of academic research, I did my best to write it in a simple, easy-to-read way, in order to keep this book as short as possible.Please SHARE links to this book!: )




Finding My Way Home


Book Description




The Grace Impact


Book Description

Chapter after chapter, verse after verse, the Bible shows a loving heavenly Father lavishing His grace on us through His son. In her book, The Grace Impact, author Nancy Kay Grace gives us a closer glimpse of God's character. In all things at all times, His grace covers every detail of life, not just the good things, but the difficult, sad and complicated things. That knowledge can give us the ability to walk confidently through life knowing God is with us every step of the way.




There Is No Messiah—and You're It


Book Description

A challenge to each of us to take personal responsibility for repairing the world. "We are taught that every one of us is created in the divine image. All of us can be holy through imitating God.... So, you don’t have to look around or look away. You don’t have to wait for someone to come and do what you were put on this earth to do in the first place. Judaism empowers you, as one of God’s anointed ones, to do more than you ever dreamed possible." —from Chapter 1 The coming of the messiah is anticipated by millions of people of many faiths as the ultimate salve for our spiritual lives and as a way to finally make the world a better place. There Is No Messiah...and You’re It examines the history of messianic hope and anticipation, its evolution in Judaism and Jewish history, and other interpretations of “messiah” that shed new light on what it means to usher in the “kingdom of God.” This fascinating book is our call to see ourselves as the fulfillment of, not the anticipators of, messianic change. Drawing from the Bible, the Talmud, rabbinic sources, and modern-day scholars, Rabbi Robert Levine provides us with an accessible, fascinating understanding of messianic vision, as well as false messiahs throughout Jewish history. He challenges the powerful idea of messiah that has survived in the heart, soul, and ethos of the Jewish people, and reveals the immediacy of the messianic presence in our day—in our own lives. Compelling and controversial, There Is No Messiah...and You’re It inspires us to embody the noblest values of Jewish tradition—prayer, study, mitzvoth, and tzedakah—and embrace our own messianic potential to heal the world.




The Messiah Before Jesus


Book Description

Publisher Fact Sheet Argues that there was a "messianic forerunner" to Jesus named Menachem who lived a generation earlier & served as a sort of role model for Jesus & his messianic movement.




Delayed Response


Book Description

A celebration of waiting throughout history, and of its importance for connection, understanding, and intimacy in human communication We have always been conscious of the wait for life-changing messages, whether it be the time it takes to receive a text message from your love, for a soldier’s family to learn news from the front, or for a space probe to deliver data from the far reaches of the solar system. In this book in praise of wait times, award-winning author Jason Farman passionately argues that the delay between call and answer has always been an important part of the message. Traveling backward from our current era of Twitter and texts, Farman shows how societies have worked to eliminate waiting in communication and how they have interpreted those times’ meanings. Exploring seven eras and objects of waiting—including pneumatic mail tubes in New York, Elizabethan wax seals, and Aboriginal Australian message sticks—Farman offers a new mindset for waiting. In a rebuttal to the demand for instant communication, Farman makes a powerful case for why good things can come to those who wait.