How the Talmud Can Change Your Life

""Liel Leibovitz’s inspired and inspiring volume…is itself alive with wisdom, humor, and the generous lightning energy that illuminates the world."" -- Jonathan Rosen, author of Best Minds: A Story of Friendship, Madness, and the Tragedy of Good Intentions ""According to Leonard Cohen, the Talmud is ‘a manual for living with defeat.’ Liel Leibovitz, a biographer of Cohen, shows us?in magnificent, hair-splitting detail?how that works in practice. With much learning, unfailing insight, and storytelling skill, Leibovitz unveils a fascinating world of ancient sages and colorful rabbis, of sinners and saints, of wisdom found and lost and then found again. Read this book. You may realize that you have been a Talmudist all your life without knowing it. Or else that you want to be one for the rest of your life."" -- Costica Bradatan, author of In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility ""[A] stellar outing.… While the adjective ‘talmudic’ is often synonymous with ‘abstruse’ or ‘hair-splitting,’ [Liel] Leibovitz argues that the Talmud itself interrogates ‘larger questions of what, if anything, this life is about,’ tackling such evergreen topics as ‘how to love, how to grieve, how to fight, how to be a better spouse, [and] how to fix the government,’ without moralizing or leaning on cut-and-dried answers.… Meticulously analyzed and surprisingly accessible."" -- Publishers Weekly, starred review ""We can understand reality, writes [Liel Leibovitz], as ‘a biblical account, maddening and inscrutable and demanding that we investigate and complicate every intricacy until it makes sense to us, allowing us to grow the more we understand.’ The Talmud, Leibovitz maintains, opens a path to self-knowledge.… An erudite and accessible examination of a baffling work."" -- Kirkus Reviews