Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World
The suffering that brings you to despair and even desperation can—with healing—become a source of hope, purpose and blessing.
Are you:
- Feeling anxious?
- Feeling depressed because of the loss of health, a relationship or a job?
- Grieving the loss of a loved one?
- Grieving loss by a suicide?
- Feeling hopeless?
- Concerned about a friend who has suicidal thoughts?
This wise and helpful guide explores the nature of personal suffering and brokenness and the potential for personal crisis as a source of strength and renewal instead of despair and death. Examining the personal journeys of biblical and historical figures such as Moses, Maimonides, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Buber—as well as the author's own personal experience with despair—it looks at brokenness as an inescapable element of the human condition. It traces the path of suffering from despair to depression to desperation to the turning point—healing—when first-hand knowledge of suffering can be transformed into blessing.
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Book details
- Author
- Elie Kaplan Spitz
- Imprint
- Jewish Lights, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Formats
- Paperback, Hardcover
- Subjects
- Self-Help › Spiritual
Religion › Spirituality - Topics
- depression and anxiety · grief and loss · Jewish spirituality · mental health · hope and healing · personal crisis · spiritual growth · suicide and despair
- ISBN-13
- 9781580234368 (Paperback)9781683361077 (Hardcover)
About the author
RABBI ELIE KAPLAN SPITZ is Rabbi Emeritus of Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California, having served there as senior rabbi for over 33 years. His books include Increasing Wholeness: Jewish Wisdom and Guided Meditations to Strengthen and Calm Body, Heart, Mind and Spirit, Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World, and Does the Soul Survive?: A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives & Living with Purpose.
Spitz holds degrees from The Jewish Theological Seminary and Boston University School of Law. He served on the Rabbinical Assembly Committee of Law and Standards from 1994 to 2004 and again from 2008 to 2016, and as a Global Justice Fellow for the American Jewish World Service from 2016 to 2017.
When not writing, Spitz teaches the philosophy of Jewish law at the University of Judaism. His work centers on spirituality and Judaism.