One God Clapping: The Spiritual Path of a Zen Rabbi
From Zen Buddhist practitioner to rabbi, East meets West in this firsthand account of a spiritual journey.
Rabbi Alan Lew is known as the Zen Rabbi, a leader in the Jewish meditation movement who works to bring two ancient religious traditions into our everyday lives. One God Clapping is the story of his roundabout yet continuously provoking spiritual odyssey. It is also the story of the meeting between East and West in America, and the ways in which the encounter has transformed how all of us understand God and ourselves.
Winner of the PEN / Joseph E. Miles Award
Like a Zen parable or a Jewish folk tale, One God Clapping unfolds as a series of stories, each containing a moment of revelation or instruction that, while often unexpected, is never simple or contrived. One God Clapping, like the life of the remarkable Alan Lew himself, is a bold experiment in the integration of Eastern and Western ways of looking at and living in the world.
We earn a commission for purchases made through the following links.
Book details
- Author
- Alan Lew, Sherril Jaffe
- Imprint
- Jewish Lights, an imprint of Turner Publishing Company
- Published
- Pages
- 336
- Formats
- Paperback, Hardcover
- Subjects
- Biography & Autobiography › Religious
- Topics
- spiritual memoir · Zen Buddhism · Judaism · Jewish meditation · interfaith spirituality · spiritual journey · East meets West · rabbis
- ISBN-13
- 9781580231152 (Paperback)9781683362296 (Hardcover)
About the author
ALAN LEW is the rabbi of Congregation Beth Sholom in San Francisco and a leading figure in developing new forms of Jewish spiritual expression.
Lew’s work combining Zen meditation with Jewish spirituality has been featured on ABC News, The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, Religion and Ethics Newsweekly, and National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. He also serves as moderator of Mosaic, CBS’s weekly religious talk show.
When not engaged in rabbinic work, Lew conducts workshops and retreats on Jewish meditation throughout the United States and Canada. This practice of exploring meditation in Jewish contexts is central to his work in spiritual expression.