Though God may some­times seem dis­tant and removed, divin­i­ty is wrapped up in our world like a snail is insep­a­ra­ble from its shell. 

Our spir­i­tu­al lives should be like a per­son shov­el­ing manure, clean­ing out the muck to uplift and trans­form even the things that seem repul­sive. 

Our spir­i­tu­al jour­ney should have us stand, walk, skip, and fall, trav­el­ing a crooked path until we real­ize we’ve been only at the gate­way the entire time. 

We should imag­ine our­selves ladies-in-wait­ing to God, as hid­den doves, as trees stretch­ing from earth to heav­en. 

We should see God as our nurs­ing moth­er, a sooth­ing spring­time rain, a shin­ing light, an over­whelm­ing ocean. 

These strange, beau­ti­ful, new images for what it means to encounter God in the world are deeply root­ed in the cen­turies-old texts of the Jew­ish mys­ti­cal tra­di­tion, par­tic­u­lar­ly in the ser­mons and teach­ings of the ear­ly Ḥa­sidic spir­i­tu­al mas­ters. 

Draw­ing on their wis­dom, each of these 70 texts — cov­er­ing the tra­di­tion­al Torah read­ing and hol­i­day cycles — includes a sum­ma­ry, orig­i­nal trans­la­tion (often appear­ing in Eng­lish for the first time), foot­notes and com­men­tary, a con­tem­po­rary per­son­al and spir­i­tu­al reflec­tion, and open-end­ed guid­ing ques­tions to aid you on your own journey. 

Togeth­er, these images and texts can open your mind to new, deep­er, more cre­ative ways of think­ing about what it means to live a mean­ing­ful, mind­ful life.