A Spiritual Life

Reviews / Votes

"This is a book full of heart and intelligence, rich with humor and emotion, no punches pulled. Honoring the past, it turns our faces finally toward a future-hopefully-of change and growth in Jewish life." --Alicia Ostriker, author, Nakedness of the Fathers and The Little Space: Selected and New Poems

"Merle Feld captures the feelings, frustrations, and hopes of a generation of American Jewish women, and her words will forever be the anthem, the emblem, of the late-twentieth-century Jewish feminist movement."-- Rabbi Nina Beth Cardin, editor and translator of Out of the Depths I Call to You: A Book of Prayers for the Married Jewish Woman

"This book cannot be pigeonholed--it evokes recognition and assent in relation to the complex experiences of being a child, being a child dealing with aging parents, being a friend and a lover, being a mother, being a (Jewish) woman at the end of the twentieth century, being a human being seeking a spiritual life. In describing her effort to live a spiritually meaningful life and to find spirituality in everyday experience, Feld names experiences shared by many women, yet seldom fully articulated, or articulated this clearly and well." -- Judith Plaskow, author of Standing Again at Sinai: Judaism from a Feminist Perspective

"You stop by Merle's house one morning. You have a cup of coffee with her at the kitchen table. She tells you a few of her stories. You look at your watch: it's late afternoon. Or, she brings out a poem she just finished. Your eyes fill with tears; it's Yom Kippur. Stories and poetry so captivating, powerful, wise, you will never be the same. An extraordinary achievement!" -- Lawrence Kushner, author of Invisible Lines of Connection

"Merle Feld speaks honestly about the lives of all women in this deep and penetrating volume. A Spiritual Life is a delight to the mind and the heart." -- Sharon Strassfeld, author of Everything I Know and coeditor of The Second Jewish Catalog: Sources and Resources

"Feld breaks new ground in spiritual autobiography--locating spiritual growth in the daily life of a daughter, wife, mother, and friend. Her distinctive voice is characterized by a simplicity and honest humility that makes the profundity of her insights all the more startling. She has a gift for making that which may seem esoteric, accessible; and that which may seem ordinary or mundane, transcendent. This book is one of a kind." -- Gail Twersky Reimer, Director,Jewish Women's Archive, and coeditor of Reading Ruth: Contemporary Women Reclaim a Sacred Story

"Interweaving poems with personal reflections, Merle Feld takes the reader on a spiritual journey through well-known paths not often associated with the sacred. In search of a meaningful Jewish self-identity, she draws on her own experiences as wife, mother, and Jewishly-committed feminist, transforming everyday events into occasions for spontaneous prayer. Feld's honest, sometimes irreverent poems are witty, wise, and religiously insightful. Worthy of a wide audience, this book should be of particular interest to feminist theologians and historians; to Jewish women who, like Feld, struggle to find their place in the Jewish world; and to anyone seeking new paths towards the holy." -- Ellen Umansky, coeditor of Four Centuries of Jewish Women's Spirituality: A Sourcebook

"Feld gives voice to a generation of American Jewish women." -- Rabbi Jane Litman, coeditor of Lifecycles Vol. 2: Jewish Women on Biblical Themes in Contemporary Life