Kosher Emotions Book

Writer, preacher and self-publicist extraordinaire Shmuley (Kosher Sex) Boteach spent 11 years as Rabbi at Oxford, where he was founder and director of the university's Chaim ("To Life") Society. Then, as now, the value of the pearls of his increasingly fecund mind was much debated, but all were distinguished by his unshakeable confidence in his own advice. Kosher Emotions is the latest in his guides for the perplexed, based on his favourite Jewish philosopher, the 12th-century Moses Maimonides. Spanning the gamut of emotions from depression, loneliness and grief, through anger, guilt and shame, to compassion, happiness and joy, he pauses mid-way at fear, climaxes with love and crosses the finishing-line (as he puts it) with the "coalescence of opposites"--a discourse on the relationship between love and fear in our everyday lives. The mind, Boteach writes, is valuable as the guidance system directing the emotions, the means to an end rather than the end itself. The secret to successful living "is to find a proper balance between heaven and earth, ego and selflessness, joy and seriousness, indulgence and sacrifice. And within that great challenge, there is nothing so difficult or so important as harmonising the intellect with the emotions."In his "guided tour of the heart", Boteach seeks to achieve that harmony and balance, through a rambling analysis of relationships--his own and others'--peppered with frequent excursus into kabbalah, talmudics and world literature. But the ride is bumpy, the destination distant, and at journey's end--as Pascal declared--"the heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of." For all that, Shmuley Boteach demonstrates his skill as a physician of the mind, though he is perhaps still a book or two away from setting himself up as a heart specialist. --Meir PersoffRead More