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About the author:
Rabbi Barry Leff is a "businessman by day and rabbi by night." He lives in Jerusalem, and is active in human rights and interfaith work. He has been thinking seriously about the meaning of life since he was 18 and living in Thailand.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

RABBI LEFF'S BLOG

God, Torah, and the Meaning of Life

Musings on the things that matter

By Rabbi Barry Leff

Excerpts from God, Torah, and the Meaning of Life:

On faith:
"People who have a deep faith in God seem different than other people. They are more at peace, better equipped to deal with the ups and downs that life throws their way. Having faith in God can totally transform your life. But is there a way to cultivate faith in God if you don't already have it? You can. But it's
not easy."

On God:
"God loves you. But I don't blame you if you don't know it. Most rabbis forget to point this out to their congregations."

"Even intelligent designers can sometimes do things that are pretty random, or that fail. Look at the Edsel! Or as God (played by George Burns) put it in the movie "Oh, God!" "Avocados. I should have made the pits smaller."

On the Messiah:
"Kabbalah, Jewish mysticism, teaches that the Messiah will not come until we have done "tikkun olam," healing or repair of the world. There is a teaching that says the Messiah will not come until three days after he is no longer needed. According to this view of the Messianic age, the Messiah doesn’t come to make everything perfect -- instead, the Messiah's arrival is sort of a "graduation ceremony," an acknow-ledgement that we created the kind of world into which the Messiah could come."

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People have probably been asking "What's the meaning of life?" since they could first think in terms of language to form the question.

Plato said the meaning of life is to attain the highest form of knowledge, the Idea of the Good.

The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy says the answer is 42.

God, Torah, and the Meaning of Life is but the latest attempt to answer that most challenging of questions. It strives not so much to answer the question for you, as to give you more questions to think about, and places to go looking for answers.

As Rabbi Leff writes in "God, Torah, and the Meaning of Life," "Ultimately, each person has to find his/her own way to God, and there are many paths to God. No one person, no one religion has all the answers for all the people."

But many books provide some answers for some people. We hope that you will find some answers -- and perhaps some new questions as well -- within these pages.

Publisher: The Neshamah Center Press, Jerusalem