Celebrating Life: Finding Happiness in Unexpected Places

(Paperback)

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Following the painful loss of his father, former Chief Rabbi Sacks began to learn how to celebrate life in a new way. 'I have tried to say what happiness is, how we make it, how we lose it, and how we sometimes walk past it without recognising it. Happiness isn't somewhere else, it's where we are. It isn't something we don't have, we do. It isn't fantasy, it's reality experienced in a certain way. Happiness is a close relative of faith.' Sacks discovered where happiness lives, often in unexpected places, through family, community, friendship and responsibilities. He also found it through a renewed relationship with God who spoke to his deepest needs. Based, in part, on his columns in the UK's Times newspaper, Celebrating Life is for people of all faiths and none. It shows us how to be human and, in becoming so, how we can touch the divine.

Reviews

"In his new and brilliantly executed book Celebrating Life, a collection of 58 short essays whose origin was in the Credo column in the Times of London, Sacks has written what is surely the most bracing and cogent popular treatise on religion and modern life that we now possess The steely determined INTELLIGENCE of Rabbi Sacks continues to impress and to inspire us in its overwhelming profundity .Celebrating Life is yet further evidence that Rabbi Jonathan Sacks stands alone among modern theologians in his eloquent espousal of Religious Humanism that brooks no compromise in either religious or secular terms. This book is required reading for anyone who thinks and feels about the things that are closest to us as human beings." -Sephardic Heritage Update, 4/22/04
In this inspiring collection of columns written for The Times, Jonathan Sacks, Chief Rabbi of Britain and the Commonwealth since 1991, reflects on the art of celebrating life . It is salutary to savor the words of this respected spiritual leader and to see how forcefully he lifts up and affirms what is best in religion. www.spiritualityHealth.com, November 10, 2004

Author Bio

Sir Jonathan Sacks, who died in late 2020, was Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of Britain and the Commonwealth. He was the author of numerous books, including Celebrating Life, From Optimism to Hope, The Persistence of Faith and The Dignity of Difference, for which he won a Grawemeyer Award in Religion.