A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven

A new book that celebrates the Jewish life-spiral, fusing ancient teachings of the Bible and rabbis with new rituals for the twenty-first century

More than twenty years ago, Arthur Ocean Waskow published a book, Seasons of Our Joy, that followed the flow of Jewish festivals through the year. It became a classic. Now, in A Time for Every Purpose Under Heaven, Rabbi Waskow and his wife, Phyllis Ocean Berman, have brought us a book for the other great cycle of Jewish life--from birth to death. They have woven handbook and history, spiritual guide and their own personal experience, ancient ceremonies and those brought forward by Jewish women today, into the single pattern of a well-lived life--a unity.

The book moves from a new "covenant of washing"--the ritual act of parents washing a newborn daughter's feet to celebrate her arrival--to an examination of how k'tubot, or marriage contracts, could be revised to affirm the commitments partners today need to make with each other, to ceremonies that celebrate the transformations of midlife, to enriching the rituals of grief in order to walk mourners through their own next spiral in the path of their lives.