Now available! The Jewish Friendship Trail Guidebook 6 Self-Guided Walking/Bicycling Jewish Boston History Tours Covers Boston, Brookline, and Cambridge Softcover 198 pages with maps & b/w photos Print out this Book Order Form to ordernow!

Now available! The Ten Commandments Guidebook Ways to Self-Struggle with Classic Morals In Song, Poetry, and Prose Covers 10 Commandments Plus One Other! Softcover 153 pages with practical suggestions pages! Print out this Book Order Form to order now!

Click here for Sheaylot by Michael Alan Ross

Copyright Michael Alan Ross, 2007.
All Rights Reserved.

Email: Boston Walks Publishers

Telephone: 617-489-5020

Can a post-denominational, American Jew elucidate both spiritual and practical ways to self-struggle with our Ten Commandments? In The Ten Commandments Guidebook, Mr. Ross uses his creative poetry, prose, and lyrics to construct modern midrashim and piyyutim, prosaic and poetic commentaries, to meet such a challenge. Rabbi Ellen Pildis, a post-denominational rabbi, offers praise of his text on the book's back cover. New Guidebook Re-Visits The Ten Commandments Can a modern, post-denominational, committed, American Jew find meaningful ways to struggle with our Ten Commandments? Michael Alan Ross, author of the newly published, The Ten Commandments Guidebook, offers many such ways. Mr. Ross, author of BostonWalks' The Jewish Friendship Trail Guidebook - 6 Self-guided Jewish History Walk Tours of Downtown Boston, now has written The Ten Commandments Guidebook as a spiritual invitation to the Ten Commandments. In The Ten Commandments Guidebook, Mr. Ross offers a personal and creative perspective of the Ten Commandments by means of his original poetry, prose, and song lyrics. His writings are drawn from a lifetime of Jewish American experiences. Here is an example of his original, creative, poetic questioning,Sheaylot:

Sheaylot Copyright Michael Alan Ross 2007. All rights reserved. When a man or a woman grows into a marriage with God; how does that commitment affect the responsibilities and privileges of each? If honoring each other is holy, if learning to honor is holy, if practicing respect is holy; how does limiting by gender the responsibility and privilege to honor, attain, and practice advance holiness? If words create an existence, if words produce meaning and fullness, if words confirm relationships; is it possible that Torah would not want full and equal participation of women and men in the Jewish story, in the rabbinic understandings, and in tefilla and minhagim? If Hashem intended that men and women have distinct and separate responsibilities and privileges; wouldn’t God have been wise enough to have placed men and women on different planets? Does God really give men alone the responsibility and privilege of transmitting our story, our interpretations, and our celebrations? Does God simply relegate to women a different role? Are the neshamas of men, women, and God intrinsically different? Have we confused the separate biological responsibilities and privileges of insemination and carrying/feeding of birth with the souls of those who inseminate and carry/feed? Is not each of us within the image of God? Can we overcome our egotistical commitment to frozen writings and re-imagine and re-interpret our texts? Have we not done such dynamic interpretation before? Can we breathe more life into our marriage among ourselves and God? If we will it, can we not find halachically responsible and acceptable ways to allow pluralistic responsibilities and privileges for men AND women within traditional Judaism?