Rabbi Goldstein’s new book available now

Niles Elliot Goldstein uses eight questions found in the Bible to explore the human journey from cradle to grave, confronting such important existential experiences and themes as mortality, responsibility, forbidden knowledge, sin, and the afterlife. By interweaving texts from the Bible, commentaries, philosophy, psychology, and literature with his own experiences, Goldstein also meditates on midlife. This book will appeal to believers and nonbelievers alike and is aimed at anyone who has ever faced a challenge or wondered what life is all about.


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Rabbi Goldstein's other books

Gonzo Judaism

Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein, founder and Rabbi Emeritus of The New Shul in New York City, says that most conventional Jewish institutions are out-of-touch and have relied too much on nostalgia, guilt, and fear—none of which resonate with modern Jews. He challenges Jews to adopt the “gonzo” spirit—the rebellious, risk-taking attitude associated with the gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson—and to take creative, innovative steps to reshape and revitalize contemporary Judaism.


God at the Edge

Here is a book about adventure, raw experience, and facing inner demons. Niles Elliot Goldstein is a young rabbi who sets out to find God in tough and often scary situations: dogsledding above the Arctic Circle, taking the Silk Road into Central Asia without a visa, being chased by a grizzly bear, cruising with DEA agents through the South Bronx, and spending a night in jail in New York City's Tombs.

The Challenge of the Soul

Rabbi Niles Elliot Goldstein draws from his own hard-won insights and personal experiences as a congregational rabbi, martial artist, FBI chaplain, and limit-pusher and interweaves them with the teachings of sages, biblical figures, and thinkers of all stripes to help us get beyond our own perceived limitations and face life’s challenges with fearlessness and fortitude.


Forests of the Night

Rabbi Goldstein explores the concept of the fear of God in the Hasidic intellectual tradition, comparing and contrasting the writings of two of the most important figures in the Jewish mystical movement, Rabbi Dov Baer, The Great Maggid of Mezeritch and Rabbi Yaakov Yosef of Polonnoye.

Craving the Divine

Covering a wide array of emotions and states of being—disorientation, panic, loneliness, yearning, anger, determination, surrender and emergence—Goldstein (Gonzo Judaism), founding rabbi of the New Shul in New York City, above all simply reminds readers that we are human.


Duties of the Soul

This outstanding anthology of 13 essays by esteemed leaders of the Reform rabbinate re-examines the role of mitzvot in liberal Judaism as viewed through philosophical, experiential, and practical contexts.

Judaism and Spiritual Ethics

This text addresses issues of Jewish conduct in the exploration of spiritual ethics, based on the thirteenth century Sefer Ma’a lot Hamidot, "Book of Virtues and Values."


Lost Souls

These days it is no longer just adolescents who feel that the universe is falling apart. In Lost Souls, Niles Goldstein writes of the chaos and fear so many of us experience in our public and private lives and makes it clear that we are not—nor have we ever been—alone in our angst.

Spiritual Manifestos

In an era of do-it-yourself spirituality and shopping-mall churches, is there any place for religion in its more traditional, institutional forms? The contributors to this volume, all full-time religious workers mostly in their 30s, share a common belief that traditional religion can be vital and relevant.





"There is nothing so whole as a heart that's been broken."

Rabbi Menachem Mendel of Kotsk