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Reviews of Climbing Jacob's Ladder

Jewish Action, Winter 2003, By Hillel Goldberg

Question: Why have all manner of Chassidic courts reestablished themselves after the destruction of the Holocaust while schools of musar have not?... more >>

Central Council of American Rabbis Journal, Summer 2003, By Ruth Gais, Ph.D

When he was a young man, Alan Morinis traveled many miles to exotic lands in search of wisdom... more >>

The Forward, May 3, 2002, By Hillel Goldberg

In about 1858, a 47-year-old rabbi at the height of his influence with a substantial following changed course... more >>

Jewish Western Bulletin - Vancouver, BC, April 19, 2002, Pat Johnson, Reporter

Vancouver writer Alan Morinis has created a beautiful book on the little-known spiritual tradition called mussar. In Climbing Jacob's Ladder: One Man's Journey to Rediscover a Jewish Spiritual Tradition, Morinis brings readers along on his journey for spiritual fulfilment... more >>

The Canadian Jewish News, April 5, 2002, By Bernard Baskin

Born and reared in Toronto, in a secular, left-wing Jewish environment, Alan Morinis completed his doctorate at Oxford University, which he attended on a Rhodes Scholarship... more >>

The Jewish Review - Portland, OR, April 8, 2002, Abby Layton

I have made it my mission the last few years to find what Judaism has to say about working with difficult emotional states.As a psychotherapist,I am not easily impressed with simple notions of how we might improve... more >>

New York Jewish Press, April 5 ,2002, Reviewed by Michael Skakun

It has been said that every philosophy is tied to a stage of life. Youth, with its soaring spirit, leans to romanticism; age, with its sharper apprehension of night, veers toward stoicism and the like... more >>

The Philadelphia Inquirer, March 30, 2002, By Murray Dubin

Alan Morinis was despondent. It was 1997, and his business had failed... more >>

The Jewish Week (New York City), March 29, 2002, Sandee Brawarsky - Jewish Week Book Critic

A major business failure sent Alan Morinis on a dark, downward spiral. The filmmaker was angry, ashamed and shocked by how far he had strayed from his core values... more >>

Los Angeles Times, March 23, 2002

'Climbing Jacob's Ladder' is a compelling portrait of the relationship between a student and a teacher, and Morinis' journey--as an assimilated Jew entering the Orthodox world of yeshiva--raises important questions about the meaning of Judaism and the search for spirituality in this world... more >>

The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, March 22, 2002, By Gaby Wenig

Day after day I was consumed by blackness ... I spent hours immobilized on the couch ... Day after day I cried with remorse... more >>

Jewish Bulletin of Northern California, March 15, 2002, Mirka Knaster

If I were to ask a random group of people to name a path of transformation, I can guess how many would bring up Judaism. Sadly, very few... more >>

Publishers Weekly, January 14, 2002

This moving account of a secular Jew's search for spirituality begins with his explorations of Eastern religions in India and ends with his quest's eventual culmination in Jewish tradition... more >>

Kirkus Reviews, December 15, 2001

One man's search for enlightenment through "Mussar," a Jewish spiritual movement that focuses on mindfulness and ethics in everyday life... more >>

Victoria Times-Colonist, A Review by Suzanne Kort Litman, Undated

Is it possible to change for the better? And if so, how do you do it?... more >>

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