Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World

The suffering that brings you to despair and even desperation can--with healing--become a source of hope, purpose and blessing.

This wise and helpful guide explores the nature of personal suffering and brokenness and the potential for personal crisis as a source of strength and renewal instead of despair and death. Examining the personal journeys of biblical and historical figures such as Moses, Maimonides, Abraham Lincoln and Martin Buber--as well as the author's own personal experience with despair--it looks at brokenness as an inescapable element of the human condition. It traces the path of suffering from despair to depression to desperation to the turning point--healing--when first-hand knowledge of suffering can be transformed into blessing.

Rabbi Elie Kaplan Spitz is the author of Healing from Despair: Choosing Wholeness in a Broken World and Does the Soul Survive? A Jewish Journey to Belief in Afterlife, Past Lives & Living with Purpose (both Jewish Lights). A spiritual leader and scholar specializing in topics of spirituality and Judaism, he teaches, writes and speaks to a wide range of audiences. He has served as the rabbi of Congregation B'nai Israel in Tustin, California, for more than a decade and is a member of the Rabbinical Assembly Committee of Law and Standards.

Erica Shapiro Taylor is a volunteer with Tarbut V'Torah Day School and a court appointed special advocate.

Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, MD, a psychiatrist, rabbi and frequent lecturer on a broad range of topics including spirituality and self-esteem, is author of over fifty books, including Happiness and the Human Spirit: The Spirituality of Becoming the Best You Can Be; A Formula for Proper Living: Practical Lessons from Life and Torah (both Jewish Lights); Waking Up Just in Time; The Spiritual Self and Getting Up When You're Down. He is the founder and medical director emeritus of Gateway Rehabilitation Center. For more information, visit www.abrahamtwerski.com.