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Informationen zum Autor Steve Leder is the senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles. After receiving his degree in writing and graduating cum laude from Northwestern University, and spending time studying at Trinity College, Oxford University, Leder received a master's degree in Hebrew letters in 1986 and rabbinical ordination in 1987 from Hebrew Union College. He is the author of three books: The Extraordinary Nature of Ordinary Things , More Money Than God: Living a Rich Life Without Losing Your Soul , and the bestseller More Beautiful Than Before: How Suffering Transforms Us . Klappentext The national bestseller From the author of the bestselling More Beautiful Than Before comes an inspiring book about loss based on his most popular sermon. As the senior rabbi of one of the largest synagogues in the world, Steve Leder has learned over and over again the many ways death teaches us how to live and love more deeply by showing us not only what is gone but also the beauty of what remains. This inspiring and comforting book takes us on a journey through the experience of loss that is fundamental to everyone. Yet even after having sat beside thousands of deathbeds, Steve Leder the rabbi was not fully prepared for the loss of his own father. It was only then that Steve Leder the son truly learned how loss makes life beautiful by giving it meaning and touching us with love that we had not felt before. Enriched by Rabbi Leder's irreverence, vulnerability, and wicked sense of humor, this heartfelt narrative is filled with laughter and tears, the wisdom of millennia and modernity, and, most of all, an unfolding of the profound and simple truth that in loss we gain more than we ever imagined. Leseprobe We were a small group, most of us a year out of college and just back from Israel, where we had spent the first of our five-year curriculum learning Hebrew. Now that we were stateside, it was time to learn everything else required to serve our pulpits and keep our tradition alive. That included a field trip to death's storefront, the mortuary. Looking at the shallow, twin-bed-sized porcelain table on stainless-steel legs with a drain toward the bottom and a coiled hose above, I realized that I would have to face a lot of death in my career. You'd think I would have figured that out before I entered the seminary, but then again, how many people who decide what they want to be at fifteen really think things through? "This is where we wash and prepare the bodies," the mortician said matter-of-factly. He went on to describe what happened from the moment he arrived at a home or hospital to retrieve a body to the moment a family drove away from the gravesite, leaving their loved one buried beneath the earth. That porcelain platform for washing and prepping, the casket showroom and the little signs with prices, the book of flower arrangements and the makeup room shocked me. I had been to only one funeral in my life: my grandmother's. I was seven years old. The only thing I remember was my auntie Geta crying in a way I had never heard anyone cry before. My classmates and I made a lot of sick jokes as we moved from room to room. But there was no denying death was going to be a regular part of my life, so I had a lot to learn. I became a rabbi for a lot of both simple and complicated reasons. My father and uncle owned a junkyard, where I worked hard as a kid. Hard work was the only thing that seemed to get my father's attention; it was what he expected and what he valued. Any creative pursuit for which I showed potential-writing, music, acting-was summarily dismissed as frivolous. Sports were laughable. And my young mother, Barbara, overburdened as she was with five kids, made it clear when we were very young that she wasn't the carpooling, den mother, team mom sort of mother other kids on the block had. It was a...
