Permission to Receive

by Lawrence Kelemen

Unknown Binding

About the author

Lawrence Kelemen is the founder and current Rosh Kollel of the Center for Kehillah Development, a leadership development project devoted to the growth and wellbeing of Jewish communities worldwide. He also created the International Organization of Mussar Vaadim, a network of self-development organizations focusing on character development in more than two dozen communities in Israel and North America. He has been honored as a visiting scholar at universities and communal organizations around the world. During his decade-long tenure at Neve Yerushalayim in Jerusalem, Rabbi Kelemen influenced thousands of students. He is also the author of many journal articles and books, among them: Permission to Believe (1990) Permission to Receive (1994), and To Kindle a Soul (2001), and he is the translator of the classical text of ancient pedagogical theory, Planting and Building (1999).

Reviews

[Rachael Adam · Rating 1 out of 5]

Read this along with 'permission to believe' over Shabbat some years ago. A book designed for very devout Orthodox Jews but anyone else will not be convinced by it. In fact this book did not do great things for my faith.

I was not convinced and i may be muddling the two books up, but 'Permission to Believe' if I remember right is arguments for G-d's existence in general whereas Permission to Receive is about Judaism specifically. While I have my beliefs this will not help you to deepen your faith at all.

The author states among other things that Judaism is the only religion in which a miracle was witnessed by thousands of people at once (ie the giving of The Torah to Moses) because he states that this was witnessed by the entire Jewish people at the time. He says that this cannot be wrong because of so many people seeing the same thing and therefore it must have happened. Christianity has something similar (The Feeding of the 5 Thousand) and he doesn't explain why this is different. And this is assuming that either event happened and wasn't just made up hundreds of years after the fact.

It was a completely unconvincing book unfortunately. You cannot rationally prove any of this happened. There are much better books about Jewish faith such as 'This is My G-d' by Herman Wouk among others.