Mirrors in Time: A Psycho-Spiritual Journey through the Jewish Year

The Jewish mystical tradition regards the rituals and stories of the Holy Day cycle as symbolic representations of internal spiritual and psychological development, helping us to translate the experience into the language of contemporary psychological theories. Joel Ziff combines his rich knowledge of psychology with close readings of Jewish texts to present us with Mirrors in Time, a clinically illustrated, practical guide that integrates the wisdom of the Jewish mystical tradition with contemporary psychological perspectives.

The Holy Days provide a context similar to that experienced in psychotherapy. They create time to reflect upon the challenges we face and consider how we might best respond. The texts of Jewish tradition describe a process through rituals, images, stories, and symbols. These can be difficult to understand because they are ancient, agrarian, hierarchical, and patriarchal in nature. Contemporary psychological perspectives can often articulate obscure mystical concepts. In his effort to translate the ideas of such mystical thinkers as Shneur Zalman of Lyady into a modern, 20th-century framework, Ziff includes theories developed by Freud, Jung, Assagioli, Perls, Erickson, and their students.

The unique character of each Holy Day is experienced in the context of one's journey through the year; a journey that includes births and deaths, beginnings and endings, opportunities and crises, successes and failures. Daily, we recreate and reinvent ourselves, giving birth to a new identity.