Sefer Ha-Aggadah/The Book of Legends: Legends from the Talmud and Midrash is not a new work in any sense of the word, but it is a crucial addition to every Jewish library. About a hundred years ago, Hayyim Bialik and Y.H.Rawnitzky organized much (certainly not all) of the staggering wealth of classical Rabbinic stories, homilies, interpretations, legends and everyday tales in a way that's easy to access for folks of all backgrounds of Jewish education. Here, you don't need to have a yeshiva education in order to get at the yummy stories and dip a little deeper into how Jews do Torah. There are Hebrew and English editions available, and some friends of mine are even about to start a year-long Sefer Ha-Aggadah blog/reading group, so it's a perfect time to get in on the fun.

Also canon-worthy is Yehuda Amichai's Open Closed Open, searing and beautiful poems about faith, God, the Jewish people, Israel, and how achingly difficult it is to be a human being sometimes. These are poems of the deepest kind of Jewish engagement: the kind that refuses to be placated by easy answers, that confronts God with the prooftexts of our own lives.  There is nothing else like them.

Lastly, a vote for a book that's not technically Jewish, but of indisputable value to those who care about faith and feminism: Carol Lee Flinders' At the Root of this Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger with a Feminist Thirst. Flinders, a scholar versed in Christian and Hindu contemplative practices, asks some of the most important questions of our day about the ways feminism and spiritual practice might contradict each other, and how they might be able to, in the end, save one another. I might spend the rest of my career referring back to the book's fifth chapter.

Each Yom Kippur my husband and I follow the same routine. Between services, we stroll through the park with a copy of The Selected Poetry of Yehuda Amichai and take turns reading aloud to each other. Why has this book, a selection of the author's poetry between 1955 and 1985, become so integral to our day of contemplation? For me there are few more powerful testaments to loss, grief, renewal and the fleeting passage of time than this essential collection by the Israeli poet who C.K. Williams called the "shrewdest and most solid of poetic intelligences." Amichai poems are often fabulist renderings of love, mourning and war through the prism of Jewish history and Biblical narrative. As a writer, I turn to them to understand exuberant simile and metaphor ("You had a laughter of grapes/many loud green laughs" ("Six Poems for Tamar")) and as a human being, I seek comfort from them, a salve for life's challenges. My favorite poems encapsulate Jewish traumas of the twentieth century in intimate family moments—a wife brushing her hair, say, or a Yom Kippur observed without the narrator's parents. Redemption may be rare but even during the most difficult times, optimism, however fleeting, manages to survive: "And hopes come to me like bold seafarers,/like the discoverers of continents coming to an island,/ and stay for a day or two/and rest…/And then they set sail." (The U.N. Headquarters in the High Commissioner's House in Jerusalem").