Rabbi Nilton Bonder – författare

The Jews are known for their intuitive genius in getting out of a pickle. With their long history of persecution, they''ve developed a knack for escaping seemingly hopeless predicaments: when your back is against the wall, you learn to think fast. Centuries of reasoning and interpreting the Holy Scriptures have also contributed to the Jews'' skill in solving the most puzzling problems. This astute way of thinking is known in Yiddish as yiddishe kop, literally "Jewish head."Through Jewish humor, folklore, and tales of the great rabbis, Rabbi Nilton Bonder presents the basic principles of this creative approach to thinking, which sees beyond appearances to the hidden truth of any problem. Once these are mastered, they may in turn be applied to many "impossible" situations that arise in business and in life.The book focuses on four levels of solving a problem:   1. On the level of Information, we approach problems literally, in response to the obvious and the concrete.   2. On the level of Understanding, we obtain concealed information through techniques such as questioning, reframing, and emptying the mind.   3. On the level of Wisdom, we access the world of intuition, where a "fool" can achieve the impossible by relying on feelings, premonitions, dreams, and coincidences.   4. On the level of Reverence, we discover the hidden Reality behind appearances. This is the realm of those who dare to take risks, make commitments, and learn from mistakes, who act out of their living experience without relying solely on reason and conceptual thinking.

Rabbi Bonder turns a few conventional ideas on their heads as he identifies the forces at play in individual, social, and spiritual transformation. Many people believe that obedience to the established moral order leads to the well-being of society as well as the salvation of their souls. On the contrary, says Bonder, the human spirit is nourished by the impulse to betray and transgress the ways of the past. Even the Bible legitimizes our God-given urge to disobey in order to evolve, grow, and transcend. It is this "immoral" soul of ours that impels us to do battle with God—and out of this clash, Bonder predicts, a new humanity will emerge. In the course of discussion, he examines a variety of intriguing issues touching on religion, science, and culture, including the findings of evolutionary psychology; the relation of body and soul; infidelity in marriage; the stereotype of Jew as traitor; sacrifice and redemption in Judaism and Christianity; and the Messiah as archetypal transgressor.

This book challenges us to take a broad and ethical view of economic behavior, which includes all forms of exchange and human interaction, from how we spend our money to how we fulfill our role as responsible human beings in a global economic framework. Drawing on Jewish ethical teachings, mystical lore, and tales of the Hasidic masters, Bonder explores a wide range of subjects including competition, partnerships, contracts, loans and interest, tipping, and giving gifts.

This book brings together the two major aspects of the Jewish myth the people of the Book and the wanderer to present an ancient concept of virtual reality. Drawing from Jewish mystical teachings, it speculates on possibilities to transcend reality by the use of special media. The longest exile in human history was responsible for shaping innovative prospects on linkage and space. Metaphors springing from the advent of widespread computer and Internet use offer new ways to understand rabbinic strategies for bonding in the lack of community and territory. They were able to devise means that can bring two or more places to be in the same site. Or as it was then called: "Jumping the Path". In this piece of archeological science fiction, Rabbi Nilton Bonder connects traces left in the past of a sophisticated concept of web. This is a book about the birth of the notion of the "net" and the first attempts of being together, without necessarily being in one place. It is a book about the possibility that much more lies between illusion and reality, than we might suppose. In a time when science was not capable of fostering imagination on the marvels of the universe, it was due to religion to manifest human speculations on wonder and awe. Nilton Bonder brings Jewish mystical texts and traditions of ancient times that can be better understood with our tools of communication and media such as the computer or the internet. Was there a Windows 1751?Were priests and prophets able to devise the principle of a net? Of a CWW , a Cosmic Wide Web?Why was the ancient fiction interested not on Time Travel, but Space Travel, or as they called it, Jumping the Way?From where could they have derived a concept of virtual reality?What are the connections between virtual reality and the Messianic ideas as well as the Resurrection of the Dead? These and some other fascinating questions are dealt in this book around mystical consideration on media and space.

Xpiritual is a book on a pagan controversy of our days.Disguised as the craze for spiritual secrets what we see today is the revival of an age-old polemic: living with the hidden versus the need to seize what is hidden. Surreptitious as the glance of Lots wife, the search for secrets is the denial of the hidden and the emotional territory of the subliminal and privilege. Equating sacred and [the search for] secrets as antonyms, Rabbi Bonder exposes forms of fetishism and idolatry in the mind-set of consumerism and individualism. This neo-spirituality is portrayed as pornographic in essence given it is based on the abuse of image and self-absortion.Paganism is the attitude of affirming self-value by means of anthropocentric strategies that always rely either on rationalism or the esoteric. The former is manifest by indulging in self-justification and self-validation and the latter on subliminal ego messages infiltrated in the realm of the sacred.Xpiritual is the presentation of simple and age-old wisdom with a renewed inspiration for the spiritual quest of our time.

The Abraham Path is the route of cultural and spiritual tourism that retraces the journey made by Abraham (Ibrahim) through the heart of the Middle East some four thousand years ago.This book recounts the inner and spiritual foortprints of the first study tour along the entire Abraham Path conducted in November 2006 by a group of pacifists and theologians under the guidance of the Program on Conflict Negotiation at Harvard Law School.

After having lectured at large corporations around Brazil and several other countries, Rabbi Nilton Bonder wrote Boundaries of Intelligence to meet the rising interest from the business world for spirituality. It talks about the ultra-wisdom that can be found in the frontiers between intelligence and ignorance. The very border that divides clarity and superstition, intuition and illusion, discernment and fantasy, is an area of mixed light and darkness. In this twilight zone abide truths that will never turn into certainties. This is the zone where good sense is usually not common sense, but counter sense. Where wisdom is forged out of experience, sensitivity and intuition; where doubt is the resource and where fog rather than light is the medium. Companies searching for their earthly kingdom have discovered that the intelligence of the kingdom of heaven could be of some use for efficiency sake, and in a highly competitive world nobody can afford to ignore a form of intelligence. In todays ever-changing business world, we have begun to recognize a field of thought that until just recently was seen as lying outside the realm of categories of intelligence.