Book Review: Growth through Tehillim, by Rabbi Zelig Pliskin

I am reading regularly at least a couple of kapiteln of Tehillim for a long time already. Either on the road or at home, while taking a break from other writing or while the food is in the oven, sometimes even when I am in the train back home, I am taking my small book of Artscroll and have my private spiritual moments. This happens for almost 3 years now, and if by laziness or superficiality it happens to miss this meeting, I feel poor and often my spirit is low. Every day of Tehillim helps me to grow and get the strength that I need so much sometimes to go through the day.

Rabbi Zelig Pliskin beautiful book Growth through Tehillim is important though not only because outlines our need of spirituality and explain how to use it. For me, it brings into light an aspect of spirituality often forgotten: our goal to be better people. 

And I will explain what it is all about. For a long time, I was worried that I used to pray without kavanah, just reading words forming sentences, without a real spiritual concentration on the prayer. I need to keep praying till I was finally able to achieve a higher spiritual level from time to time. It works the same in the case of Tehillim. I am reading and focusing on the words but the realization of the spiritual message might came later in the day or even in life. 

Trying to be a better person and achieving that high level of spirituality and wisdom when you are able to consider everything is going on into your life as a blessing and you have the capacity to learn from everyone takes more time. Personally, I had to cope with a huge challenge of having around me people with toxic attitudes, very often self sufficient and over critical against everyone except themselves. Whatever efforts you strive to make for being a good person, when those around you are focused on the negative parts and refuse to be wise, it is hard to resist the temptation to follow your example.

Growth through Tehillim brought me back to some well practised habits in the last years when I made tremendous efforts to say 'good bye' to my negative attitude against my fellow humans and cultivate kindness and understanding for every human being. Every chapter of the book develops around a verse of Tehillim, with samples of Torah learning ending up with life stories that have the strength to inspire even more, because always we are curious to hear and read what other people from our times will do in similar situations with us. 

It is written in a simple yet inspiring way, and gives a lot of food for thought and reasons to decide that from tomorrow on, will try at least to be a much better person, with a positive attitude, thankful to Hashem for everything that we receive in our life and careful to count and be grateful for our gifts.