A while back, Rabbi Ben Greenberg, an Orthodox chaplain at Harvard Hillel who blogs at A Yiddishe Thought, contacted me to ask whether he could reprint some of my #Torah tweets in a short collection. I said sure.

During this week of Sukkot, when we celebrate all kinds of harvest, that agreement has borne fruit; Twitter Torah has been released!

Twitter Torah brings the profundity, beauty and depth of the Torah to you in 140 character messages based around the weekly Torah portions. The book shares insights from seven unique and thoughtful people. The contributors to this book all come from different places in the Jewish community: traditional and non-traditional, men and women, Jewish professionals and lay members. The common denominator that brings these people together is a love for Torah and a desire to share their short and profound thoughts with the wider world.

The collection includes tweets from me, Harriet Goren, Michael Green, Ben Greenberg, Mark Hurvitz, Andrew Pepperstone and Phyllis Sommer. It's being offered with a fairly hefty price tag -- US$25 -- so I leave its purchase to your budgetary discretion. Still, it's a nifty thing.

ETA 10.13.09: The author decided to publish the book in black-and-white rather than color, so the price has come down to US$10 -- hooray!

On an entirely unrelated note, I just received my copy of a truly gorgeous chapbook of poems in the mail: A Walk Through the Memory Palace, the winner of the first Qarrtsiluni chapbook contest. I had the pleasure of being a first-round reader -- my partner and I read a dozen or so manuscripts, discussed them with each other, and forwarded our top two on to Dinty Moore, who was the final arbiter -- and I'm pleased to say that this manuscript was in the pile which my colleague and I read, and was our favorite of the batch! Apparently Dinty agreed with us that it is excellent work.

The collection is published by Phoenecia Press (the parent imprint of Laupe House, which published my collection chaplainbook back in 2006, and in 2007 Brilliant Coroners which I had the pleasure of co-editing.) It's a physically lovely artifact, of course, but what really bowls me over are the poems. Read all about it (including the free podcast and the online edition); if you're so inclined, you can pick up a copy here at qarrtsiluni's in-print page -- and at just US$6, it's a bargain.