Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life

“David Patterson’s profoundly Jewish book shows how deep-down, ethical understanding of eighteen key words including truth and goodness, responsibility and love, gratitude and peace can resist the destruction and despair that threaten human flourishing in the 2020s and beyond. Much needed, Eighteen Words to Sustain a Life is a gift for all seasons but especially timely, welcome, and urgent for ours now.”


—John K. Roth, author of The Failures of Ethics: Confronting the Holocaust, Genocide, and Other Mass Atrocities





“This is a wonderful, searching, learned, and necessary book—personal and personable, joyous and loving, transmitting and telling all in one. David Patterson offers us eighteen English words that wrap within them Hebrew, Aramaic, and Yiddish teachings of Jewish life, about the life of a Jew, and surely about life itself. These richly evocative words and teachings are directed to his children and grandchildren. But they are clearly a gift to all of us as well.”


—Alan Rosen, author of The Holocaust’s Jewish Calendars: Keeping Time Sacred, Making Time Holy