A Seat at His Fire
A village innkeeper healed with herbs and psalms, and lit a fire that warmed all of Eastern Europe. A complete 21,000-word book, free and yours to keep. Not a sample chapter.
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Told with full reverence from within the tradition, by Brick Hut Press, an independent house. Enter your email and it is waiting in your own library here: read it, listen to it, and your place is always kept across every device.
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The candles in the small shul at Międzybóż are burning low on the second night of Rosh Hashanah in the year 5507, and the Besht has wrapped himself in his tallis and does not come back. His body remains where it always stands, near the eastern wall, swaying the way it always sways, murmuring the words of the Amidah the way he always murmurs them. But something else has begun. A man standing close enough, and there is always a man standing close enough, because no one in that room can help but watch him, would tell you that the Besht's face has gone still in a way that living faces do not usually go still. As if all the blood and breath of him has gathered itself behind his closed eyes and started, quietly, to rise. He is climbing. This is not new to him. By 5507 the Besht has walked this road more times than he could count, if counting were the sort of thing his soul did while it traveled. He has told his closest disciples, in the careful, guarded way a man speaks of what is most precious to him, that on the sacred days, the Days of Awe above all, his neshama does not merely pray. It ascends.
9 movements, carrying the whole life of Rabbi Israel ben Eliezer, the Baal Shem Tov from beginning to enduring memory.
- The Night He Climbed to Ask
- An Orphan Carrying a Blessing
- The Hidden Years
- Chai Elul: The Master of the Good Name Steps Forward
- The Court at Medzhybizh
- Everything Is Full of God
- The Wolf at the Door
- The Flame Passed Hand to Hand
- The Door Is Open
Bought here, this life does not land in a downloads folder. It lives in your own library, in rooms built for unhurried reading and listening.
The Reading Room
Pages that truly turn. Type sized to your eyes, line by line; Night, Paper, or Sepia; your place kept to the paragraph, on every device you own.
The Listening Room
Narrated cover to cover, chapter by chapter. And when a passage takes hold of you, one touch of Read this passage opens the book to the very paragraph in the voice's mouth, lit gold.
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Then the whole life, and every other
One membership opens all 3 volumes of this life, narrated in full, and every other life in the Sanctuary besides, to read here and to listen to here, with each new life joining the day it is finished.
The free book asks nothing and expires never.
Questions, answered
What is the free book, and is there a catch?
No catch. The Invitation is a real book, free, and yours to keep: a complete portrait of this life in about 20,000 words, not a sample or a teaser. It is the doorway. The three volumes tell the life in its fullness, and they are here whenever you wish to go deeper.
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Can I listen as well as read?
Yes. Every life is available in both ebook and audiobook, read and listened to natively in your library. The free Invitation includes its narration too.
What does it cost?
The free Invitation costs nothing, and always will. Own any title for $8 (ebook and audiobook together) or a Complete Life for $20. The Library Card ($369, once, yours for life) opens every life in the house, every volume and every audiobook, and each new life joins the day it is finished. Every life, every volume, every voice - and every one still to come. One payment, yours for life.
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Any time, in one click, from your library. You keep everything to the end of the period you have paid for, and we never ask why.
What if I would rather own a copy?
Every life is sold in print and ebook through the ordinary bookshops: Ingram, Google Play, Apple Books, Kobo. The membership is how to read the whole house; the shops are how to keep one life on your shelf forever.