October 2025
Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Beth Lieberman offer creative, innovative rituals and tools to honor aging and mark life-cycle moments for midlife and beyond: from navigating retirement, facing illness to finding new love.
New York, NY – October 2025 – CCAR Press, a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, proudly announces the publication of Moments That Matter: Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond by Rabbi Laura Geller and Rabbi Beth Lieberman.
As we live longer, more of us experience additional life-cycle moments—from launching children to launching oneself anew, navigating retirement, downsizing and moving, facing illness and caregiving, and embracing love at any age. These moments are tender times of transition, calling out for ritual to provide a scaffold of meaning and centeredness during a liminal time. Moments That Matter provides suggestions and outlines for these rituals while offering fresh perspectives on this time of life, transforming it into a period for personal growth, meaning, and renewal. The chapters weave Jewish wisdom with practical rituals, interspersed with personal stories and ways to adapt each ceremony for a communal setting.
With a foreword by Casper ter Kuile—author of The Power of Ritual: Turning Everyday Activities into Soulful Practices—Moments That Matters empowers readers to embrace these milestones with creativity and intention, offering tools to craft personalized and deeply moving rituals that honor the complexity of aging. This volume is a powerful follow-up to Rabbi Laura Geller’s 2019 book Getting Good at Getting Older.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, author of The Amen Effect: Ancient Wisdom to Mend Our Broken Hearts and World and senior rabbi of IKAR, said that, “This book is beautiful, tender, and insightful—filled with new/old wisdom on endings and blessed beginnings. At the heart of it all, Rabbis Geller and Lieberman invite us to honor the deep connections that sustain us as human beings, pay attention to the in-between moments, and find a ritual language that speaks directly to the heart. I could imagine no better guides through the landscape of loss, love, and renewed life.”
“Moments That Matter is a beautiful and practical guide, rich with wise and poetic passages and stories pondering the power of the ‘third chapter’ or ‘encore years,’” said Rabbi Karyn D. Kedar, author of Unfolding: A High Holy Day Companion and rabbi emerita of Congregation B’nai Jehoshua Beth Elohim in Deerfield, Illinois. She continued, “I found myself lingering on many pages, reflecting and finding inspiration. With skillful guidance, this book offers meaningful rituals to honor transitions, empowering readers to embrace life with grace, purpose, and renewed vitality.”
Rabbi Ed Feinstein, senior rabbi of Valley Beth Shalom in Encino, California, and author of The Chutzpah Imperative: Empowering Today’s Jews for a Life That Matters, said, “Why should our later years be a time of diminishment and loss? Why not discovery, engagement, and fulfillment? This marvelous book of celebrations, markers, and rituals reveals all the poetry and power of these years. Moments That Matter is a gift to all who truly believe, along with Robert Browning, that ‘the best is yet to be, the last of life for which the first was made.’”
Reverend Dr. Elizabeth Nordquist, a Presbyterian pastor and spiritual director, said, “Deeply founded in Jewish tradition, Moments That Matter is also inviting to people of many other places of identity, religious or not. The deft combination of sacred text, accessible action, and clear instruction is a valuable guide for all who are faced with life’s inevitable progression. Clergy and laity, communities and individuals, will all find it a great gift.”
Rabbi Laura Geller, the third woman in the Reform Movement to become a rabbi, is rabbi emerita of Temple Emanuel of Beverly Hills and the coauthor of Getting Good at Getting Older. Rabbi Beth Lieberman serves on the faculty of Hebrew Union College and as literary editor and revising translator of JPS Hebrew-English Tanakh: Revised Edition.
Moments That Matter: Marking Transitions in Midlife and Beyond is available at moments.ccarpress.org.
To request review copies, interview opportunities, or to book author events, please contact: Raquel Fairweather-Gallie, Marketing and Sales Manager, CCAR Press: rfairweather@ccarnet.org.