Cancer, death, divorce, betrayal.

If you have no choice but to suffer, why not at least transform the power of pain into the potency of wisdom? In Rabbi Steve Leder’s deft hands, the concept moves beyond cliché into a moving lesson for how anguish and adversity need not break us but can become the beginning of a new — and more profound —wholeness.

In his new book, The Beauty of What Remains: How Our Greatest Fear Becomes Our Greatest Gift, Rabbi Leder draws on science, the wisdom of ancient traditions, his experience as a spiritual leader and his personal suffering to share his insights into creating a more meaningful life.

The senior rabbi of Wilshire Boulevard Temple in Los Angeles, Rabbi Leder is a contributor to Time magazine, a regular guest on Today, the author of three prior books and winner of the Kovler Award given by The Kovler Institute on Black-Jewish Relations of the Religious Action Center. Newsweek twice named him one of the ten most influential rabbis in America.