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By VICKI CABOT
Contributing Editor

It's fitting that the last four pages of Amy Hirshberg Lederman's book "To Life! Jewish Reflections on

Everyday Living" (Aliyah Publishing, $17.95 paperback) are blank.

They invite readers to jot down reactions to Lederman's quick snapshots of Jewish life or questions induced by her succinct explanations of Jewish law.

But they also remind that there are empty pages in Jewish life rife with possibility - and opportunities for us to fill them.

Lederman, a Tucson writer, teacher and speaker, offers a collection of essays and columns she's written over the past several years, organizing them into categories - family, holidays, growing and learning, to name a few - to make an easy-reading how-to guide.

"If people read it from cover to cover, it would give them a way of feeling comfortable with Jewish life," says Lederman from her southern Arizona home.

She deals with topics as timely, and timeless, as love and marriage, sibling rivalry and aging parents. She offers perspectives on holiday rituals, lifecycle events and Jewish values from tzedakah to kashrut, from visiting the sick to saying kaddish. She shares personal experience and shores it up with Jewish precepts and teaching.

And don't be fooled - her easy conversational style sometimes belies the depth of her Jewish knowledge. Her writing may be simple and straightforward - but her message is far from simplistic.

Her voice makes for easy listening, her message soft but clear.

Want to live a more meaningful life? Live Jewishly.

"A lot of what we are looking for is in our own back yard," says Lederman, who embarked on her own spiritual search just after her 40th birthday.

A serious illness and time for introspection led the former real-estate lawyer to begin a course of Jewish learning that led, ultimately, to a career change.

"When I got sick...I realized that I did not want to wake up on the other side of 50 and find out that I did not try to do something I wanted to do," she says.

Lederman began looking at study programs across the country and was most impressed with both the national Florence Melton Adult Mini-School and Boston's Meah program.

She contacted the national Melton director, and rather than commute to participate in an existing program, she opted to write a grant to start a new one in Tucson - and wrote herself in as director.

The program was initiated in September 1995 and graduated its first class in 1997.

That year, Lederman received a fellowship to participate in a senior educators' program at Hebrew University's Melton Center in Jerusalem. She and her husband, Ray, a psychiatrist, and their two children moved to Israel for the year.

Lederman has also earned a master's degree in Jewish education from Spertus College of Jewish Studies in Chicago and has served as assistant North American director of the Melton Schools and as the director of the department of Jewish education and identity for the Jewish Federation of Southern Arizona.

She weaves her personal story throughout "To Life!" sensitively dealing with a number of family issues, particularly her parents' secular lifestyle and her growing desire to become more observant.

She writes, "In our home, my father's idea of keeping kosher was not putting bacon on his cheeseburger. Between my father's reluctance to practice Judaism and my mother's lack of religious training, we muddled through rituals like the Passover Seder, where every other page in our Maxwell House Haggadah was marked 'Skip.' It wasn't until I was in my teens that I realized the 'Skip' wasn't some long lost cousin but rather a directive to expedite the service."

In other sections, she writes movingly about those who came before her - her grandmother, who arrived in the United States with her family's brass candlesticks sewn into her coat lining, and her own mother, with minimal Jewish learning, who knew instinctively how to care for her dear friend Eleanor, who was dying.

"She knew from the start how to provide comfort care," writes Lederman, "the kind that in its early stages took the form of a pot of chicken soup and a brisket big enough to feed the neighborhood but ended with the stroking of a barely conscious forehead covered in sweat. She understood instinctively that visiting the sick, or bikur cholim, often meant sitting quietly by Eleanor's bedside, asking nothing, just giving her friend the sense that she didn't have to bear her sickness alone."

And in the last selection in the book, Lederman writes of an irreligious aunt who surprisingly asks Lederman to say kaddish for her when she dies.

"I don't want to die without being remembered in the way that my parents were remembered before me," Aunt Gen says poignantly.

It is Lederman's inherent respect for the many levels of Jewish being and doing that make the book come alive - and makes her message resonate.

Lederman, who speaks often in the Valley and whose columns appear in Jewish News, says she sees a resurgence of interest in Jewish learning that attracts those from a variety of ages, lifestyles and background. Students learn from each other, but ultimately, each must find his or her own way.

"There is a deep need to personalize Judaism, to make it personal in a very real way," she says.

Denominational labels are an unnecessary impediment, says Lederman, who describes herself as "an evolving Jew."

She says she seeks to encourage her readers and her students to start learning about Judaism from wherever they are.

"You don't have to be anything or do anything to start on a journey," she says.

"It is the search that is important."

"To Life! Jewish Reflections on Everyday Living" is available through Lederman's Web site, www.amyhirshberglederman.com or at amazon.com.