Sublime

Jewish history is a living testimony to the power of ideas,

In Judaism, faith is not acceptance but protest, against the world that is, in the name of the world that is not yet but ought to be.

All these built-in interactons are tensions that operate in the context of unparalleled freedom and power for Jews. In Israel, Jews have taken command of responsibility for Jewish fate. That freedom and power can be used to create the greatest Jewish society of all time, one that carries the covenantal mission to new heights of justice and exemplar

For thirty-four years, there had been Jewish settlements in Gaza. In 2004, eighty-eight hundred Jews lived there, surrounded by over a million Palestinians. The territory in which they lived took up a fifth of the Gaza Strip. But defending those few thousand Israeli Jews was becoming very costly for Israel, requiring tens of thousands of soldiers o

It is impossible to exaggerate the degree to which Gordon’s worldview would profoundly shape the first decades of renewed Jewish life in Palestine. The centrality of agriculture to the early kibbutz movement, the image of Jews resettling the land as farmers (though even at the peak, only a very small percentage of Jews worked in agriculture), was i

of center and Israel’s center-right.

The international community has tired of the conflict, and inside the Jewish state, many Israelis feel stuck. They believe that the occupation is proving Yeshayahu Leibowitz correct. They fear that occupying another people has forced Israelis to be something they did not want to be, and yet for many, it is not clear at present what the alternative

For nearly two decades, a wall of cinder block and barbed wire ran through the heart of the country’s capital. Even if the Israeli government was prepared to live with that, for many Jews, most particularly (but certainly not exclusively) in the religious community, it was a wound that refused to