Sublime

The Bible insists that the human role in redemption in no way reduces the divine intentionality and responsibility for the outcome of events. This is implicit in the meaning of covenant. In the case of the State of Israel, however, the human role in redemption is dominant and self-assertive.

Much more than the state’s honor was at stake, however, and Ben-Gurion had failed to recognize the full gravity of the mistake he had made. By 2014, Haredim constituted approximately 15 percent of Israel’s Jewish population, and the percentage was growing; the average fertility rate for Haredi women was 6.2 children, while for the non-Haredi Jewish

You promised peace; You promised spring at home and blossoms; You promised to keep your promises; You promised a dove. When that song appeared in 1995, more than two decades after the Yom Kippur War, no dove had come. Israel was a country with a still-broken heart, a country still at war. Even the religious holiday of atonement, Yom Kippur, would n

of both “Sharon the Murderer” and “Begin the Murderer.”

Identifying yourself as a Zionist doesn’t mean that you’ll be supporting each and every action of the Israeli government with eyes wide shut. In true rabbinical tradition and those liberal values it was founded upon, Zionism in and of itself has been debated from day one and will continue to be debated while aiming to perfect its society. As such,

Despite his apparent private misgivings, Rabin continued to shore up support for the Oslo Accords. To demonstrate to Israel and to the world that the Jewish state remained behind the agreements it had signed with Arafat, he and Shimon Peres called for a massive pro-peace rally in Tel Aviv on November 4, 1995.

The Torah survived as the law of the Jewish nation because Jews continued to see themselves as a nation, even though they had lost all visible bases of nationhood.

Ever since the First Zionist Congress in 1897, Zionists had seen themselves as the central address for the world’s Jews. As the Nazis had eradicated Polish Jewry, American Jews were now the largest and most significant Jewish community in the world—and they were warning Israel to back off that sentiment.

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way t