Sublime

A majority of self-styled secularists led the State of Israel, fought in its armies, tilled its soil. In the eyes of many secular and religious Jews, any state so obviously brought into being by human activity, a state often not observant of Jewish traditional practices, a state manifestly vulnerable and full of flaws, could not define itself as a

Only the transfer of power to potential victims—power enough to defend themselves—can correct the new imbalance of power.

From the perspective of Israel (and pretty much every world leader who has studied this topic) the solution cannot include the return of 5.6 million people to a country of 9 million people. It must include an “end of demands.” And it must affirm Israel’s right to exist in safety and security.

The largest Israeli military operation in the West Bank since the Six-Day War, it was designed to uproot the terror infrastructures in the major Palestinian cities there. In essence, Israel took back the cities that it had transferred to the Palestinians in 1995 as part of the Oslo Accords. Israel did not stop there. Committed to stopping the terro

Judaism without generosity is a hollow shell.

If goodness will not be imposed by power, then the human must be educated toward perfection. The rabbis conceive of God as teacher and pedagogue—teaching Torah to Israel and to the world. This also explains why, in the words of Ethics of the Fathers (chapter 6, Mishnah 2), “the only truly free person is one who studies Torah.”

The Torah is an extended wrestling with the question of human association.

And like the Holocaust before it, Tikkun Olam tended to sideline Israel as the focal point of American Jewish purpose. How can we donate to the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, liberal Jews increasingly asked, when children went hungry in Honduras?

One of the sources of that resiliency, in his opinion, is the fact that Judaism is decentralized and encourages dissent.