Sublime

Then God, as parent and teacher, must bind God’s own self to humans.

A central task of this generation is to incorporate experiences such as the Holocaust and the rebirth of Israel into the religious understanding of the Jewish way. Shavuot should properly be called the holiday of the Continuous Giving of the Torah. It celebrates “what God and humans have wrought.”

After the Balfour Declaration, Ben-Gurion switched his allegiance from the Turks to the British. He joined the British Army’s Jewish Legion and fought with the British against the Turks in the Palestine Campaign. Though he continued working with Poalei Zion, he also launched his own political party, Achdut Ha’avoda (“Unity of Labor”), composed most

Israel, he says, ‘thought it was different because it was different: it constituted an egalitarian social system in the midst of stratified societies.’

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

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?

There are countless examples of rabbinic activism in which the Sages of Israel harness the tools of legal analysis and interpretation in the service of the ethical values that infuse the Torah to this day.

The First Zionist Congress in 1897 had closed with a sense of great promise; in 1939 there was dread. A week later, on September 1, 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Two days later Britain and France declared war on Germany. World War II had begun. Most of the European delegates to the Twenty-First Zionist Congress would be dead by the war’s end.

Rabbi Irving “Yitz” Greenberg, all human beings are endowed with three “intrinsic dignities”: infinite worth, equality, and uniqueness.10