Sublime

Israelis did not give up, though, in part because they had nowhere to go. American Jews, long ambivalent about the very idea of a Jewish state, sent Israel desperately needed financial resources. Then Germany paid Holocaust reparations, and Israel began its slow climb out of poverty and weakness. With time, it built an infrastructure of roads and m

THE EICHMANN TRIAL BEGAN in Jerusalem on April 11, 1961.

In the most literal meaning of “Israel,” I am thankful to be one of those who wrestles or struggles with God.

Nor was Israel created as a kind of worldly superpower (though it may have looked like that in the time of David and Solomon), a new nation that would beat the world at its own game. Rather—and this is something the early Christians come to with hindsight, only at that stage tracing its earlier stages in the Psalms and prophets—the point is that th

However, there is already a fundamental difference from the past. In the past, a threatened Jewish community in Diaspora could hope only to sustain bearable losses and to live on by sufferance or flight. Israel has—and, through it, all Jews have—a major voice in its own fate. In the past, when Jews were destroyed, their wealth and achievement enric

“Empowered Judaism.” This is a Judaism in which people begin to take responsibility for creating Jewish community, without waiting on the sidelines.

had to step over supine protesters with signs saying “Dead Gazan.” Once again I had to snap out of it in order to defend Israel in public.