Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Hazony
Read between
April 21 - July 20, 2024
In Herzl’s imagination over 120 years ago, the future state would be a technological wonderland. Electric and telephone lines would exist in every home.
the reason Ashkenazi Jews in Latin America began adding jalapeños and cilantro to their matzoh ball soup.
For example, Eisenhower’s Secretary of State John Foster Dulles in 1954 queried Israeli Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion about the degree to which American Jews cared about the State of Israel. Ben-Gurion told him that if he doubted the Jews’ commitment to Zion, he had only to ask a Jewish child about the story of the Exodus.
More than 85 percent of American Jews, according to recent polls, believe that our fortunes are inextricably tied with the safety and success of Israel.
“If we blow into the narrow end of the shofar, we will be heard far,” wrote the acclaimed American Jewish writer Cynthia Ozick. “But if we choose to be Mankind rather than Jewish and blow into the wider part, we will not be heard at all.”
The essayist and critic Leon Wieseltier, in a commencement speech to Hebrew College in 2005, put it this way: There is no choice between particularism and universalism. Nobody comes from nowhere and nobody goes nowhere. There has never existed a perfectly particular individual or a perfectly universal individual.
he commanded no armies, he performed no miracles, delivered no prophecies, yet to him was promised “descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky.”
Israel needs to embrace its biblical narrative and lean in to the Abrahamic brand.
even renaming the Middle East “the Abrahamic Region” would be to Israel’s advantage—and would just be true.
An exception that proves this rule is a course about the Jewish people offered by Young Judaea’s Israel-based Year Course—but
As the educational philosopher Israel Scheffler wrote, “The growth of cognition is thus, in fact, inseparable from the education of the emotions.” We need both.
Three hundred years after Hillel, it became illegal in the Roman Empire for Jews to convert others to Judaism,
It is past time for the Jewish community in North America to develop curricula and train teachers to present the idea of the Jewish people as a central pillar of who we are.
We find out in Deuteronomy and the Book of Malachi, when God tells us that we will be blessed (which means that our material needs will be assured) if we give generously and enthusiastically to the poor.
There is a lot in common between a birth and a forced departure from one’s homeland. Both are journeys from a familiar place of comfort to a cold, blinding abyss into which the newborn and the newly-expelled pour pain and tears.
If fleeing has a conceptual antithesis, it is writing. Writing is the undoing of a hasty escape: It is to tether oneself in the record, to an account, so that one can be known, seen, and heard.
Journey from the Land of No: A Girlhood Caught in Revolutionary Iran
particularism of klal yisrael—Jewish peoplehood. Ahavat habriyot—love of humankind—must be balanced with ahavat yisrael—love for the Jewish people.
To the contrary, universal aspirations emerged from, and were a result of, Jewish particularism, a function of Jewish peoplehood, not its negation.
We are so preoccupied with the mission and rhetoric of Jewish universalism that our commitment to Jewish peoplehood can barely be heard beyond a whisper.
The Lilac Tree: A Rabbi’s Reflections on Love, Courage, and History
three components: ethnic integrity, spiritual integrity, and functional integrity,
A genetic research study published in 2018 found that nearly 25 percent of the entire Latin American population carries Jewish ancestry. That is about 200 million people. Surely,
As Arnold Eisen, chancellor of the Jewish Theological Seminary, once joked, the Jews believe in one God—at most.
Song of Songs, which makes it unique not only in Judaism but in Abrahamic religion in general: It is the only piece of sacred pornography to survive the monotheist revolution.
discover the mystery of sex within God himself.”
Rabbi Kook expressed his attempt to resolve that struggle in an essay, “A Fourfold Song,” which celebrates a human being’s four commitments or “songs,” from the Whitman-like
He even envisioned his yeshiva in Jerusalem, Mercaz HaRav, as a center for the renewal of prophesy.
What is required is a new form of Jewish institution, a kind of Jewish ashram, where ritual practice and religious study have only one purpose: furthering the quest for God.
We have forgotten that disagreement is the Jewish way of conversation.
“those in extremities are the most abominable creatures.”
That is why the rabbis present the stand-off with the heretics as a battle. Nekusah says to his students: When you weaponize your arguments—even “just” with hammers—there is collateral damage.
Right-wing conservatives and ultra-Orthodox do not have a monopoly on Jewish tradition nor do woke progressives have a monopoly on skepticism. We must claim both, as we educate our students out of their extremism.
When God began to create the heaven and earth—the earth was an unformed void (tohu vavohu)—a chaotic mess—with darkness over the surface of the deep, and the spirit of God swept over the water (Genesis 1:1–2). Chaos and messiness have always manifested as the precursor to creation and progress and meaning.
Rabbi Schulweis declared that “Rosh Hashanah is not Yom Kippur…. Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of strength. Yom Kippur is the commemoration of weakness. Rosh Hashanah is the celebration of independence. Yom Kippur is the commemoration of dependence. If we split them, then we have a half-truth. And there is nothing more deceitful than a half-truth.”
Thus, for Teitelbaum, Zionism was anti-messianic: Being exiled in every land is necessary in order for there to be Torah and devotion to God in all the lands to purify the air of the world in preparation for the indwelling of the Shekhina….
America has become the focus and fountainhead of Jewish survival…. American Jewry must recognize this sacred historical mission which Divine Providence has entrusted to it at this critical moment of our struggle for survival.
While exile was often viewed from inside the tradition as a form of punishment or at best an “error,” Singer came to recognize that exile should better be seen as “a link in religious evolution.”
“In my later years it became clear to me that only in exile did Jews grow up spiritually.”
It is forbidden for us the negate the exile. The ethos of “Negation of the Exile” or the substitution of belief in God with the belief in the IDF, this in my view is what turns the state into an entity of violence and power.
Where does that leave us? As the historian Israel Yuval has argued, the notion of a “decree of exile” is a rabbinic myth. It was a hermeneutical move to enable the covenant to survive the trauma of deterritorialization.
There is much worth thinking about in Boyarin’s proposal. But where we disagree is that he deems exile an “unhappy state,” essentially buying into the rabbinic myth of exile that needs to be overcome.
Zionism undermines itself, in my view, when it seeks to end exile. Instead, it should seek to embrace it. But such a revision would require courageous minds and believing hearts.
If all the world’s a stage, then Judaism is an amazing and eclectic cast, each one of us with our own unique story, with no two tales alike.
The Talmud in general, and the aggada in particular, is an extremely unorthodox text.
that very same fart also awoke me from my own dogmatic slumber, born of the ignorance and prejudice imprinted from my youth.
Maybe the cold, cerebral halacha is actually the substructure on which the sages built their most important discourse—that of the aggada.
Abraham became the first human rights lawyer
John Donne, a Christian fascinated by Jews, wrote: “No man is an island entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main.”
4.6 percent for Haredim versus 1.2 percent for non-Haredi Jews. In other words, despite having far less money, Haredim are giving three to four times as much as non-Haredi Jews, depending on how you measure
