Sublime

Fatefully, Jews became ambivalent about themselves. Thus the conflicted modern Jewish identity was born.

For Jews, memories of Zion were “inwrought with affection” because of the Bible, the book they had seen as a kind of “national diary.” To be sure, for religious Jews, the Bible was God’s revealed word, filled with commandments about how they were to live their lives. For secular Jews, the Bible was one of the greatest works of literature of all tim

But no one tried to save the culture of Hasidism, for example, with its devotion to ordinary, everyday holiness—or Misnagdism, the opposing religious movement within traditional Eastern European Judaism, whose energy in the years before the war was channeled into the rigorous study of musar, or ethics. Entire academies devoted to the Musar Movement

Caring-about is empty if it does not culminate in caring relations.”

With no Eastern European demographic backbone, Zionism becomes a bridgehead that no reinforcements will ever cross, protect, or hold.

Israelis were seeking a new kind of redemption, one that would come not from courage on the battlefield or profound ideological intensity, but from a life of simple humanity. Many of them were seeking it in the texts and traditions that had shaped their people for thousands of years.

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

he suggests the Yiddish writer who writes in the distinctly Israeli paradigm of Zionist-socialist culture should carry on as if in the diaspora, namely, surround himself with Yiddish books and create a spiritual atmosphere in which Yiddish will not be forgotten. However, in Israel, for the first time, Birshtein wrote of the need to justify his writ

Mediated by the models of their culture, the Torah’s prohibitions become inscrutable decrees. Human dignity and human partnership are far more central in the rabbinic tradition.