Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
GIVEN THE CENTRALITY OF the sacrificial cult and priestly leadership to Israelite religion, the destruction of the Temple, and with it the sacrificial rite and the power of the priests, might well have meant the end of Israelite life. With sociological and religious genius, however, the Israelites’ leaders begged their followers…
Some highlights
Daniel Gordis • Israel: A Concise History of a Nation Reborn
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
... See moreIrving Greenberg • The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays
The orthodox Marxist notion2 that the Jews – as an economic agent – perform a distinctive function within a system designed for the extraction of surplus value has been replaced by the anticolonialist notion that the Jews – as a national collective – are integral to the maintenance of American hegemony on a global level.3 Accordingly, there has
... See moreBen Cohen • Some Of My Best Friends: A Journey Through Twenty-First Century Antisemitism (The Berlin International Center for the Study of Antisemitism (BICSA) / Studies ... zum Antisemitismus Book 4)
Powerless, stateless and often living under conditions of great poverty, Jews throughout the centuries of their dispersion created a communal equivalent of a welfare state. They did so voluntarily, because it was a mitzvah (religious deed), because it is what Jews do, and because they knew that no one else would do it for them.
Jonathan Sacks • To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility
