Sublime

a programme for peace in an unredeemed world.

Hence the vital principle: when bad things are happening in society, when corruption, violence, and injustice prevail, it is our duty to register a protest, even if it seems likely that it will have no effect.

A majority of self-styled secularists led the State of Israel, fought in its armies, tilled its soil. In the eyes of many secular and religious Jews, any state so obviously brought into being by human activity, a state often not observant of Jewish traditional practices, a state manifestly vulnerable and full of flaws, could not define itself as a

Applying inflexible rules to a constantly shifting political landscape destroys societies.

I wrestle with and write about theology because I care about it to the depths of my being, because questions about who and what God is, and about what it means to be a Jew and a human being in the twenty-first century matter to me like almost nothing else does.

That requires covenantal, not just contractual, politics.

After the publication of Herzl’s Altneuland in 1902, the battle between Herzl and Ahad Ha’am (who was by then Herzl’s most vociferous critic) grew even uglier. But just a year later, the pogrom in Kishinev led even the apolitical Ahad Ha’am to back off—everyone understood that the Jewish people needed to set aside differences and to prepare a way