Sixty-five years in, we can no longer be sustained merely by the fumes of our own existence, or by the fumes of those who threaten us — as powerful as those realities are. We must have a painful conversation not only about our borders with our neighbors, but about the identity of the home we build together — this is the Zionist calling of our times.
Rabbi Mishael Zion, “Israel at 65: Celebrating is Not Enough”, The Jewish Week (12 April 2013), 23.
In pre-Israeli Days, Zionism was a dynamic, world-wide movement whose goal was the creation of a Jewish national homeland in Palestine. In 1948, to the surprise of many leading Zionists and others, the goal was achieved. From then on, nobody could ever figure out what a Zionist was. Some say a Zionist is a Jew who tries to persuade a second Jew to give money to settle a third Jew in Israel. Zionism has become an ideal whose time has gone. Is a Zionist now someone who is friendly to Israel? Well, so are the non-Zionists – indeed, all Jews, not to mention WASP candidates for public office in America. Is a Zionist someone who contributes to Israel? Well, as Ben-Gurion puckishly used to remind the Zionists, the non-Zionists give more. So what is a Zionist? The Israelis (understandably worried that Israel is becoming an oriental or Levantine state) have a simple answer: if you claim to be a Zionist, you must come and live in Israel. The result is a thunderous silence. Aw, come on, say the Israelis, stop playing games, we need you. The silence now becomes eloquently ominous.
Albert Vorspan, My Rabbi Doesn’t Make House Calls: A Guide to Games Jews Play (Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, 1969), 102.
The parallels with the challenges for modern Israel are striking, for Solomon, like modern Israel, was essentially confronting “non-state actors.” For Haddad the Edomite, an indigenous resident stripped of his territory, one might substitute Hamas or Islamic Jihad; for Rezon the Syrian, one might substitute Hizballah. As with modern Israel, neither threat to Solomon’s state was existential. Solomon was prepared to tolerate some level of violence in his more remote territories as long as he could preserve the peace in Judah and avoid entanglements with major foreign powers. That was not the case for those who ruled after him, whether in Judah or in Israel. Few of Solomon’s successors avoided major conflicts with other states. Modern Israel, likewise, cannot now and probably will not in the future be able to avoid conflict with states, whether with Iran or with some as yet unforeseen threat.
Dov S. Zakheim, “The Geopolitics of Scripture,” The American Interest (July/August 2012), 11.
Rabbis had a number of exegetical methods for expanding the parameters of the law while respecting the integrity of authoritative sources. Practical or inductive reasoning, or simply conjecture, could be used to reinterpret a talmudic passage, suggesting that the text is discussing something other than what it seems. The provenance of a troublesome legal text could be limited to circumstances dissimilar to what a jurist now faced, effectively neutralizing the legal impact of the original case. Precedents could be narrowed or broadened to afford such greater flexibility in dealing with a problem. If the situation was extreme, a text could even be deliberately misinterpreted in the course of developing a line of thought. A jurist had to separate a contemporary case from previous legal thought if he was to follow an independent approach. Hermeneutical methods, however, did not tell Jewish legalists when to attempt a reinterpretation of the law.
Perhaps in a simpler world, halakists could have ignored the comings and goings of daily life and let purely legal considerations shape all legal discussions. Yet, no rabbi could be oblivious to the practical implications of his decisions on individuals or the Jewish community. In each generation and in every locale, rabbis had to interpret the law in light of the needs of those who lived by it while respecting the integrity of a legal tradition that was believed to have emanated from Mount Sinai with all its details and specifications. Any ideal of searching for absolute truth was outweighed by other values and goals.
Edward Fram, “Jewish Law and Social and Economic Realities in Sixteenth and Seventeenth Century Poland” (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1991), 4-5.
As has been called to my attention, the phrase “standing on one foot” may be found, for example, in the Satires of Horace, which include a criticism of Lucilius, whose copiousness Horace resolved to avoid: “In hora saepe ducentos ut magnum versus dictabat stans pede in uno” (“Often in an hour, as though a great exploit, he would dictate two hundred lines while standing on one foot”). Cf. Horace, Satires, Epistles, and Ars Poetica, edited and translated into English by H. Rushton Fairclough (Cambridge, MA, 1942), Book I, Satire 4:9-10, pp. 48-49, dated ca. 35 BCE. Fairclough notes that “standing on one foot” is proverbial for “doing without effort.” The parallel of the phrase is striking, and yet it need not surprise us that people of different cultural backgrounds find similar expressions, common themes, or other parallels. The question is whether in a given instance a historical influence of one on the other can be documented, or in the absence of historical evidence, whether an understanding of the one clarifies and helps us to understand the other better. The issue is thus not merely to find parallels in Latin or other non-Jewish literature to the phrase “standing on one foot.” In the case of Hillel’s statement in Avot 2.4, the Greek σχολή and σχολαστικός may give us an insight into a possible word-play in the Hebrew, and all the more so regarding the ambiguous passages about the ten batlanim: are the batlanim idlers who in any event have nothing better to do (as implied by the ordinary usage of the term), or do the passages refer with approbation to ten men who out of their concern for the community’s welfare avoid other remunerative occupations? Similarly, in the case of regel-regula, the Latin opens up a range of literary and perhaps even historical perspectives, which the literal Hebrew understanding of regel would never suggest.
Raphael Jospe, “Hillel’s Rule,” The Jewish Quarterly Review, New Series, Vol. 81, No. 1/2 (July-October, 1990), 50, n8.
While generalizations about “rabbinic theology” and the “rabbinic mind” can be useful as gross characterizations and for heuristic purposes, they can also be misleading precisely because they are unrefined. It is far too common to speak of the “sea of Talmud” (and, by extension, Midrash) and, since the same exegetical and aggadic traditions appear in many documents, to glean illustrations and prooftexts from a variety of documents across the board without regard to their chronology or peculiar literary characteristics and integrity. The anthological character of this literature as a whole may easily cause us to overlook evidences of redactional-editorial activity in shaping, recasting, or restyling materials to fit their literary context in a particular document. But once we recognize such activity and take into account the distinct literary characteristics of individual documents, we simply cannot treat this complex literature as a single fabric.
Richard S. Sarason, “Toward a New Agendum for the Study of Rabbinic Midrashic Literature” in Studies in Aggadah, Targum and Jewish Literature in Memory of Joseph Heinemann, eds. Jakob J. Petuchowski and Ezra Fleischer (Jerusalem & Cincinnati: The Magnes Press, The Hebrew University and Hebrew Union College Press, 1981), 58.