“Consistency, in short, was not the goal of the early Zionists. Creativity was.”

Consistency, in short, was not the goal of the early Zionists. Creativity was. And, of course, the project proved successful. The richness of Jewish traditional life and the identity it forged, the attraction of the Haskalah and the productive intellectual tension it unleashed, together with the increasing sense of a desperate Jewish urgency, led to a burst of Jewish creativity that ultimately resulted in the creation of the state of Israel.

Daniel Gordis, “Tradition, Creativity, and Cognitive Dissonance”, The Jewish Review of Books, vol. 6, no. 3 (Fall 2015), 7.