Shalom Hartman Institute

Saul, David, and Solomon are dominant figures in the Hebrew Bible, rulers of an expanding Israelite polity before it dissolved into two separate kingdoms. Saul's paranoid jealousy, David's killing the Philistine champion Goliath with a slingshot, and Solomon's meeting the Queen of Sheba are familiar stories to many people, but what is the truth behind the texts? While scholars long believed these three monarchs to have been historical personalities, over the past three decades many have questioned the historicity of this United Monarchy, some doubting even the existence of its founding fathers. This book robustly argues that the Israelite kingdom of the Bible was a real mini-empire, and that Saul, David, and Solomon were kings of consequence – even if the biblical stories reimagine their lives to glorify and vilify them. Combining fresh archaeological evidence with astute readings of key texts, the authors offer a compelling reconstruction of this fascinating ancient polity which, though it lasted less than a hundred years, has bequeathed a remarkable religious and cultural legacy to the western world. Written in a clear and engaging style, this book will be of interest to scholars and general audiences alike.

This chapter deals with the shift in Camus’ stance in The Myth of Sisyphus to that in The Plague and The Rebel, conveying the change that takes place in the self. While in The Myth of Sisyphus the self is focused inward and strives for conscious choices, in the later works the self undergoes a transformation and is now constituted through its shared existence with the other. A shared human existence requires action in the real world.

The halakhic discourse is the central endeavor of Jewish tradition. Judaism is not a philosophy but a way of life, and analyzing the world of halakhic sages is thus a key concern in any attempt to understand its positions. This chapter focuses on R. Israel Moses Hazan, a well-known halakhic authority who, in his halakhic rulings, developed a stance that assumes moral autonomy. His basic assumption is that the Torah reflects rationality. This view requires him to reject the thesis of a conflict between religion and morality given that, if Jews are required to act morally, religious obligations must conform with morality. This approach leads to surprising conclusions. Confronted with a conflict between divine commands and rationality, the religious believer is expected to endorse the divine command. R. Hazan, however, expects the believer to invest efforts in reconciling halakhic and rational norms, even when it entails a less plausible interpretation of the halakhic norm.

Indications of apparent support for the DCM thesis can be found in rabbinic sources. Thus, one talmudic statement determines that God issues decrees—instructions lacking compassion or any rational basis. Another states that “one who is commanded and does is greater than one who is not commanded and does.” God’s commandments, then, are to be observed only because they are from God. These and other sources often surface in the discourse as proofs of Jewish tradition’s endorsement of DCM. This chapter considers how these sources were addressed in Jewish thought, which often conveys the voice of the faithful and closely adheres to the traditional discourse when approaching classic texts. This discourse, then, incorporates beliefs and values into the interpretive endeavor; hence the unique importance of its analysis.

ABSTRACT The article develops a theoretical outline for a comparative analysis of the North American and Israeli Jewish cultures as two systems of meanings. Relying theoretically on the “strong program” of cultural sociology and on Ephraim Shmueli's Seven Jewish Cultures paradigm, it suggests that the American-Jewish and Israeli cultures be understood as two different meaning-systems: that of emancipation, whose main thrust is hyphenation with non-Jewish cultures; and the nationalist culture, whose main corollary is Jewish demographic and symbolic dominance of the public space. This cultural difference can determine political, sociological, and intellectual differences no less than the other way around. To exemplify the “Two Cultures” approach, the article offers a short comparative anthropological history of the bat mitzvah in the North American and Israeli Jewish mainstream (i.e. the non-Orthodox) from the end of the Second World War through the present, to serve as a methodological window onto the meanings that the two communities attribute to “Jewishness” – that is, the nature of membership in the Jewish people. By taking a step back from the tumult of politics and the media, the Two Cultures framework may be able to uncover unspoken cultural gaps between the two largest Jewish centres in the twenty-first century, as well as find potential points of understanding between them.

Abstract The Jewish meditative tradition is a diverse collection of techniques and practices, originating at different eras and exhibiting varying characteristics. In the following a summation of the major trends of Jewish meditation is attempted, following a chronological scheme and aiming to underline the shifts in emphasis displayed by different Jewish meditative paths, from the Bible, through the Merkabah literature, to Kabbalah, Hasidism, and ending with contemporary spirituality circles. Special consideration will be given to the effects of modern subjectivity and secularization on the development of Jewish meditative practices and to the inherent tension they exhibit with the Halakhic tradition.

This chapter investigates the conditions in which a “buy national” campaign turns from a positive campaign for “our” prosperity into a negative one against “theirs,” that is, boycott. It uses the Zionist “buy national” campaigns in interwar Palestine as a case in point. It explores the possible villains these campaigns could single out: the British imperial power, the rival Arab-Palestinian nationalist movement, and after 1933, Nazi Germany. Although Zionist “buy national” campaigns seldom called on consumers to boycott the products of a particular group, their intensity was directly linked to the intensity of the ethnonational conflict over Palestine and the immediate presence of a rival nationalist movement.

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