Assaf Inbari

Hi, I’m sure you’re familiar with Assaf Inbari’s famous article, which I reread recently, and I’m extracting and sending the following excerpt from it:

Does religious Zionism today have the power to constitute a spiritual force – rather than a political force – that may influence the social and cultural image of the secular state?” Ehud Luz wonders in the same article, and sets out three conditions necessary for this, in his opinion. The first condition is “the growth of a new theology that will form the basis for a new cultural-social orientation.” The second condition is “the cultivation of a new spiritual leadership” that will be “capable of infusing new dynamics into the halakha,” and the third condition is “the depoliticization of religion by separating religion from the state, or, unfortunately, by establishing a new relationship between them.”

By setting these three conditions for religious Zionism, Luz is playing into the hands of the guardians of its walls. For if the chance that religious Zionism will begin to contribute something to Israeli culture depends, as Luz says, on the existence of conditions that are so lofty and so difficult to achieve; if the matter depends, as Luz says, on a theological revolution, and as if that were not enough, also on a halakhic revolution, and as if both were not enough, also on an intra-sectoral political revolution of replacing the rabbis of religious Zionism with spiritual leaders of a different kind, and as if all three were not enough, also on a general-state political revolution of separating religion from the state – then religious Zionism can breathe a sigh of relief: this is halakhic for life. The Messiah.

I suddenly thought that you contribute a lot, and most recently in the trilogy, regarding the three conditions set by Ehud Luz, which appear to be “the rule for the days of the Messiah” in the eyes of Assaf Inbari.