Educational conclusions following the disaster
Hey Miki
We are not researchers and certainly not judges of the preparatory school instructors. But I feel that it is our duty, especially now, when we are all in pain, to look for ways to exploit this grave disaster for educational purposes for all humanity.
It seems to me that the idea should be to internalize the need for a forward-thinking culture.
The foundation must be a vision. In light of the vision, the chances and risks of realizing it must be considered.
In the flood disaster, we all ask what would have happened if they had changed the route or date of the trip according to the weather forecast?
But the question of realizing the vision is also relevant to Ben-Gurion’s decision to declare the establishment of the state!
As a well-known “Israeli troublemaker,” I allow myself to include the issue of settlement in the territories of Yesha as a topic worthy of discussion, while weighing the guiding values: the commandment of settling in Israel + the right of the ancestors, in the face of future complications.
Something from my personal biography: After my tears of excitement and amazement over the liberation of our ancestral homeland in the Six-Day War were interrupted, “I started thinking,” and as a result, I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper “Lamerhav”, a newspaper of “Achdut Ha’avado”, in which I wrote against settling in Yesha, because I understood that settling there could get us into trouble. At the time, I was still a member of Sde Nahum, which was a settlement of the Kabbalah. They were very angry with me there.
Now I remembered a different kind of event, but definitely relevant:
As early as the 1950s, when the JNF discussed the drying of Lake Hula, there were people who opposed the drying due to the ecological consequences of this act, and they justified their position well. But one of the senior officials – I think it was Yosef Weitz – silenced the opponents by saying something like this: Since this is a Zionist act, nature will adapt itself to the Zionist vision. And so he decided the debate!
But of course, there were those who even then suppressed our joy over the drying up of the lake and the marshes.
Uri Avnery! He gave a good reason for his opposition. But even though I had a great respect for him since I read his first book, “In the Fields of Philistia,” in my youth, I was angry at his opposition to drying.
And hence to a matter that is not at all related to the subject of this letter, and which we have already discussed recently: Judaism and socialism.
I remind you of Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag. And he is not the only one.
So I’ll end with this now.
All the best to you.
Hello A.
Regarding the settlements, I am in principle ready for a compromise, but I am skeptical whether we have such an option today. Furthermore, I am not sure that the settlement enterprise itself did not create the option, because if it had not been carried out a long time ago, we would have returned it even without peace. So assessments of the past are very complicated and difficult to draw conclusions.
I liked Weitz’s quote, because just like him, there is a Jewish halakhic world where the world adapts itself to the rulings of the sages and the law. For example, there is an interesting passage in the Talmud that states, “At the age of three, her virginity returns.” That is, if a girl is raped, her hymen heals by the age of three. From then on, it doesn’t. Now the question arises, what happens when a court of law skips the year (adds another month). There are claims among the poskim that this changes physiology. The world adapts itself to the law. Here too, this is nonsense, as with Weitz, of course.
But perhaps what Schweitzer intended to say is that sometimes the Zionist vision rejects ecological concerns even though they will actually be realized. He said this in a literary way and did not intend that the Zionist vision actually changes reality (I think the interpretation of the Talmud’s statement about Bat Shloush is also along these lines).
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