Q&A: Educational Conclusions Following the Disaster
Educational Conclusions Following the Disaster
Question
Hi Michi,
We are not investigators, and certainly not judges, of the pre-military academy instructors. But I feel that דווקא now, when we are all in pain, we have an obligation to look for ways to use this terrible disaster for universal educational purposes.
It seems to me that the core idea should be to internalize the need for a culture of thinking ahead.
At the base there must stand a vision. In light of that vision, one should weigh the chances and the risks involved in realizing it.
In the flood disaster, we all ask what would have happened if they had changed the route or the timing of the trip in accordance with the weather forecasts.
But the question of how to realize a vision is also relevant to Ben-Gurion’s decision to declare the establishment of the state!
As a known “troubler of Israel,” I allow myself to include also the issue of settlement in the territories of Judea and Samaria as a subject worthy of discussion, while weighing the guiding values: the commandment to settle the Land of Israel + ancestral right, versus future entanglements.
Something from my personal biography: after the tears of excitement and wonder over the liberation of our ancestral inheritance in the Six-Day War had dried, I “thought it over,” and as a result I wrote a letter to the editor of the newspaper LaMerhav, the paper of Ahdut HaAvoda, in which I wrote against settlement in Judea and Samaria, because I understood that settling there could entangle us. At the time I was still a member of Sde Nahum, which was a settlement of the United Kibbutz Movement. They were terribly angry with me there.
Now I remembered an event of a different kind, but certainly relevant:
Already in the 1950s, when they discussed in the Jewish National Fund the draining of Lake Hula, there were people who opposed the draining because of its ecological consequences, and they argued their position well. But one of the senior figures—if I remember correctly it was Yosef Weitz—silenced the opponents by saying approximately this: since this is a Zionist act, nature will adapt itself to the Zionist vision. And that is how he decided the debate!
But of course there was someone who already then spoiled our celebration over draining the lake and the swamps:
Uri Avnery! He argued his opposition well. But although I had greatly admired him ever since I read his first book, In the Fields of the Philistines, in my youth, I was angry about his opposition to the draining.
And from here to a matter that is not at all connected to the subject of this letter, and which we discussed not long ago: Judaism and socialism.
I am reminding you of Rabbi Yehuda Ashlag. And he is not the only one.
So with that I will finish for now.
All the best to you.
Answer
Hello A.,
Regarding the settlements, in principle I am willing to compromise, except that I am skeptical whether we currently have such an option. Moreover, I am not sure that the settlement enterprise itself did not create that option, since if it had not taken place, we might long ago have returned it even without peace. So assessments of the past are very complicated, and it is hard to draw conclusions.
I liked the quote from Weitz, because just like him there are people in the halakhic world for whom the world adapts itself to the rulings of the sages and to Jewish law. For example, there is an interesting passage in the Talmud that states, “A three-year-old girl’s virginity returns.” That is, if a little girl is raped, the hymen heals until the age of three. After that, it no longer does. Now the question arises: what happens when a religious court intercalates the year, adding another month? There are claims among the halakhic decisors that this changes the physiology. The world adapts itself to Jewish law. Here too this is nonsense, just as in Weitz’s case, of course.
But perhaps what Weitz meant to say was that sometimes the Zionist vision overrides ecological concerns even though they really will materialize. He said it in a literary way and did not mean that the Zionist vision literally changes reality (in my opinion, the interpretation of the Talmud’s statement about the three-year-old girl should also go in that direction).