Talking a Touch Away
These conversation guidelines are for you to use at your own discretion. Feel free to use them fully, partially, or to ignore them completely…
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The Meaning of Israel – 1
In the traditional Jewish community, long before there was a Zionist movement or a state of Israel, the “connection to Israel” was built in to everyday life. The entire calendar of holidays, the words of the daily prayers, the everyday detail of the stories of the Bible and the laws of the Mishnah – all were permeated with Israel: its landscape, its climate, its agriculture, its geography.
The success of Zionism has led to the crisis of Israel education. Now that Israel is a modern state, now that we have “returned to history” with all the unpleasantness and difficult dilemmas that that entails – and now that in our modernization we have lost much of the substrate of tradition in which our Israel connection was rooted – we are left trying to create a new connection to Israel, based on the assumption of the Zionist revolution: that Judaism is a nationality, not a religion.
The difficulty that the modern or post-modern North American Jew has in defining his/her Jewish identity (religious? ethnic? national? universalistic?) creates a parallel difficulty in defining his/her relationship to Israel – and this in turn leaves educators without clearly defined goals and outcomes. This whole course is designed to help teachers grapple with this situation and formulate their own responses. This first lesson is meant to articulate the problem, and start the deliberation process that will, hopefully, run throughout the course.
Early Ties I: Abraham in and out of the Land – 4
> Click here for printable pdf. Click here for printable pdf.
The Covenant, the Land, the Hand of God in History – 10
We will discuss the covenantal view of history and its implications for our reading of the biblical historical narrative and rabbinic texts; does God determine history as a response to our merits/sins? Does this imply we should undertake a passive role when national disasters occur, since they are simply the hand of God dealing out our due punishment? Is there a rational way to interpret the same concept of historical consequences for our actions? How do we relate to and teach this concept after the Holocaust? What does this mean for the modern State of Israel – do we have an unconditional right to the Land, or is it dependent upon our actions?
