Reflections on Yom Ha'atzmaut - Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb - Jewish Philosophy

What’s said in this shiur

The opening of this shiur, in Rabbi Dovid Gottlieb’s own words — taken from the captions, so names and Hebrew terms may be approximate.

Well, uh Zionism is a subject which you could usefully study for a year. Um sometimes when you get a short introduction it's called a taste. I would call this a whiff. You just get a whiff of what Zion is about. There's a wonderful text which I highly recommend. It's now more than 60 years old. It's called The Zionist Idea edited by Arthur Hertzberg. And his introduction to the text is excellent but it's an abscess. I think it's like 80 or 90 pages long. He was a conservative rabbi so he doesn't reflect our prejudices. Of course we don't prejudice everything we think is just objectively true. But okay. >> [snorts] >> Anyway, I highly recommend it. Uh I'm going to go through straight through it and given the time that we have, Sunday is evening is open Q&A so if you want to make notes and ask questions that's fine with me. There are a lot of different attitudes towards Zionism and of course they have different definitions of Zionism. But I want to talk about three or the third one divides into four. Um one is the most I'd say has a plurality of support and that is the secular Zionist [clears throat] Western secular Zionist movement led by Theodor Herzl. Then there was I think in terms of adherence a secondary movement uh led by Ahad Ha'am which is I would call uh although not religious but um more than just a secular political vision as I will describe. And then there is an extreme religious position which is anti-Zionist, wholly anti-Zionist. >> [clears throat] >> And the fourth is a group of people whom I would call religious people who are Zionists each in their own way. Now I didn't use the term religious Zionism. That's a term that has a much

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1. 0:02Well, uh Zionism is a subject which you could usefully study for a year. Um sometimes…
2. 3:45idea of Uganda was floated. But very few people know that in Herzl's own book the…
3. 8:08How else could he have managed to start a movement and and and predict the outcome…
4. 12:24Come and say, would you be for or against Zionism? Deep question? No-brainer? I guess you'd…
5. 16:39is already the foundation for the Messianic era, points out that the prophets predict return of…
6. 20:52the state of Israel. The first group, the secular group, in order to create for itself…
7. 24:34Father says, "Well, see, I guess if they're dati'im, probably they Yeah, they probably they probably…
8. 28:50the army and although we have superior means and superior esprit de corps than the rest,…
9. 32:56It never happens. Now, the the non-religious will say, "But we don't agree with you that…
10. 37:08And there's a softening of the opposition of these two groups, five and six, somewhat on…

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