On Sacredness and Politics, 28.07.21
Since the establishment of the State of Israel, and particularly in recent decades, Jewish religious tradition has been identified with the political right. However, historically - and also fundamentally - this identification is not obvious. In The Dawn of Redemption (Ivrit Publishing, 2021), Mikhael Manekin presents a different reading of Jewish religious and halachic tradition and sees in it the basis for a politics of compromise, moderation, and patience. Manekin, who is religiously observant and served as the executive director of the NGO Breaking the Silence, argues in his book with Ben-Gurion, Rabbi Herzog, Yeshayahu Leibowitz, and Micha Goodman in order to present a different view of the relation between sacredness and politics, and to portray the social and political left as relying on traditional Jewish texts, not as a retrospective justification, but rather as a commandment from the outset.
Participants
Chair: Ameer Fakhoury - director, Research Institute, Neve Shalom/Wahat al-Salam; co-director, Shared Nationalism research group, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute
Dr. Nechumi Yaffe - Tel Aviv University
Prof. Ishay Rosen-Zvi - Tel Aviv University; Shalom Hartmann Institute
Yael Gidanyan - chair, Singing Communities; active in culture, society, and coexistence in Israel
Mikhael Manekin - author, The Dawn of Redemption; co-director of the Shared Nationalism research group, The Van Leer Jerusalem Institute