Hevruta Study Questions on the Sources and Background Reading

Lecture 1: From Crisis to Covenant

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. Whether or not you agree or think it's accurate, what is the major shift in sentiment in North America regarding Israel that Beinart describes?
  1. The pollster found young college age Jews "indifferent" to Israel or lacking all "positive feeling." Is this a good description of your own experience or what you see in your community?
  1. What gave you or gives you positive feelings about Israel? Have your opinions or feelings changed and why?
  1. Beinart claims that the American Jewish establishment asks the majority of American Jews who are liberals "to check their liberalism at the door" when it comes to Israel. Do you agree?
  1. Beinart complains that majority of liberal American Jews who still care about Israel have felt alienated from Israel's new illiberal majority as well as from the strident up and coming American Orthodox Zionist minority. Do you agree? What might reinvigorate the relationship of the relatively silent majority of liberal American Jews with Israel?
  1. Is Beinart's perception too monolithic or extreme? What other voices would you want to add to the discussion?

Study Questions on the Background Reading:

  1. As an Israeli and as a rabbi, Donniel Hartman welcomes criticism of Israel. Do you agree that is a right and privilege for North American Jews or only for Israeli citizens? How might one distinguish constructive and engaged criticism from delegitimizing criticism? Please give an example.
  1. What role do various crisis narratives play in your relationship with Israel? In the relationship of your parents or children with Israel?
  1. Why does Donniel insist we should build a relationship with Israel on ought, not is; on dreams for what could be, not on facts of what is real?
  1. What should be the rules or guidelines for a new covenant?

Lecture 2: Religion and Peoplehood

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. Study Genesis 12:1-3. What is Abraham chosen for? Is this about an individual spiritual quest or is something larger at stake? What will be the promised outcome of Abraham’s “going forth,” his choseness, as expressed in the verses?
  1. Study Exodus 32:7-10.While Moses was having a spiritual high on Mount Sinai seeing God, the ex-slave people—just liberated—were preparing a golden calf to worship. Why must Moses interrupt his unique religious moment for such a sinful and stiff-necked people?
  1. God too is frustrated with this people, so he makes Moses an offer—"I may destroy them and make of you a great nation." Do you think Moses as religious man ought to accept God's offer and become a new Abraham?
  1. What is God's ultimate goal with regard to Moses? What does God need Moses for?
  1. Read BT Berakhot 32a. Why does God send Moses down the mountain according to this rabbinic text as opposed to the biblical text?
  1. What is the significance of Rabbi Abahu's statement about Moses and God? What kind of relationship does it portray?
  1. Consider the Avotd'RabbiNatan text. What are the two different explanations for why Moses broke the Tablets?
  1. At what moment are you willing to destroy Torah (as Moses did) for the sake of saving the Jewish people? In what circumstances would you put the Jewish people above all else, hold peoplehood as more important than Torah?
  1. Study Exodus 6:5-8. At this moment of collective election what is the relationship described in verse 7? What characterizes the nature of the relationship between the Isralites and God a this stage of the biblical narrative?
  1. The Haggadah portrays four children, one of whom is wicked. On what grounds is he described as such? What foundation of Judaism did he deny? What are the consequences for denying that foundation?
  1. Sources 7, 8, and 9 relate to the experience and significance of peoplehood. What is the role of a shared sense of past and a shared memory in creating a sense of peoplehood?
  1. In particular, what roles does the Exodus from Egypt play in the memory of the Jewish collective?
  1. What is the relationship between peoplehood and religion? If one can sin and still be considered part of the people, according to Sanhedrin 44a, what is the core identity and what are the boundaries of that identity?
  1. Why does the TzitzEliezer, 20th century Orthodox rabbi EliezerWaldeman, who was the head of the Jerusalem rabbinic court, argue that a Jewish woman who converts to Christianity cannot be converted back to Judaism? What feature of Jewish peoplehood does this response embody?
  1. According to Deuteronomy 15:1-11, what are the core responsibilities of peoplehood? What does this text say about the reasons for one's responsibility toward the poor? What are the risks and advantages of this kind of responsibility?
  1. According to Exodus 19:1-6, what is the essence of Jewish peoplehood?
  1. If Ruth is the paradigm text for conversion, what respective roles do religion and peoplehood play in that transformation?
  1. What role does peoplehood play in contemporary life?

Study Questions on the Background Reading:

Steven M. Cohen and Jack Wertheimer: "Whatever Happened to the Jewish People?"

  1. While some people speak of disengagement with Israel by younger American Jews as a matter of changing attitudes to the Palestinians and Israel's move to the right, Cohen and Wertheimer think it is matter of changing patterns of American identity. While the Jews have always been a religion and a people, its peoplehood or ethnicity has drastically decreased even as its spirituality has increased. Consider this thesis. Can you bring examples or counterexamples from your experience? How might we reinforce ethnicity or peoplehood?

Joseph B. Soloveitchik: "The Voice of My Beloved…."

  1. At the end of this selection Soloveitchik distinguishes between the two symbolic acts involved in conversion or initiation into the Jewish people-cum-religion—circumcision and immersion in mikvah. How do these parallel the categories of people and religion, fate and destiny, camp and congregation?

Lecture 3: Sovereignty and Identity

Sovereignty is often considered merely as a political category of a nation that has exclusive power over its territory. However, it also has important implications for one's identity as an individual; for a people with their own secure land; and one's own ability to fend and defend for oneself without being a parasite on others or a minority guest in someone else's home. The texts and hevruta questions for this lecture focus briefly on four benefits for one's identity in terms of having one's own land and state: 1) a framework for self-protection; 2) a sense of home and homeland; 3) the opportunity to live out Jewish values freely and fully in the public space; and 4) the opportunity to create a Jewish national (non-religious) identity.

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. Framework to Protect Oneself
  1. In the first source, Sigmund Freud reflects on a traumatic experience of anti-Semitism in which he comes to be deeply ashamed of his father's impotence and thus longs for a more manly culture—the fierce Carthaginian Hannibal—than Judaism has to offer at that time in history. How does this brief characterization of some aspects of Jewish life without sovereignty influence Jewish identity?
  1. BamidbarRabbah 21:4 clearly expresses the context in which one is to engage in self-defensive, self-protective violence and killing. What is that context?
  1. Maimonides shows that one's power is not only for self-defense but for the defense of the vulnerable anywhere. How has Zionism changed the image of the Jew for good and for bad in terms of the ability to defend oneself and in terms of the ability to help others in life-threatening situations, such as Israel's medical emergency teams sent to Haiti? What opportunities for protecting human life does sovereignty allow and even require?
  1. Study Numbers 32:1-19. What aroused Moses' anger? How was the issue resolved?
  1. What kind of responsibility does power give a nation both inside and outside of the particular territory ascribed to it? What responsibilities does Jewish sovereignty give or require of you?
  1. How does the fact of Jewish sovereignty change Jewish life both inside and outside of Israel?
  1. Ashkenazi's speech at Auschwitz defines the role and responsibility of the IDF and brings into our discussion terms such as "witnesses in uniform” and the "army of the Jewish nation." How do these terms determine the role of the IDF and the impact of sovereignty on Jewish peoplehood?
  1. How does the Holocaust experience change when seen through the eyes of a Jewish soldier? What is the significance of Ashkenazi speaking in the name of the six million?
  1. Jerusalem Talmud, Horayot 3:7 portrays one of the ways in which the central Jewish value of "redeeming the captive" was implemented and thus the use of collective strength in order to save a member of the community. How does sovereignty change the possible uses of Jewish power for the sake of self-protection?
  1. What new responsibilities can sovereignty allow us to fulfill?
  1. Sense of Home/Homeland
  1. What does a historic homeland add to the depth of one's identity? What are the central images that characterize the homeland in Agnon's Fable of the Goat?
  1. What does a sense of longing for home, the imagined and the real homeland, do for one's Jewish identity when living in other homelands?
  1. How does having a national homeland and a sense of belonging to a particular place contribute to Jewish life?
  1. Study Genesis 50:24-26. What function does the land of Israel play here? Is Israel the only place a Jew, or you, would want to be buried? Or is it also a place one can dream of experiencing while one is alive?
  1. How did Ben Gurion understand the Law of Return in his Address to the Knesset in 1950? What connection do the Jews of the world have with regard to the Land of Israel? What rights does that connection give them/you?
  1. Ben Gurion insists on the "historical uniqueness" of the state of Israel and then proceeds to define Israel as "a state like all other states." How does he understand that contradiction?
  1. What is Ben Gurion's vision of Israel-Diaspora relations?
  1. How do you understand the notion of homeland with regard to the land and state of Israel?
  1. How is homeland and hope portrayed by Ezekiel?
  1. What is the significance of homeland and sovereignty in the Israeli national anthem, Hatikvah?
  1. Values in the Public Space
  1. What are the Jewish values of the sabbatical year and the jubilee expressed in the biblical texts? How might such values be expressed in a sovereign context?
  1. The Mishna in Sanhedrin 4:5 describes the jurisdictional authority of judges in cases of potential capital punishment. How does a Jewish values conversation change when Jewish values control criminal proceedings?
  1. What happens to Judaism and Jewish values when they can be fully expressed and tested in every arena of public life?
  1. A Jewish National (Non-Religions) Identity
  1. YosefHayyim Brenner (1881-1921), the Zionist activist and writer, wrote in "On the Specter of Shemad" about the possibility of a thoroughly de-Judaized but "national" Jew. Why does he see this as morally superior to an assimilated Jew?
  1. What aspects of Jewish national identity are possible in a sovereign Jewish state?
  1. What are, for AhadHa'am (1856-1927), both the possibilities and the dangers in Jewish nationalism?
  1. What is, for AhadHa'am, a healthy Jewish national identity, and how would it be expressed?
  1. Why, according to Freud's Preface to the Hebrew Translation of Totem and Taboo, is he so moved by the translation of his work into modern Hebrew, a language he cannot understand?
  1. What kind of identity can be expressed in the Jewish state, where one's Judaism is not secondary or difficult to express?

Study Questions on the Background Reading:

David Ben Gurion, "The Imperatives of the Jewish Revolution"

1. What is the nature, and what are the sources, of Ben Gurion's Jewish faith?

2. How does Ben Gurion attempt to navigate between his vision of Jewish normalization and an almost mystical belief in Israel's destiny?

Berkovits, "On the Return to Jewish National Life"

3. How did Exile, according to Berkovits, distort the spirit of Judaism?

4. How is Jewish nationhood a solution to that crisis and Jewish nationalism a new threat?

Lecture 4: Power and Powerlessness

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. What narrative of power emerges from the biblical and rabbinic sources?
  1. When can power or violence or even killing be appropriate? For what purposes and in what contexts?
  1. What is the core value of Judaism with regard to others as expressed by Hillel in Shabbat 31a?
  1. What are the possibilities and limitations on the right to the use of power for self-defense as opposed to one's responsibility for all human life?
  1. What limitation on power does Baba Metzia 62a pose?
  1. When is the use of power, and even killing, necessary according to BamidbarRabbah 1:26-28?
  1. How does the understanding of every human being as created in the image of God (Genesis 1:26-28) influence Jewish thinking on the use of power? On the experience of the powerless?
  1. What, according to Sanhedrin 73a, is Jewish responsibility to the other who is endangered?
  1. When is one required to use power to prevent sin or to protect another from sinning according to Sanhedrin 74a?
  1. The Book of Esther portrays the complexity of powerlessness for Jews. What kind of power did Esther possess? What kind of power did the Jews of the Book of Esther lack, and what were the implications?
  1. What ambivalence about power and its use is expressed in BereshitRabbah 76:2?
  1. In Deuteronomy 17:14-17 what limitations on power are placed on the king, even in the context of sovereignty?
  1. What are the potential dangers and limitations on sovereign power described in Chronicles I:22:1-10?
  1. According to Isaiah 2:1-4 and Maimonides, Laws Pertaining to Kings 12:4-5, what are the ultimate goals and gifts of power?
  1. Is power itself a necessary or ultimate good?
  1. What narrative of power and Judaism emerges from these texts?

Study Questions on the Background Reading:

Heschel, "No Time for Neutrality"

  1. What, for Heschel, is the greatness of Judaism?
  1. Given Heschel's assertion that "it is the small in which the great becomes real. It is the weekday in which the Sabbath is reflected," what might be a Heschelian ethics of power?

Ruth Wisse, "The Contradictions of Jewish and Power"

  1. What, according to Wisse, are the limits of Israeli power?
  1. For Wisse, what is the moral significance of Jewish power for the world?

Lecture 5: War and Occupation

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. According to BamidbarRabbah 21:4, when is it just to kill?
  1. How does this passage of Matthew 5:38-42 argue one should respond to violence?
  1. In Deuteronomy 2:24-31 what does God want Moses to do and how does Moses respond? Why does God want Moses to go to war?
  1. In BamidbarRabbah 19:33 how does Moses respond to God and how does God respond? How do the rabbis re-read the previous biblical text?
  1. Read Exodus 22:1-3. For what notion of self-defense does this text argue?
  1. In Sanhedrin 72a how do the rabbis understand the issue of intent in the case of the thief? How should one respond?
  1. How does the principle of certainty determine what force is permissible? What are the limitations on the use of force?
  1. How can one understand Genesis 18:22-25 with regard to the morality of war and demand for morality in war?
  1. Study Samuel II, chapter 3 and then read the source Sanhedrin 49a. When is the use of deadly force deemed unnecessary?
  1. What should Abner have done?
  1. In Maimonides, Laws Pertaining to Murder, how is the principle of proportionality explained? What is the distinction between killing and murder?
  1. How might Sanhedrin 74a influence the principles of morality in war? How does this text argue one should respond to those not actively engaged in trying to attack you?
  1. How does the IDF Spirit understand the role of the IDF in war? What morality of war does it teach?
  1. How might Leviticus 19:18 and 19:33-34 influence a morality of occupation?
  1. What principles for morality in war and occupation morality does Shabbat 31a teach?
  1. Read Aharon Barak's "Judge on Judging." What are his arguments about the morality of war? What are human rights and how are they determined in the present context?

Study Questions on the Background Reading:

David Hartman, Living with Conflicting Values

  1. How does the argument over miracle between Nachmanides and Halevi on the one hand and Maimonides on the other play out in the debate over Israeli policies?
  1. What does David Hartman mean when he writes, “The interpretative category of Zionism is miracle, but the success of Zionism is reality”?

Noam Zohar, "War and Peace"

  1. Of the three justifications for war—commandment, convention, and lesser evil—which seems to you the most, and which the least, compelling?
  1. How does Judaism attempt to navigate between Isaiah’s vision of a world without war and the reality of a world in which war is an accepted means of resolving dispute?

Michael Walzer, Just and Unjust Wars

  1. Does fighting terrorism fall under the category of “the utilatarianism of extremity?”
  1. In asymmetrical war against terrorists in urban areas, how absolute should the distinction be between soldiers and civilians? How do you assess the IDF’s policy during the Gaza War of 2009 of placing the lives of its soldiers above those of Palestinian civilians?

Lecture 6: Morality on the Battlefield

Hevruta Study Questions:

  1. What is the new strategic paradigm that Israel faces, according to Halbertal?
  1. What is the goal of Israel with regard to its enemies?
  1. What does Halbertal critique in the Goldstone report and why?
  1. What are the aspects of the Goldstone report that Halbertal thinks are important to consider carefully?
  1. How does Halbertal think Israel should respond to critiques of its behavior on the battlefield?

Study Questions on the Background Reading: