ajc wire - blog of the american jewish committee

David Bernstein

In 1989, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman published his best seller, From Beirut to

Jerusalem. A foreign correspondent initially based in the war-torn capital of Lebanon, Friedman chronicled how this once peaceful “Paris of the

Middle East” had come apart at the seams and descended into factional violence and chaos.

After spending nearly five years in Beirut, and in much need of a breather, Friedman moved to

Jerusalem, where he reported on the painful dilemmas facing a society divided along ideological, ethnic and religious lines.

The thesis of Friedman’s book was that Israelis “could end up like the Lebanese: arguing first in the parliament and then in the streets.” In other words,

Israel, too, might fall part.

Having just returned from an AJC national board mission to Israel and

Germany, I am more convinced than ever that Freidman, a commentator I greatly admire, overstated the risks of a social and political meltdown. (more…)

Some of Noah Feldman’s “Orthodox Paradox” resonated with me. Like him, I am an alumnus of Boston’s Maimonides Hebrew Day School, which “made me who I am”. Like him, I have since struggled to integrate the precepts of two very different world views and value systems, sometimes successfully and sometimes not.

Some of Feldman’s arguments are compelling. The rabbi who challenged a physician on treating gentile patients on Shabbat was guilty not only of a serious error of judgment, but also of perverting Judaism’s fundamental teaching that all of humanity are created in God’s image. I well understand Feldman’s discomfort with the injunction to exterminate the Amalekites, but long ago chose to historicize the teaching rather than struggle to discover its contemporary salience. To be sure his disingenuousness in claiming that he had been deliberately airbrushed out of the reunion photo badly undermines his credibility.

(more…)

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What Israel Means to Me
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