And today we are hosting with us Nessa Schram.
So Nessa is an advanced PhD candidate, focussed on modern Jewish thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.
And recently she was also a manoeuvre fellow at the Centre for Israel Studies at who looks with Maximilian's University in Munich.
And she is the founder and current head of an interdisciplinary research group titled I'm Not a Text.
In her research, she employs performance theory and autophagy to read audio visual archive material of modern contemporary Jewish thinkers.
And she has published in part Das, CCAR and Moosa.
And today she is going to talk about of other Josephine Ichiro favourites.
Yes, I'll just remind all of us that the format is 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of Q&A,
after which both Max and I will be running to catch our plane. It will be punctual.
Yes. So without further ado, let's make sure I'm silent.
Them a little embarrassing, huh?
That, I think is unnecessary. Okay.
Okay. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming.
And I came for Lisa and Professor Edgar for having me.
Today, I want to talk about the Zionism of Israel, which involved Yosef, and I'm going to have three different levels of argumentation going on here.
So first I'm going to be drawing parallels between Israeli labour, which is and the values of Zionism.
That's going to be the main topic. But except for that, I'm going to be talking about using the right kind of resources.
I'm going to be using audiovisual materials and not just texts.
And the third thing I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be arguing with other researchers.
You know, it is this is academia. And I'm going to say that what they've said about their each of their Zionism is problematic.
Use it because I have these other texts, these audio visual texts that prove otherwise.
So that's the three levels of argumentation that are going to be happening here today.
Okay. So I want to begin with talking about my.
This is what I just said. These are the three points. Okay. I want to talk about my two protagonists for today.
I made a little graph. On the one side, we have religious anti-Zionism, and on the other side we have religious Zionism.
And in the middle, we have two figures who are very, very different, but are both of them in between these two positions.
So one of them, Rabbi Joseph, was born in 1920 in Iraq, in Baghdad, and he immigrated to Israel when he was like four years old.
He lived in Jerusalem in the old not in the old city, but in the old part.
He was educated in the elite, the forward yeshiva of Port Joseph.
He was a you know, he was obviously a genius. Everybody could see from a very young age.
And he became a leading Holocaust's, a whole office of the 20th century, moving from position of rabbinical magistrate on the local,
you know, different cities, and then finally being the chief rabbi of Israel for ten years.
And after he was done with that, he became the political leader that made him a household name.
He was the leader of the political party, chess, which was the Haredi Sephardi movement in Israel that at its height had 90 mandates and
really changed the politics in Israel till this day really changed something fundamental.
Next thing, I have a buddy, Joseph. He was born in 1903 in Riga.
Excuse me. He was born in 1903 in Riga to a family who came from a, I would say, modernised orthodoxy.
When I say modernised, I mean that he received secular, very good secular education at home.
His parents brought tutors. And then because of the World War One, the whole family fled to Berlin.
He received two PhDs and was, you know, one in chemistry and the other one in medicine.
And that at the age of 27, he became politically active in the Zionist movement of the Eastern European Jews in Germany.
He, as I said, his family was modern Orthodox already back in Riga and the Zionism in the house was already there.
It wasn't like something he wasn't going against his family on this front. In 1935, he he immigrated to Israel.
He got a professorship at the Hebrew University where he worked literally until he died.
And but that's not what he's known for. What he's known for is for him is for his political, very strong political critique of Israel.
Israel's policy regarding this, the occupied territories and and many, many, many other things in Israel.
So he's very known until this day. And both of these figures are thought that Judaism is about law, it's about halacha, it's about leading a life.
Being Jewish is leading a life of praxis. And the praxis.
It's halachic praxis. But except for this poor position, they had very divergent ideas about what are we doing about this modern age?
What are we doing about secular education? There they were, totally different.
I mean, even though they both lived in the same neighbourhood in Jerusalem, they never met sociologically.
Okay. But there is one very core thing that unites them, and that's the fact that they were media intellectuals already in the 1970s.
Both of them had aligned to to to Israeli radio.
But Yousef was giving a weekly talk about halacha on the radio and all that.
And you have a Labour which was giving weekly lectures on religious matters.
And as technology became easier, audiovisual technology became more cheap and easy.
Both of them had a media. Presence of a Joseph.
It would be like cassettes being handed out for free in the streets, you know,
getting people back to return to their to their roots and re-embrace Judaism.
And for and for leverage. It was his, you know, his students recording him.
And and so both of them were not only public intellectuals in the fact that they wrote or made legal decisions,
but the fact that they really reached huge public. And, of course, they actually travelled across the country daily,
giving lectures everywhere and also had a permanent cathedral, you know, where they would sit.
So one of them was the specific shul, the Yazdi, and the other one was a specific school.
Sure, yes. You would like to synagogues where you could find them at least once or twice a week, giving an open letter to whoever wants to come.
So in these respects, in these aspects, there is something in common.
Although, as I said, sociologically, they were very different. So why did they put them between national Zionism and religious anti-Zionism?
Religious anti-Zionism is a position that thinks that Zionism is going against the wish of the will of God,
because God is going to decide when the Jews should be coming back to Israel and rebuilding themselves as a political entity, not humans.
This is not up to humans. So anything that not only art and design is literally secular and horrible people because of their secularism,
they're also going against God because God didn't say, Oh, fine, you know, they didn't get his consent.
Now, national Zionism on the other side thinks that Zionism,
the success of the net of the building of the nation, proves that God wants this to happen.
And this is the beginning of the Messianic Age, and all of Judaism should be thinking of itself anew because,
you know, besides all the he's he's on the gate, we just don't see it.
But he's really here. And they couldn't accept either of these positions.
But in terms of their media, where were they more connected?
I put them in this order for a reason, is that I believe it's at least it's claimed came from a national Zionism when he was younger and
then when he came to Israel he moved to it's causing he right and left doesn't really mean much,
but he moved closer to creating ideas against ideas.
And that's what some researchers say. And the but Yosef came from the more crazy anti-Zionist positions.
And then as his career progressed, he moved towards closer to a position that does embrace of the Zionist state and this ideal of,
you know, human or originating, you know, humans starting this process.
I don't agree with this idea what the direction they move, but I do agree that there are between these two poles.
So that's what I'm going to be talking about. And that's the reason I can even compare these two people.
So now I'm going to I'm going to talk a little bit about methodology, which was actually here.
I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So I think that, as I explained, these people have very,
very heavy media presence and they have thousands of hours of them speaking to the public with the idea of self.
If he wrote legal halachic writings that are not something a layperson can read.
It's not. It's like you can't read the legal writing if you're not a trained legal is thinking about the use of writing was not meant for the public.
When he wanted to engage with the public, he would have them come to his synagogue and he would talk to them.
So if you want to understand his how he's navigating, you know, the world, most researchers say, well, go see what he's writing.
What's what are his what are his decisions regarding, you know, do you should you pray for the state of Israel or not?
Like he wrote his ideas there, but he also expressed them in public.
And this is not less important, as some researchers say.
You know, it's you're not getting the truth about your research if you listen to what
it's actually saying and also use this sometimes used inflammatory rhetoric.
So it's better to just let's ignore this, you know,
problematic setting where he sometimes curses people and says nasty things and just look at his pure everyday works.
I don't agree with that.
And with over with your trial level, which is even more crazy because the books that people always quote from are all built on electricity.
So he would give a lecture and then they would write it up and print it in a book.
But we actually have the recording of the original. Okay.
Researchers don't like their view. Let's see what happens. Right.
So that's my. So that's what what what what I'm doing.
And except for that, I think that when you listen to them speak and watch them speak, then you can see their performative poetics.
You can see how they're how you can you can use more literary tools to see what's happening.
And not only what are they saying, but how are they seeing it.
So that's my my methodological contribution to this topic.
So now we're going to talk about your childhood, which a little bit what have what did people say before me?
So there's this very common idea that your childhood had two phases.
When he was younger, he was more pro-Zionist. He was really, really part of the national Zionist movement.
And then he came to Israel. He tried to make it work. He failed.
And then he totally changed his view. He said that the state and the religion and state should be disconnected.
The connection must be severed. The Jewish halacha will never be implemented in a Jewish state.
So we've got to just we've got to just battle the state instead of be part of it,
in that we are part of the state in terms of the structural contribution,
but we're not in it in terms of trying to make it a Jewish place, a Jewish space.
So they say used to be part of national Zionism, and he was then no longer past 53 or something.
He's no longer part of that, or he moved towards the more authority ideas.
And then you can find in different research and not so research,
not so academic publications that some people think or call them anti-Zionist and some people call and post Zionist.
When people say anti-Zionist about Yishai, they're thinking about him as one of the courageous society.
Like he he thinks that the Zionism, the whole Zionist project is a sin against God, or at least it's just a sin.
Forget about God, it's a sin. And they quote different things.
They quote how courageous newspapers sometimes took him up and things like that.
And then there's another kind of idea, because in the 1980s, he was very opposed to the first Lebanon war,
and he was he was spearheading a group of young men who were not willing to enrol in the IDF and take part of the of the war.
So then and they were part of a post Zionist post-colonial movement.
So they thought that this 90 year old man, 80 year old man who was with them is one of them.
But the post Zionists were very secular and he was extremely religious.
So that's really a problematic suggestion to say that nobody has said that, to say that you shall live, which is post Zionist.
When you think about it as part of that 1990s movement,
I disagree with those two interpretations and I'm going to try to show my neutral, sadhana, sardonic version now.
So I have two different quotes from of ideas from Shelley, which where he's going to give his battle is going to be against national Zionism.
Against the idea that Judaism is going to be changed because Messiah is, you know, he's here.
That's his battle. That's what he can't stand. He's not he's not against Zionism.
He's against Zionist theology. Even if the Zionist theology is secular, it doesn't matter.
Once it has a meta historical bent to it, he can't stand it.
So he's going to give this very, very ironic definition to Zionism, where he's going to say that, yeah, he loves Zionism islands.
Zionism is great. It's a great infrastructure. And why does he like it?
Because we're fed up of being ruled by goyim. Doesn't say Gentiles.
He's going to say this in English. He's not going to send Gentiles. He's going to think goyim like you would see in the shtetl.
Like it's a it might be a derogatory way for saying non-Jews, but it's also the inner way of it's the word of the inside group.
And also I checked the couple of years dictionary.
Goyim is also what you talk how you would say stupid Jews like goyim number one non-Jews goyim number two stupid Jews.
So it's like this is like this is like an inner. And he says this.
He says, we're fed up of being ruled by God. And how would this interpret it?
We're going to watch it one moment.
How was this interpreted label, which is a Zionist without Zion label, which is anti-Zionist label, which is post Zionist, all kinds of things.
So let's just watch it and then we'll see where we're going.
Their government does not have Yiddish and Shia who use their vision of making money in your land.
Media Lucky. You need young people in your life right here on Long Island and I share the venue and they will not need one word.
And then I have in Italy who looks like Lionel Richie, if you know what the meaning of I mean I'm a little confused.
I really it that you are lively.
Chief William Shatner on issue of international edition of Fame.
You are not Charlie Sheen from New England.
What should you should if you get out and you do it on your own, you have a unique profession in the value of your life, which I challenge you.
We are fed up being ruled by God.
Okay, so I have to tell you, I've went through like every academic publication that references this,
and I found one that talked about this as an ironic invocation.
Everybody else just took him at face value.
Some people said it's a simple definition that people said it's simplistic, but people here in this room were laughing.
Right. So it's not either simple or simplistic.
It's it's it's performative. So using this as his definition, designers and people thought, okay.
I, I believe, had a very limited view of Zionism.
Zionism is only a structure, has no merit except for being just a political organisation that ensures a self-governance.
But really, he's a Zionist without dying.
He's hardly a Zionist, all kind of things like that. But I found him saying the same story, but changing the ending of this quote.
He's speaking to an Israeli audience and he's so angry with the prevalence of Zionist
theology that he has to take his Zionism and make it very ironic and very limited,
very sardonic. But when he's talking to a Jewish friends historian that in a kid who comes up to who sits with language and says,
Don't we think that Zionism is postcolonialism? The language totally changes his position.
And what I will show you now, I think, proves that language which never really changed his affinity toward Zionism.
He always thought about it as a as something that doesn't have its own content.
But when the people around him started giving Zionism a very theological like
adding theological content to something that should have been more technical,
then he started saying these kinds of things. So let's see how how we speaking to the dynamic.
And also, it's very important for me to show you that we here, we get the response and Povidone and Povidone, the kiss says, I understand you.
What are you going to say now is that Zionism allows the Jews to be responsible for their own, for their own faults and for their own problems.
And this is a this is a positive of a positive framing of Zionism versus the negative.
We are just fed up. You know, that's a negative theology.
Never going to get a positive theology around or remove the other group of people who have come
from countries over a number of years undercover who can work under or for the Google her.
I want you to look at our own country, hope for her part of her career.
Okay. So here he is. He's misquoting.
He always would say that that history is the, you know, of crimes and follies.
He had this quote, I forgot that Edward Gibbon, Edward Gibbon and somebody else.
You always use the quote that he's paraphrasing here. And so what is Zionism?
Zionism is to be responsible for our own crimes.
That's not exactly a positive of a positive of definition, but it's not as devoid of meaning as the previous one.
And I think that when he's picking the people he doesn't like, he's not afraid that he doesn't like.
It is going to think about Zionism in religious and messianic terms so he can give this kind of answer, which he still believes in.
But whenever he's talking to the Israeli public, he will never say this answer because Israelis will take this as an as a love pact.
And he wants to he wants to enrage the Israeli public.
And this is this is very, very different from the regular UK,
which I haven't seen anybody who even paid attention to this kind of positive definition.
Where is this story coming from? This this London Times, you know, guy and he's repeating this twice.
Totally different story. So I actually found I actually found in 1974, 1975, he gave a talk than your institute for.
But it was an hour and a half talk and the whole hour and a half was about this event when this journalist came to him.
And we have it like much, much longer version of the same story.
And in this story, it's like it's it's like a Socratic dialogue where you shall know which is
being confronted with all the different kinds of thought and forms of Zionism.
All the journalists are telling him, how about, you know, a layer upon the nations, and how about this?
And how about that? And the shallow, which says about everything that it's bad.
And he explains why very, very gives a lot of details.
And in the end, his answers were fed up of being rude by going after an hour and a half.
That's what he has to say. We're fed up of being ruled by God.
And so and so the little tiny part I brought about him, his other hidden answer, which is also ironic, I think proves that he has.
It changed his actual beliefs. It's only his his trying to get rid of meta historical theological interpretations of Zionism.
Now I want to show that in five years that did more or less the same thing.
He did not like met historical theological interpretations of Zionism, but instead of being anti metaphysics, he turned it into hyper metaphysics.
And I also want to show that he has his own version of We are fed up of being ruled by God, but it's a little different.
So let's do a really big different you know, we're moving on totally different, guys.
So then you mean Brown said that of ideas this was a Zionist without Zionism because he was part of the parading militia.
He couldn't be a pro-Zionist for many, many reasons.
First of all, they were secular and he clearly didn't like that. And many, many, many regions also, like in the fifties,
the way the Sephardic Jews and tracking Jews were treated was something that really made him very critical of the Jewish state.
But on the other hand, there were some things that he did like about it, and that's what we're going to try to see today.
I think that instead of saying Zionism without Zionism, I want to say I want to say sardonic.
Sardonic about Zionism or neutral Zionism. That's my that's my take on it.
And you see me on try to talk about counter nationalism. I don't have time to go into it.
Also, that's it's good, but it's problematic. So what do I have to say?
I'm going to start with this video.
It's it's one of if I just put speak in his this is from his old age, he would speak in his he would speak in his synagogue, under his house.
And sometimes there was an actual camera and you have the good recording of it.
But this is with a cell phone. So I don't know if he knew that he was recorded all the time,
but there's another version of probably a year before where you see that the camera is in shaking and he has a microphone,
but he says something different.
And this one where there isn't, it's like somebody holding one sign he's giving that he's giving his version of We're fed up of being ruled by going.
So let's hope this one works. He's going to talk about just a little bit.
There's a whole argument about are you allowed to should you pray on the National Independence Day,
should you say a certain extra prayer for the state of Israel, yes or no?
And he says you shouldn't, but you can add a few sounds after that, after the actual prayer is over.
It's a big, big, big debate. Doesn't mean that he was Zionist, doesn't mean he was anti-Zionist.
The other committee rabbis wouldn't even consider answering this question.
So that shows he's not a scientist, but because he said, okay, so this is what he's going to say, why should we like the state of Israel?
Why should we be happy about it during the Independence Day or not?
So this is his answer. Huh?
Like, what the [INAUDIBLE] are you going to shake your head?
Panopto. You have guys who are going to have to move forward.
But I feel like we should be able to.
Viable Avenue, Tony. It doesn't mean much.
You're crazy. Let me ask you this.
You have to have an inheritance to protect your family.
I want to show you one more question of how.
Usually on that day with people like me or you really have nothing to do, but they make you.
And the rest is. So it's this is a hard translation, but let's try and get the the the parity here.
So we're saying why are we happy about the state of Israel?
Because before that, in order to get into it, in order to get into the Holy Land, the Jews were had to pass through a different government, a mandate.
And they said, you need a certificate, certificate. And if you don't have it, you can't get it and protect you.
I mean, you have to know somebody, you know, somebody in the system or you won't get it.
And now the Jews can decide for themselves who can come in and who can leave the country.
So that's that's good enough for us. Then that's something you say on Passover.
It means that God gave us something and he hasn't given us everything yet.
But we say thank you for what he has given us. And what he has given us is is a gift from God.
So, A, the state is something that God gave us.
It's can't be that it's against God's will and it exists because then it wouldn't exist.
And B Yeah, the country is not perfect, it's full of faults, but we're thankful for whatever it is we have and what is in the area.
The goyim don't get to decide if I have a certificate or don't have a certificate. He himself could not return.
He was he was in he was in Cairo. He was serving there as a rabbinical magistrate.
And he couldn't return because of things like this.
Right. So this is even a biographical note. He wanted to return to a city. You want to return Jerusalem?
And and the you know, the British government is not okay.
And the tone I don't know if some people are a little laughing here. The tone was it was a it was like a parody, like funny.
It wasn't like serious. It was like, oh, yeah. So what I was trying to show from this is that although what he's going to do now is he's going
to make the state of Israel part of a huge story in which God is controlling everything.
And it's going to be very, very, very hyper metaphysical to make Zionism just a part of, you know, global Jewish history.
Still, he has this. We just don't like the going deciding things for us.
We want to, you know, be in charge of ourselves. And we like this self responsibility thing.
Yeah, we like that. But you know, let's be a little silly about it. Let's be a little, you know, a little parodic.
It's not parody, but it's promote a mood, I would say. And the next source I wanted to bring up how I was the time.
You're good on this. The next which I want to I want to bring is a source I cannot use.
And the reason I can't use it is because I do not have the recording.
I don't even know what year this was said.
Somebody quotes in a book, something that obviously it's an oral piece without giving any indication of time or date.
And there are at least 4000 hours of his recordings that I have that have been converted to three or and before.
But there is like a like I don't even have a way to begin to find this and I don't want to use it because
I don't know what was the intonation with which he used when he said this was where where was this dress?
What was the joke? So they come to attack.
They is obviously people who call him an anti-Zionist. They could be secular or they could be.
In this case, it's either national, Zionist, religious, national, Zionist or secular.
So they have to attack what is anti-Zionist? It's not it's nonsense.
It's a concept that they have in their hearts. I mean, and anti-Zionist, that doesn't even exist after all.
I served ten years as chief rabbi, a senior state position in the country.
What are we good at?
We pray for Zion, Jerusalem and its inhabitants, for Israel and for the RA and for the rabbis and for their El-Sadr and for their students.
This is not the correct text. I had a better one. Okay,
but I don't know how to read this when he says what is anti-Zionist is is laughing at the idea of anti-Zionist
is using a voice to mock the concept or is he actually saying this in horror or disgust or is he insulted?
I don't know how to read this text.
And two different options are, you know, a performer getting this text could do could make two very different performances using using it.
So I don't want to do anything with this text because I don't know how to read it, but I do have a text.
I do know how to read because I have a recording. And this recording shows us how he puts political events in the political not only political,
just historical events in is in Israeli history and national Israeli history.
He puts it on stage and on the stage there is world Jewish history and there's the God who's, you know, navigating what's happening.
And the secular president of the state of Israel, Menachem Begin, because he would invoke the name of God.
That's why Saddam Hussein's nuclear bombs were destroyed by the need by the Israeli army.
Now, this is totally far in the clarity of thinking, to think and to put every.
That's happening in politics as part of God's plan.
I mean, maybe today with the realisation it would be more common, but this in 1991, this was definitely not a regular position for for already people.
And what am I trying to show here? If.
The whole history of Jewish people was this way where God would, you know, move the chess pieces to help the Jews.
So the fact that he's moving the chess pieces also now is nothing new.
The state is just so the British won't get to decide who can come in and who can come out.
But it hasn't changed Judaism. We still have our own agendas.
You know, the Torah study and whatever. That's that's what we do.
And then we have another thing that helps us do it better. So buy, buy, buy.
You know, inflating the the metaphorical implications, the state of Israel is actually minimising them.
That's what I'm going to try now. So let's listen to. It's kind of nice. Where is this helo to play without this here?
Okay. Well, gave me an idea. I might get in the way of it.
Well, they could even go to a cash stream with it to do it.
Good idea. I should go to whatever it is. Put it up.
Okay, that's a good one. I wanna come up and canoeing in the afternoon to have all this is.
The sort of trauma of election day. President Bush and I said that would not only be a doom and gloom is going to leave us alone.
Maybe that's because he would have won. I didn't want to show you some of what I mean.
Okay. How about him? The end, of course. Doesn't matter.
I knew they had gotten.
I believe that I mean, 100% trust within the community last night rather than over the moon.
Have you ever you nobody told me, you know, what do I do?
I've had it with him in my day. And then they were having a go.
Yeah, I guess they just make the rational happen.
I think in the book I don't have time to think about it now.
I know so. I think that the idea that you can that you can compare of ideas Stephanie language
on the on the little comparison I offered today we don't like Zionist theology,
so let's either remove God from history or put him in history.
Full blown is convincing, but from this piece we also see that their attitude towards nationalism in general is different.
But is it has no problem with Jewish nationalism. It doesn't bother him at all.
He has no problem with with a Jewish uniqueness.
That's fine with him as a karate rabbi. He doesn't have any problem.
He doesn't have a secular education. He doesn't have it doesn't bother at all.
But we know that. I mean, I hope, you know, inshallah.
It was very, very, very, very much against those kinds of claims.
And he would say that Jews are not the chosen few poor people. And that is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.
It's idolatry. So on that point, I have to say that that's a limit in the parallel I was showing here today.
So if they were the same in terms of we're fed up of being ruled by goyim, goyim for them is not the same thing.
One of them, she's going in a more traditional, a particular rustic way, very traditional, I would say hyper traditional.
That's rather about yourself and the other one sees goyim in.
In a more you wouldn't agree with it, but in a more humanistic.
Being a Jew is about what you do. It's not about what you are. So that would be about yourself.
So I have to say that the parallel doesn't work all white. Obviously there are very different people.
I will argue now. Well, there was another text that I that I that I that I didn't bring.
And I don't know if I should if I should reflect on a little bit, but.
I don't know. Maybe I should just leave it. Okay, I'll. I'll, I'll. I'll leave it now.
So if I have to summarise the two positions, I would say with when I say that there's that there Zionism is neutral.
What I mean to say that they think of Zionism as a structure that once this structure is understood as content, it is.
Idolatry. It is. That would be a bad idea. That would be libel, which is a way of phrasing it.
You wouldn't call it idolatry, but he would call it, you know, a terrible,
terrible mistake and one that both of them would agree about this that makes people change halacha and prioritise national things to religious things.
Now, I should I should for this point, I really need to talk about the source I didn't put in here for watching.
There's a there's a very big. And the news now about our Jews allowed to go onto the mount unto the Temple Mount.
And guess what? Leibovich was against going up to the Temple Mount.
He called the Western Wall that this Kotel, you know, he was he was very anti anti holy sites and holy things in the world and all but over.
Joseph was very much against going up to the Holy Mount for a lot of reasons.
He said, We don't know where you're allowed to stand and you might be impure because we have impurities today that we cannot get.
We can't purify because we don't have the red heifer, all kinds of things like that.
So that's why we shouldn't. And those who are going up to the Temple Mount and this he was saying back in the 19th,
the 1990, the reason they're doing it is to show the Arabs on them up on the mount.
You know, they're trying to prove a point, but they have nothing to do with her.
So they're willing to take a serious, serious religious not like a religious danger for something that has nothing to do with religion.
So it's it's pointless. It's horrible. It's terrible. It's deforming the correct way a Jew should consider his actions.
Is this a sin or is this not a sin?
What you're trying to you know, you think you'll do something politically, A, you won't, and B, you're going to sin for it.
So he's absolutely against going up onto the Temple Mount. He's just he's a ver.
GIBSON The the aversion to this changing the criterion by which you rule halacha and there were rabbis and there
are rabbis who say that yeah of course you're allowed to go up to the Temple Mount because there are Arabs there.
That makes it even more okay. But he goes through all the legal precedents and is just shocked that such a non halachic idea can can influence.
Of course he has an unrealistic idea that you should have. You know that Zionism isn't the change in Judaism.
So he also has an extra halachic idea guiding him.
But he was very, very much opposed to it.
So even though he wasn't like Shiloh, which claiming these things outspokenly that Zionism and Zionist theologies changing the halacha,
he actually thought that and he had a lot to say against national Zionist rabbis who made all kinds of decisions that were totally against it.
This was very in that respect. He's like other comrade about.
Okay, so what I tried to show this is a sardonic part is that they both tried to claim
that Zionist theology is joke making material there the way they would come back,
this idea being a religious or a secular theology, but they didn't have kind of like needle down more is that they would make jokes about it.
Now, these jokes aren't always like a punchline. Har har har kind of joke could just be the tone in the mood, in the framing of the situation.
I mean, joke is a large word, but that's a good try to state.
So then religious Zionist theology, which is the basis for all Zionist ideology, I would say the theological part is, don't you think so?
We don't like it, so we're going to make jokes about it and then we're going to do two things one or one of two things.
Either we're going to say God has nothing to do with Zionism.
It's only about, you know, a structure. Or We're going to say that, yeah, God has everything to do with Zionism.
He does everything but everything. He's done everything also before.
And I have to add here that Ovadia Assaf said that the reason a Palestine mandate Palestine was not conquered in
the Second World War was because he and a group of rabbis went to the Western Wall and prayed and got heard.
The prayer and woman was returned to Europe.
So it's not something specific to to what happens inside Jewry since 1948.
This is like the way God does things, right? So that means that it is just, you know, another structure but has no difference.
Doesn't change Judaism, doesn't change the game.
It should not be given extra. Significant.
So that was that. Thank you very much. I was clear.
I'd be really happy to hear questions and comments because I presented this to people who do perform in theory and they had a lot of comments,
but they had not much to say about the contents of what I just said.
So.