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And today we are hosting with us Nessa Schram.

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So Nessa is an advanced PhD candidate, focussed on modern Jewish thought at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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And recently she was also a manoeuvre fellow at the Centre for Israel Studies at who looks with Maximilian's University in Munich.

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And she is the founder and current head of an interdisciplinary research group titled I'm Not a Text.

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In her research, she employs performance theory and autophagy to read audio visual archive material of modern contemporary Jewish thinkers.

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And she has published in part Das, CCAR and Moosa.

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And today she is going to talk about of other Josephine Ichiro favourites.

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Yes, I'll just remind all of us that the format is 45 minutes of presentation and 45 minutes of Q&A,

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after which both Max and I will be running to catch our plane. It will be punctual.

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Yes. So without further ado, let's make sure I'm silent.

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Them a little embarrassing, huh?

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That, I think is unnecessary. Okay.

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Okay. Hello, everybody. Thank you so much for coming.

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And I came for Lisa and Professor Edgar for having me.

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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.

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So first I'm going to be drawing parallels between Israeli labour, which is and the values of Zionism.

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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.

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I'm going to be using audiovisual materials and not just texts.

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And the third thing I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be arguing with other researchers.

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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.

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Use it because I have these other texts, these audio visual texts that prove otherwise.

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So that's the three levels of argumentation that are going to be happening here today.

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Okay. So I want to begin with talking about my.

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This is what I just said. These are the three points. Okay. I want to talk about my two protagonists for today.

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I made a little graph. On the one side, we have religious anti-Zionism, and on the other side we have religious Zionism.

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And in the middle, we have two figures who are very, very different, but are both of them in between these two positions.

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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.

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He lived in Jerusalem in the old not in the old city, but in the old part.

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He was educated in the elite, the forward yeshiva of Port Joseph.

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He was a you know, he was obviously a genius. Everybody could see from a very young age.

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And he became a leading Holocaust's, a whole office of the 20th century, moving from position of rabbinical magistrate on the local,

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you know, different cities, and then finally being the chief rabbi of Israel for ten years.

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And after he was done with that, he became the political leader that made him a household name.

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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

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really changed the politics in Israel till this day really changed something fundamental.

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Next thing, I have a buddy, Joseph. He was born in 1903 in Riga.

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Excuse me. He was born in 1903 in Riga to a family who came from a, I would say, modernised orthodoxy.

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When I say modernised, I mean that he received secular, very good secular education at home.

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His parents brought tutors. And then because of the World War One, the whole family fled to Berlin.

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He received two PhDs and was, you know, one in chemistry and the other one in medicine.

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And that at the age of 27, he became politically active in the Zionist movement of the Eastern European Jews in Germany.

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He, as I said, his family was modern Orthodox already back in Riga and the Zionism in the house was already there.

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It wasn't like something he wasn't going against his family on this front. In 1935, he he immigrated to Israel.

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He got a professorship at the Hebrew University where he worked literally until he died.

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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.

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Israel's policy regarding this, the occupied territories and and many, many, many other things in Israel.

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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.

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Being Jewish is leading a life of praxis. And the praxis.

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It's halachic praxis. But except for this poor position, they had very divergent ideas about what are we doing about this modern age?

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What are we doing about secular education? There they were, totally different.

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I mean, even though they both lived in the same neighbourhood in Jerusalem, they never met sociologically.

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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.

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Both of them had aligned to to to Israeli radio.

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But Yousef was giving a weekly talk about halacha on the radio and all that.

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And you have a Labour which was giving weekly lectures on religious matters.

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And as technology became easier, audiovisual technology became more cheap and easy.

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Both of them had a media. Presence of a Joseph.

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It would be like cassettes being handed out for free in the streets, you know,

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getting people back to return to their to their roots and re-embrace Judaism.

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And for and for leverage. It was his, you know, his students recording him.

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And and so both of them were not only public intellectuals in the fact that they wrote or made legal decisions,

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but the fact that they really reached huge public. And, of course, they actually travelled across the country daily,

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giving lectures everywhere and also had a permanent cathedral, you know, where they would sit.

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So one of them was the specific shul, the Yazdi, and the other one was a specific school.

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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.

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So in these respects, in these aspects, there is something in common.

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Although, as I said, sociologically, they were very different. So why did they put them between national Zionism and religious anti-Zionism?

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Religious anti-Zionism is a position that thinks that Zionism is going against the wish of the will of God,

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because God is going to decide when the Jews should be coming back to Israel and rebuilding themselves as a political entity, not humans.

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This is not up to humans. So anything that not only art and design is literally secular and horrible people because of their secularism,

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they're also going against God because God didn't say, Oh, fine, you know, they didn't get his consent.

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Now, national Zionism on the other side thinks that Zionism,

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the success of the net of the building of the nation, proves that God wants this to happen.

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And this is the beginning of the Messianic Age, and all of Judaism should be thinking of itself anew because,

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you know, besides all the he's he's on the gate, we just don't see it.

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But he's really here. And they couldn't accept either of these positions.

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But in terms of their media, where were they more connected?

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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

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then when he came to Israel he moved to it's causing he right and left doesn't really mean much,

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but he moved closer to creating ideas against ideas.

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And that's what some researchers say. And the but Yosef came from the more crazy anti-Zionist positions.

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And then as his career progressed, he moved towards closer to a position that does embrace of the Zionist state and this ideal of,

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you know, human or originating, you know, humans starting this process.

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I don't agree with this idea what the direction they move, but I do agree that there are between these two poles.

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So that's what I'm going to be talking about. And that's the reason I can even compare these two people.

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So now I'm going to I'm going to talk a little bit about methodology, which was actually here.

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I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So I think that, as I explained, these people have very,

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very heavy media presence and they have thousands of hours of them speaking to the public with the idea of self.

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If he wrote legal halachic writings that are not something a layperson can read.

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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.

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When he wanted to engage with the public, he would have them come to his synagogue and he would talk to them.

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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.

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What's what are his what are his decisions regarding, you know, do you should you pray for the state of Israel or not?

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Like he wrote his ideas there, but he also expressed them in public.

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And this is not less important, as some researchers say.

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You know, it's you're not getting the truth about your research if you listen to what

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it's actually saying and also use this sometimes used inflammatory rhetoric.

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So it's better to just let's ignore this, you know,

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problematic setting where he sometimes curses people and says nasty things and just look at his pure everyday works.

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I don't agree with that.

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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.

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So he would give a lecture and then they would write it up and print it in a book.

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But we actually have the recording of the original. Okay.

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Researchers don't like their view. Let's see what happens. Right.

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So that's my. So that's what what what what I'm doing.

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And except for that, I think that when you listen to them speak and watch them speak, then you can see their performative poetics.

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You can see how they're how you can you can use more literary tools to see what's happening.

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And not only what are they saying, but how are they seeing it.

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So that's my my methodological contribution to this topic.

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So now we're going to talk about your childhood, which a little bit what have what did people say before me?

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So there's this very common idea that your childhood had two phases.

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When he was younger, he was more pro-Zionist. He was really, really part of the national Zionist movement.

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And then he came to Israel. He tried to make it work. He failed.

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And then he totally changed his view. He said that the state and the religion and state should be disconnected.

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The connection must be severed. The Jewish halacha will never be implemented in a Jewish state.

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So we've got to just we've got to just battle the state instead of be part of it,

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in that we are part of the state in terms of the structural contribution,

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but we're not in it in terms of trying to make it a Jewish place, a Jewish space.

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So they say used to be part of national Zionism, and he was then no longer past 53 or something.

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He's no longer part of that, or he moved towards the more authority ideas.

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And then you can find in different research and not so research,

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not so academic publications that some people think or call them anti-Zionist and some people call and post Zionist.

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When people say anti-Zionist about Yishai, they're thinking about him as one of the courageous society.

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Like he he thinks that the Zionism, the whole Zionist project is a sin against God, or at least it's just a sin.

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Forget about God, it's a sin. And they quote different things.

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They quote how courageous newspapers sometimes took him up and things like that.

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And then there's another kind of idea, because in the 1980s, he was very opposed to the first Lebanon war,

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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.

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So then and they were part of a post Zionist post-colonial movement.

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So they thought that this 90 year old man, 80 year old man who was with them is one of them.

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But the post Zionists were very secular and he was extremely religious.

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So that's really a problematic suggestion to say that nobody has said that, to say that you shall live, which is post Zionist.

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When you think about it as part of that 1990s movement,

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I disagree with those two interpretations and I'm going to try to show my neutral, sadhana, sardonic version now.

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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.

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Against the idea that Judaism is going to be changed because Messiah is, you know, he's here.

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That's his battle. That's what he can't stand. He's not he's not against Zionism.

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He's against Zionist theology. Even if the Zionist theology is secular, it doesn't matter.

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Once it has a meta historical bent to it, he can't stand it.

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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.

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Zionism is great. It's a great infrastructure. And why does he like it?

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Because we're fed up of being ruled by goyim. Doesn't say Gentiles.

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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.

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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.

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And also I checked the couple of years dictionary.

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Goyim is also what you talk how you would say stupid Jews like goyim number one non-Jews goyim number two stupid Jews.

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So it's like this is like this is like an inner. And he says this.

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He says, we're fed up of being ruled by God. And how would this interpret it?

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We're going to watch it one moment.

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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.

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So let's just watch it and then we'll see where we're going.

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Their government does not have Yiddish and Shia who use their vision of making money in your land.

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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.

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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.

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I really it that you are lively.

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Chief William Shatner on issue of international edition of Fame.

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You are not Charlie Sheen from New England.

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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.

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We are fed up being ruled by God.

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Okay, so I have to tell you, I've went through like every academic publication that references this,

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and I found one that talked about this as an ironic invocation.

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Everybody else just took him at face value.

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Some people said it's a simple definition that people said it's simplistic, but people here in this room were laughing.

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Right. So it's not either simple or simplistic.

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It's it's it's performative. So using this as his definition, designers and people thought, okay.

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I, I believe, had a very limited view of Zionism.

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Zionism is only a structure, has no merit except for being just a political organisation that ensures a self-governance.

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But really, he's a Zionist without dying.

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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.

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He's speaking to an Israeli audience and he's so angry with the prevalence of Zionist

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theology that he has to take his Zionism and make it very ironic and very limited,

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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,

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Don't we think that Zionism is postcolonialism? The language totally changes his position.

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And what I will show you now, I think, proves that language which never really changed his affinity toward Zionism.

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He always thought about it as a as something that doesn't have its own content.

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But when the people around him started giving Zionism a very theological like

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adding theological content to something that should have been more technical,

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then he started saying these kinds of things. So let's see how how we speaking to the dynamic.

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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.

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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.

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And this is a this is a positive of a positive framing of Zionism versus the negative.

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We are just fed up. You know, that's a negative theology.

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Never going to get a positive theology around or remove the other group of people who have come

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from countries over a number of years undercover who can work under or for the Google her.

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I want you to look at our own country, hope for her part of her career.

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Okay. So here he is. He's misquoting.

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He always would say that that history is the, you know, of crimes and follies.

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He had this quote, I forgot that Edward Gibbon, Edward Gibbon and somebody else.

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You always use the quote that he's paraphrasing here. And so what is Zionism?

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Zionism is to be responsible for our own crimes.

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That's not exactly a positive of a positive of definition, but it's not as devoid of meaning as the previous one.

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And I think that when he's picking the people he doesn't like, he's not afraid that he doesn't like.

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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.

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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.

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And he wants to he wants to enrage the Israeli public.

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And this is this is very, very different from the regular UK,

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which I haven't seen anybody who even paid attention to this kind of positive definition.

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Where is this story coming from? This this London Times, you know, guy and he's repeating this twice.

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Totally different story. So I actually found I actually found in 1974, 1975, he gave a talk than your institute for.

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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.

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And we have it like much, much longer version of the same story.

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And in this story, it's like it's it's like a Socratic dialogue where you shall know which is

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being confronted with all the different kinds of thought and forms of Zionism.

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All the journalists are telling him, how about, you know, a layer upon the nations, and how about this?

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And how about that? And the shallow, which says about everything that it's bad.

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And he explains why very, very gives a lot of details.

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And in the end, his answers were fed up of being rude by going after an hour and a half.

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That's what he has to say. We're fed up of being ruled by God.

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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.

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It changed his actual beliefs. It's only his his trying to get rid of meta historical theological interpretations of Zionism.

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Now I want to show that in five years that did more or less the same thing.

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He did not like met historical theological interpretations of Zionism, but instead of being anti metaphysics, he turned it into hyper metaphysics.

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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.

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So let's do a really big different you know, we're moving on totally different, guys.

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So then you mean Brown said that of ideas this was a Zionist without Zionism because he was part of the parading militia.

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He couldn't be a pro-Zionist for many, many reasons.

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First of all, they were secular and he clearly didn't like that. And many, many, many regions also, like in the fifties,

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the way the Sephardic Jews and tracking Jews were treated was something that really made him very critical of the Jewish state.

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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.

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I think that instead of saying Zionism without Zionism, I want to say I want to say sardonic.

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Sardonic about Zionism or neutral Zionism. That's my that's my take on it.

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And you see me on try to talk about counter nationalism. I don't have time to go into it.

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Also, that's it's good, but it's problematic. So what do I have to say?

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I'm going to start with this video.

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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.

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And sometimes there was an actual camera and you have the good recording of it.

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But this is with a cell phone. So I don't know if he knew that he was recorded all the time,

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but there's another version of probably a year before where you see that the camera is in shaking and he has a microphone,

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but he says something different.

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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.

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So let's hope this one works. He's going to talk about just a little bit.

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There's a whole argument about are you allowed to should you pray on the National Independence Day,

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should you say a certain extra prayer for the state of Israel, yes or no?

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And he says you shouldn't, but you can add a few sounds after that, after the actual prayer is over.

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It's a big, big, big debate. Doesn't mean that he was Zionist, doesn't mean he was anti-Zionist.

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The other committee rabbis wouldn't even consider answering this question.

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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?

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Why should we be happy about it during the Independence Day or not?

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So this is his answer. Huh?

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Like, what the [INAUDIBLE] are you going to shake your head?

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Panopto. You have guys who are going to have to move forward.

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But I feel like we should be able to.

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Viable Avenue, Tony. It doesn't mean much.

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You're crazy. Let me ask you this.

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You have to have an inheritance to protect your family.

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I want to show you one more question of how.

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Usually on that day with people like me or you really have nothing to do, but they make you.

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And the rest is. So it's this is a hard translation, but let's try and get the the the parity here.

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So we're saying why are we happy about the state of Israel?

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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.

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And they said, you need a certificate, certificate. And if you don't have it, you can't get it and protect you.

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I mean, you have to know somebody, you know, somebody in the system or you won't get it.

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And now the Jews can decide for themselves who can come in and who can leave the country.

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So that's that's good enough for us. Then that's something you say on Passover.

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It means that God gave us something and he hasn't given us everything yet.

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But we say thank you for what he has given us. And what he has given us is is a gift from God.

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So, A, the state is something that God gave us.

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It's can't be that it's against God's will and it exists because then it wouldn't exist.

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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.

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The goyim don't get to decide if I have a certificate or don't have a certificate. He himself could not return.

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He was he was in he was in Cairo. He was serving there as a rabbinical magistrate.

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And he couldn't return because of things like this.

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Right. So this is even a biographical note. He wanted to return to a city. You want to return Jerusalem?

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And and the you know, the British government is not okay.

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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.

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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

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to make the state of Israel part of a huge story in which God is controlling everything.

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And it's going to be very, very, very hyper metaphysical to make Zionism just a part of, you know, global Jewish history.

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Still, he has this. We just don't like the going deciding things for us.

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We want to, you know, be in charge of ourselves. And we like this self responsibility thing.

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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.

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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.

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You're good on this. The next which I want to I want to bring is a source I cannot use.

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And the reason I can't use it is because I do not have the recording.

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I don't even know what year this was said.

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Somebody quotes in a book, something that obviously it's an oral piece without giving any indication of time or date.

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And there are at least 4000 hours of his recordings that I have that have been converted to three or and before.

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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

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I don't know what was the intonation with which he used when he said this was where where was this dress?

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What was the joke? So they come to attack.

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They is obviously people who call him an anti-Zionist. They could be secular or they could be.

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In this case, it's either national, Zionist, religious, national, Zionist or secular.

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So they have to attack what is anti-Zionist? It's not it's nonsense.

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It's a concept that they have in their hearts. I mean, and anti-Zionist, that doesn't even exist after all.

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I served ten years as chief rabbi, a senior state position in the country.

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What are we good at?

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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.

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This is not the correct text. I had a better one. Okay,

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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

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is using a voice to mock the concept or is he actually saying this in horror or disgust or is he insulted?

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I don't know how to read this text.

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And two different options are, you know, a performer getting this text could do could make two very different performances using using it.

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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.

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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,

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just historical events in is in Israeli history and national Israeli history.

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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.

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And the secular president of the state of Israel, Menachem Begin, because he would invoke the name of God.

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That's why Saddam Hussein's nuclear bombs were destroyed by the need by the Israeli army.

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Now, this is totally far in the clarity of thinking, to think and to put every.

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That's happening in politics as part of God's plan.

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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.

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And what am I trying to show here? If.

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The whole history of Jewish people was this way where God would, you know, move the chess pieces to help the Jews.

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So the fact that he's moving the chess pieces also now is nothing new.

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The state is just so the British won't get to decide who can come in and who can come out.

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But it hasn't changed Judaism. We still have our own agendas.

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You know, the Torah study and whatever. That's that's what we do.

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And then we have another thing that helps us do it better. So buy, buy, buy.

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You know, inflating the the metaphorical implications, the state of Israel is actually minimising them.

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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?

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Okay. Well, gave me an idea. I might get in the way of it.

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Well, they could even go to a cash stream with it to do it.

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Good idea. I should go to whatever it is. Put it up.

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Okay, that's a good one. I wanna come up and canoeing in the afternoon to have all this is.

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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.

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Maybe that's because he would have won. I didn't want to show you some of what I mean.

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Okay. How about him? The end, of course. Doesn't matter.

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I knew they had gotten.

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I believe that I mean, 100% trust within the community last night rather than over the moon.

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Have you ever you nobody told me, you know, what do I do?

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I've had it with him in my day. And then they were having a go.

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Yeah, I guess they just make the rational happen.

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I think in the book I don't have time to think about it now.

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I know so. I think that the idea that you can that you can compare of ideas Stephanie language

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on the on the little comparison I offered today we don't like Zionist theology,

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so let's either remove God from history or put him in history.

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Full blown is convincing, but from this piece we also see that their attitude towards nationalism in general is different.

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But is it has no problem with Jewish nationalism. It doesn't bother him at all.

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He has no problem with with a Jewish uniqueness.

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That's fine with him as a karate rabbi. He doesn't have any problem.

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He doesn't have a secular education. He doesn't have it doesn't bother at all.

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But we know that. I mean, I hope, you know, inshallah.

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It was very, very, very, very much against those kinds of claims.

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And he would say that Jews are not the chosen few poor people. And that is a terrible, terrible, terrible idea.

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It's idolatry. So on that point, I have to say that that's a limit in the parallel I was showing here today.

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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.

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One of them, she's going in a more traditional, a particular rustic way, very traditional, I would say hyper traditional.

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That's rather about yourself and the other one sees goyim in.

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In a more you wouldn't agree with it, but in a more humanistic.

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Being a Jew is about what you do. It's not about what you are. So that would be about yourself.

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So I have to say that the parallel doesn't work all white. Obviously there are very different people.

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I will argue now. Well, there was another text that I that I that I that I didn't bring.

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And I don't know if I should if I should reflect on a little bit, but.

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I don't know. Maybe I should just leave it. Okay, I'll. I'll, I'll. I'll leave it now.

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So if I have to summarise the two positions, I would say with when I say that there's that there Zionism is neutral.

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What I mean to say that they think of Zionism as a structure that once this structure is understood as content, it is.

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Idolatry. It is. That would be a bad idea. That would be libel, which is a way of phrasing it.

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You wouldn't call it idolatry, but he would call it, you know, a terrible,

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terrible mistake and one that both of them would agree about this that makes people change halacha and prioritise national things to religious things.

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Now, I should I should for this point, I really need to talk about the source I didn't put in here for watching.

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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.

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And guess what? Leibovich was against going up to the Temple Mount.

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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.

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Joseph was very much against going up to the Holy Mount for a lot of reasons.

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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.

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We can't purify because we don't have the red heifer, all kinds of things like that.

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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,

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the 1990, the reason they're doing it is to show the Arabs on them up on the mount.

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You know, they're trying to prove a point, but they have nothing to do with her.

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So they're willing to take a serious, serious religious not like a religious danger for something that has nothing to do with religion.

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So it's it's pointless. It's horrible. It's terrible. It's deforming the correct way a Jew should consider his actions.

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Is this a sin or is this not a sin?

363
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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.

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So he's absolutely against going up onto the Temple Mount. He's just he's a ver.

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GIBSON The the aversion to this changing the criterion by which you rule halacha and there were rabbis and there

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are rabbis who say that yeah of course you're allowed to go up to the Temple Mount because there are Arabs there.

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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.

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Of course he has an unrealistic idea that you should have. You know that Zionism isn't the change in Judaism.

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So he also has an extra halachic idea guiding him.

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But he was very, very much opposed to it.

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So even though he wasn't like Shiloh, which claiming these things outspokenly that Zionism and Zionist theologies changing the halacha,

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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.

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This was very in that respect. He's like other comrade about.

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Okay, so what I tried to show this is a sardonic part is that they both tried to claim

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that Zionist theology is joke making material there the way they would come back,

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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.

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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.

378
00:39:20,720 --> 00:39:24,650
I mean, joke is a large word, but that's a good try to state.

379
00:39:24,680 --> 00:39:35,809
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?

380
00:39:35,810 --> 00:39:40,400
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.

381
00:39:40,400 --> 00:39:46,160
Either we're going to say God has nothing to do with Zionism.

382
00:39:46,310 --> 00:39:52,430
It's only about, you know, a structure. Or We're going to say that, yeah, God has everything to do with Zionism.

383
00:39:52,670 --> 00:39:55,580
He does everything but everything. He's done everything also before.

384
00:39:55,700 --> 00:40:03,769
And I have to add here that Ovadia Assaf said that the reason a Palestine mandate Palestine was not conquered in

385
00:40:03,770 --> 00:40:09,709
the Second World War was because he and a group of rabbis went to the Western Wall and prayed and got heard.

386
00:40:09,710 --> 00:40:13,400
The prayer and woman was returned to Europe.

387
00:40:14,240 --> 00:40:19,730
So it's not something specific to to what happens inside Jewry since 1948.

388
00:40:19,760 --> 00:40:27,380
This is like the way God does things, right? So that means that it is just, you know, another structure but has no difference.

389
00:40:27,770 --> 00:40:30,860
Doesn't change Judaism, doesn't change the game.

390
00:40:30,860 --> 00:40:35,530
It should not be given extra. Significant.

391
00:40:36,380 --> 00:40:38,940
So that was that. Thank you very much. I was clear.

392
00:40:38,990 --> 00:40:46,790
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,

393
00:40:46,790 --> 00:40:49,910
but they had not much to say about the contents of what I just said.

394
00:40:50,330 --> 00:40:50,690
So.