Daniel Gordis (Updated)

Mike L.



This is more appropriate than ever.

This is a Gordis discussion of Cast Lead and the Goldstone Report and American-Jewish / Israel relations and the importance of Israel to the Jewish people.

Gordis is one of the significant voices in the larger discussion today.

He is also one of the very few people in the world who can claim to have voted for both Jesse Jackson and Ariel Sharon.

And that definitely catches my interest.

He is a signatory in opposition to the Levy Report, which concluded that the Jewish presence in Judea and Samaria is not some insidious "occupation."

He recognizes that it's up to the Arabs to end the conflict, since it is they who, since 1937, refuse to accept a state for themselves in peace next to our fellow Jews in Israel.

Update:

I notice that Gordis has a new piece up at the Times of Israel.  He writes:

That ­an utterly universalized Judaism is almost entirely divorced from the richness of Jewish heritage and the worldview of our classic texts is bad enough. But on weeks like this, with hundreds of thousands of Israelis sleeping in bomb shelters and many millions more unspeakably frightened, it’s become clear that this universalized Judaism has rendered not only platitudinous Jews, but something worse. It bequeaths us a new Jew utterly incapable of feeling loyalty. The need for balance is so pervasive that even an expression of gut-level love for Israelis more than for their enemies is impossible. Balance has now bequeathed betrayal.

Indeed.