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 | | Rereading Passover: Redemption and the Rational Mind | | Passover, writes Rabbi Prof. David Hartman, is meant to celebrate and sustain our deep yearning for freedom, not necessarily to show that God can change the order of the universe. Passover is a holiday that inculcates the belief that man will overcome oppression, that freedom will reign throughout the world. The faith that tyranny will ultimately be vanquished is deeply embedded in the significance of Passover | | Read More | |  | | | |
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 | | On the Appropriate Place of Rabbis | | There is no dispute that the disclosure of the complaints against Rabbi Mordechai Elon of sexual molestation through exploitation of spiritual authority provoked deep shock in the National Religious community. The allegations at the base of the matter, the circumstances that made them possible, how the issue was handled, the responses in the National Religious community, and the intense and sweeping upheaval caused by all these, raise a series of questions regarding the processes taking place in the National Religious community and regarding the impact of these processes on the lives of all Israelis. The most prominent and important of these is the ascent of the status of rabbis. Dr. Ariel Picard, Rabbi Dr. Rachel Sabath Beit-Halachmi and Dror Yinon offer some points for consideration | | Read More | |  | | | |
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 |  | | The Moral Equality of Soldiers | | Against the background of the wars being waged in Iraq and Afghanistan, a loaded debate is being conducted in the United States and in the international community on the “Just War Theory” developed by the American philosopher Michael Walzer. The implications of this discussion not only touch on the actions of the U.S. military or NATO forces - they also have an impact on the military actions taken in the Israeli-Arab conflict. Dr. Yitzhak Benbaji offers an original interpretation of Walzer’s classic theory. | | Read More | | | | | |
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 | | Purity and Impurity | | The laws of purity and impurity were carefully set out in order to organize the Israelite camp around the Tabernacle and its holiness. This institutionalized an ecological-ethical system that related to various bodily situations. Yair Furstenberg investigates whether it is possible to separate our recoil from what we find disgusting and our tendency to classify it as inferior and describes the way in which physical revulsion is translated into an ethical hierarchy that shapes our view of the world | | Read More | |  | | | |
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