Description
Book SynopsisEnd of Days is both a meditation on Jewish morality in the age of Israeli Jewish power, and a cri du coeur by an Orthodox Israeli Jew, a former combat officer in the IDF, for Israelis to look into the Jewish religious ethical tradition for an alternative to the secular and religious Zionism that sanctifies power, statehood, and sovereignty. Appealing to a wealth of Jewish sources from the Bible to the present, including medieval Jewish ethical literature, rabbinic sources, Jewish law, and contemporary Israeli thought, the book presents an argument against Israel’s occupation of the Palestinians and the suppression of their rights from the perspective of a modern Israeli religious Jew.
Trade Review“Drawing on an impressive range of sources—the Talmud, the writings of Ashkenazi and Sephardic medieval Jewish pietists, the Chofetz Chaim’s forgotten guide for Jewish soldiers, the Yiddish poetry of Jacob Glatstein—Manekin traces in compelling detail the traditional Jewish ethical disposition that recoils from pride, abhors violence, and views power with suspicion. He argues that this traditional Jewish ethics requires a radically different approach to the reality of Jewish political power instantiated by the Israeli state than the dominant view in Israel allows. By the book’s end, he leaves the reader with little doubt that not only is there no need to compromise one’s commitment to Jewish tradition in order to oppose Israel’s occupation, but that a commitment to traditional Jewish ethics requires active opposition to the occupation. Powerful yet unconventional, [this book] is a hybrid of memoir, mussar [morality], family history, halakhic argumentation, and social criticism. It is a manifesto for a new religiously committed Jewish left that is taking shape.”
— Joshua Leifer, Tel Aviv Review of Books (on the Hebrew edition)
Table of ContentsPreface, by Shaul Magid
Introduction
Acknowledgments
- Remembering
- Patience
- Submission
- Devotion
- Contentment
- Listening
Index
