Abstract
In the political realm it inaugurated the torturous decline of the State's founding Labor Party elites and sparked the founding of Gush Emunim. While calling on his Religious Zionist community to introspect and change, he is here, as elsewhere, offering a subtle counterpoint to other camps: to the Haredi stance that Jews ought not to have state-level power at all, an untenable position after the Shoah, and to the secular Zionist leadership, whose wielding of that sovereignty was laced with hubris, resulting in horror and death. The fact that it became a global event attests to its eschatological character, as does the miraculous nature of Israel's ultimate victory after the utter collapse of the war's first days. Public prayer and fasting is rooted in an acknowledgement of human vulnerability, grounded in an awareness of the moral stakes of human action in God's world, rousing the community to acts of compassion that aim to open sluices for God's compassion in the world.7 In R. Amital's view, what is the nature of this redemption by way of suffering?