On December 7, Rabbi David Ellenson, a theologian, scholar, and former president of the Hebrew Union College, died at the age of seventy-six. Ellenson wrote important studies of the history of Orthodoxy while serving as one of the great theorists and leaders of Reform. He was also, as Gil Troy notes, a devoted Zionist:
In his 2014 book, Jewish Meaning in a World of Choice: Studies in Tradition and Modernity, Ellenson recalls living decades earlier on Kibbutz Mishmar HaEmek, a secular kibbutz . . . in the Jezreel Valley. In a passage that is agonizing to read after October 7, he says that whenever he viewed the lovely, busy, productive kibbutz from above while wandering the hills, he would recall the prophet Amos’s vision of the people of Israel being restored. However, while “deeply moved” by the scene, he continues, “no blessing would emerge” [from his lips].
But, he adds, whenever he climbed down the mountain, a different feeling overwhelmed him as he reentered the kibbutz. Watching parents kibbitz with one another on the lawn while their children scampered about happily, peacefully, and safely, this child of the American experience, born in 1947, a year before Israel’s re-establishment, would inevitably start pronouncing the She-heḥeyanu thanksgiving prayer for having lived to this moment. “In those moments,” Ellenson writes, “my spirit moved me instinctively to thank God for the kiddush ha-ḥayyim, the sanctification of life, that the Jewish state and Jewish existence embody.”
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