For Ahad Haʿam and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, Shabbat was not about belief but about belonging. Through their Cultural Zionist vision, Shabbat emerges as the aesthetic, temporal, and cultural heart of Jewish identity—welcomed each week as a queen in a song meant to update the more traditional Shalom Aleichem.
In his famous essay on Moses, Asher Ginsberg (Ahad Ha’am 1856–1927), an influential Zionist thinker, recasts the revelation at the burning bush as Moses encountering his internal voice. His heroic Moses is shadowed by other, more melancholic figures, such as Jeremiah, and even Muhammad, as imagined by Thomas Carlyle. Rather than a figure of strength and power, Ahad Ha’am’s Moses comes to express the anxieties and ambivalences of early Zionism.
When the State of Israel was established, the leading figures in religious Zionism had to justify Israel’s right to conscript soldiers using Jewish legal sources.
With a Close Look at Its Biblical Sources
An analysis of why the approach taken by TheTorah.com has found such a large audience among the Orthodox at this time.
