Some years ago, a friend asked what I thought was the more impressive title: "Rabbi," "Doctor," or (the often unwittingly self-parodying) "Rabbi Dr." You know, I said, there's a man in Israel who's one of the most impressive talmidei hakhamim and moral authorities I've ever known—and he's not "Rabbi" or "Doctor," he doesn't go by Yoseph or even Yossi, but Yoske. And you're as likely to find him working in the kitchen of his kibbutz as in the beit midrash.
One of Judaism and Israel's most precious lights went out recently, with the death at age 79 of Yoske (Yoseph) Achituv. A longtime member of Kibbutz Ein Tzurim, Yoske was far from a household name. But he was revered by the moderate wing of Religious Zionism, and may have been its last great tribune. He was one of the last, perhaps the very last, veterans of the religious kibbutz movement (ha-kibbutz ha-dati), in whose presence one felt the mered ha-kadosh, that movement's vision of sacred rebellion.
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