In the past year or two, with the unrest in Israel’s political scene, the security failures involved in the brutal horrors of October 7 and the existential crisis we have been enduring as a people since then, I’ve come to conclude something unfortunate: Zionism, in its current form of intellectual ideology, is, in many ways, failing us.
As a passionate religious Zionist myself, I’m disturbed by this, and it’s led me to believe that we need a new type of Zionism, one that is rooted not only in Jewish history and modern-day politics, but in Musar — Jewish ethical growth. As Jews, some of us are interested in ritual law, others are interested in spiritual practice, and others have totally irreligious notions of what it means to be a Jew. But the Musar tradition is one we all can learn from together.
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