Maimonides
I have always found Maimonides fascinating. Working on my book was both exhilarating and extremely demanding. Now, four years after its publication, I still feel that Maimonides continues to play an important role in my life (as does Shinran, though for different reasons). I'm confident this feeling will persist. Coming across the words below felt like walking down memory lane while also reminding me why I became fascinated with this thinker in the first place.
He understood then what some of us still fail to understand.
“Explaining why the Jewish polity came to ruin in ancient times, Moses Maimonides, the greatest of Jewish thinkers, makes a point that proves highly salient in light of some of the recurrent clashes over hot-button issues in the Israeli public square. “We lost our kingdom and destroyed our sanctuary,” explains Maimonides (in his Letter on Astrology), because Jews believed that the nation’s fate lay in the stars. This zealous addiction to delusional belief led Jews to neglect what was truly needful: “the study of warfare or the conquest of lands.” For the nation to flourish, the Torah requires a combination of observance of the commandments and rational initiatives, including the cultivation and exercise of military might. In light of this teaching, one wonders what words of scorn Maimonides might heap on some of the confusions of mind attested in so much Israeli religious discourse, such as the claim of his Sephardic successor, former chief rabbi Yitzhak Yosef, that Israel’s defense against murderous Islamists depends not on the acumen of Israeli military leaders or heroic, self-sacrificing feats performed by IDF soldiers but on the studies of yeshiva students.
https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/on-jewish-history-after-a-year-of-severe-decrees/
And my book :
https://www.amazon.com/Exile-Otherness-Maimonides-Comparative-Philosophy/dp/1498574580