November 1989. The Berlin Wall falls. The Cold War comes to an end. The Soviet Union begins to implode. A young American political scientist, Francis Fukuyama, captures widespread attention with an essay entitled “The End of History.”1 In it he argues that the two great institutions of the modern West, liberal democracy and the market economy, have not only proved stronger than Soviet communism but are about to conquer the world. People are no longer willing to make the sacrifices or endure the privations of war for the sake of nation, class, or creed. John Lennon’s vision in his 1971 song “Imagine” -“Nothing to kill or die for / and no religion too / imagine all the people / living life in peace” - is, he claims, about to be realised, a secular equivalent of the Messianic Age.
Within three years, bloody ethnic war had broken out in the former Yugoslavia - first in Bosnia, later in Kosovo - between Muslims, Orthodox Serbs, and Catholic Croats, groups that had lived peaceably together for many decades. A rueful liberal intellectual, Michael Ignatieff, wrote that the forces of “blood and belonging” had prevailed.2 In 1993, Harvard political historian Samuel Huntington predicted not the “end of history” but instead a sustained and dangerous “clash of civilizations.”3
Fast-forward to January 2011. Aided by the new electronic media, a series of mass protests broke out in North Africa and the Middle East, beginning in Tunisia. There were insurgencies in Iraq, Libya, Syria, and Yemen, civil uprisings in Bahrain and Egypt, and mass demonstrations in Algeria, Iran, Lebanon, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Oman, and Sudan. The phenomenon was quickly named the “Arab Spring,” in the belief that what had happened in Eastern Europe in 1989 was about to happen in the Middle East as well: a grassroots-led rejection of tyranny in favour of democracy, liberalisation, and human rights.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - Covenant & Conversation. A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible. Numbers: The Wilderness Years
The Koschitzky Edition
Maggid Books & The Orthodox Union, Koren Publishers Jerusalem Ltd., New Milford, Jerusalem, 2017. - 349 pp.
ISBN 978-1-59264-023-2, hardcover
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks - Covenant & Conversation. A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible. Numbers: The Wilderness Years - Contents
Numbers: Then and Now
BEMIDBAR
- The Human Story: Act
- The Space Between
- Wilderness and Word
- Law and Land
- Hosea Rereads the Wilderness Years
NASO
- What Counts?
- Tribes
- Sages and Saints
- The Priestly Blessings
- Pursuing Peace
BEHAALOTEKHA
- The Book Between the Books
- Camp and Congregation
- The Adaptive Challenge
- Is a Leader a Nursing Father?
- The Seventy Elders
- Miriam’s Error
SHELAH
- Fear of Freedom
- Time as a Factor in Politics
- Law and Narrative: Believing and Seeing
- What Made Joshua and Caleb Different?
- Without Walls
- Fringe Phenomena
KORAH
- Servant Leadership
- A Cloak Entirely Blue
- Argument for the Sake of Heaven
- Not Taking It Personally
- Power and Influence
- The Egalitarian Impulse in Judaism
HUKKAT
- Statute and Story
- Yohanan b. Zakkai and the Red Heifer
- Neuroscience and Ritual
- Did Moses Sin?
- Losing Miriam
- Love in the End
BALAK
- The Hardest Word to Hear
- A People That Dwells Alone
- The Man Without Loyalties
- Let Someone Else Praise You
- Tragic Irony
PINHAS
- The Zealot
- Acts and Consequences
- When Words Fail
- The Crown All Can Wear
- Lessons of a Leader
- Leadership and the Art of Pacing
MATOT
- The World We Make with Words
- Priorities
- The Power of Non-Zero
- Above Suspicion
MASEI
- The Long Walk to Freedom
- The Death of the High Priest
- Individual and Community
- The Complexity of Human Rights
- The Religious Significance of Israel
- The Prophetic Voice
About the Author
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