I'm not sure that Professor Weiss will bring to bear the insights she can from Jewish literature

in our discussion today, but I've learned an immense amount from reading her on Jewish authors

of many generations and many countries and many languages, and certainly many of the things

that she has discussed in her scholarly work pertained directly to our subject today.

Professor Halbertoll, who has been teaching at the Hebrew University for as long as I can

remember, has also written abundantly on medieval and modern Jewish thinkers, in addition to his extensive

work in connection with Israel's military code of ethics, which will probably enter directly

into our subject today.

Our plan is not a very carefully formulated one. We're not staging a debate here.

We will not be allotting time and equal allotments to each of our participants.

We want to discuss these matters, but we do want to consider the question of Jews and power,

at least initially,, primarily from the vantage

point of the excellent book that Ruth Weiss wrote some eight years ago on this subject.

With the faith of our ancestors and their own conviction that the ways in which they exercised power were inextricably bound up with

their faith. And that's something that Ruth illustrates pretty clearly at the very beginning

of this book, where she describes the shared mentality of Jews in the pre-modern era and describes them as

people who knew that God would be the guarantor of Jewish power as long as Jews obeyed his laws.

If they didn't assimilate in the aftermath of the destruction of their kingdom and antiquity,

it was because they were sustained by the belief that God had not abandoned them,

and God still had expectations from them.

The prophets taught, in her words, that the political fate of the Jews depended on their ability to convince

not their rivals of their military prowess, but God of their uprightness.

...