Summary
Rabbi Shlomo Aviner, one of Gush Emunim’s most prolific and influential ideologues and a disciple of Tzvi Yehuda Kook, whose article “Messianic Realism” Lustick uses in Chapter 4 for the movement’s theonomous scale of values and its doctrine of instinctual gentile enmity (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3625-4118).
Details
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Aviner disclaims originality in “Messianic Realism”, an article often cited in fundamentalist circles: the views were drawn exclusively from the teachings of Rav Kook, and more directly from his son Rav Tzvi Yehuda and his disciples (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3650-3750).
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He argues that divine commandments to the Jewish people “transcend human notions of national rights”, that the Jewish scale of values is theonomous — rooted in the will of the Divine architect — and that by humanistic morality the taking of the land from the Canaanites was wrong, except that God’s command ordered it (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3800-3900).
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In a didactic dialogue in the first issue of Artzi he explains persecution of Israel by an inner instinctual enmity of the nations toward the Jewish people, beyond all historical or rational explanation, because Jewish moral values negate the foundations of gentile life (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 4, lines 3900-4000).
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In Chapter 5 Aviner represents the extreme of required expansion: “We have been commanded by the God of Israel and the creator of the world to take possession of this entire land, in its holy borders, and to do this by wars of defense, and even by wars of liberation” (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5119-5400).
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Against the vanguardists’ expectation of rapid completion, Aviner asks whether “anyone could think that only fifty years were needed to repair this people?!” and answers that generations will be necessary (For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Chapter 5, lines 5400-5618).
Related pages
For the Land and the Lord: Jewish Fundamentalism in Israel, Gush Emunim, Tzvi Yehuda Kook, Jewish Fundamentalism