The Yom Kippur War and the Meaning of Jewish History

Since 1973, the tenth day of the Hebrew month of Tishrei has taken on the added significance of being the anniversary of the outbreak of the Yom Kippur War. (The latter date falls on October 6 on the Gregorian Calendar.) And that anniversary has taken on new, and terrible, meaning in the wake of the Hamas invasion of southern Israel. Therefore these reflections by the great Israeli rabbi Yehuda Amital—first published in 1974 and recently made publicly available in English translation—are doubly relevant today. Rabbi Amital (1924–2010) was one of Israel’s great talmudic thinkers, a formative figure in Religious Zionism, and a veteran of the War of Independence.