A Citadel Defending Zion..
31 July '12..
The annual Herzog College Bible study seminar at Yeshivat Har Etzion in Alon Shvut – attended last week by over 6,000 men and women, young and old, religious and secular — is a magnificent enterprise, an intellectual treat, and an exhilarating spiritual experience. Too bad it gets no media coverage.
The Israeli press regularly ignores this uplifting event, year after year. The military censor herself couldn’t have done a better job of blocking news of the conference. Why? Probably because Israeli journalists are embarrassed by the Bible’s popularity. They’re petrified that so many people feel that the Bible is relevant.
The Herzog College Bible studies seminar (Yemei HaIyun BeTanach) was founded 20 years ago by its parent institution, the Har Etzion hesder yeshiva in Alon Shvut. The seminar offers a choice of 200 lectures across five days, ranging from Biblical archaeology to hermeneutics, linguistics, poetry, prophecy, politics, theology, history, geography, translation, cosmology and creationism, mysticism, midrash, and law, covering all 24 books of the Bible.
The classes are both academic and traditional, incorporating twenty-first century scholarship and Talmudic interpretation, creative readings alongside conventional approaches. Dozens of books with contemporary analysis of the Bible are published every year by the College. The lecture days are nearly always sold out, as is an additional day of Biblical field tours.
Herzog College lecturers are yeshiva deans and university professors, men and women, scholarly giants such as Rabbis Yoel Bin Nun, Yaakov Medan, Elhanan Samet and Menachem Liebtag – who have birthed the critical study of Bible within the yeshiva world – along with academic stars like Professors Uriel Simon, Amos Frisch, Yonatan Grossman, and Yael Ziegler.
Alas, these names mean nothing to the average Israeli.
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