Before we get to today’s podcast, I’m taking the liberty of remembering a treasured teacher, colleague and friend.

Rabbi Dr. David Ellenson, who served for many years as the President of the Hebrew Union College, died in New York one year ago this week, in the early months of the war. His death left me wordless, and though I’d intended to write something about him last year, I couldn’t.

A year later, I still feel his absence more than I might have imagined I would. I often recall the first time I met David, when as a Ph.D. student at USC, I signed up for a course with him. His warmth was apparent immediately; his profound intelligence and prodigious knowledge instantaneously thereafter.

When I was wrapping up my Ph.D., in which I’d written a bit on Jewish legal rulings on conversion to Judaism in European Orthodoxy, David suggested that we do a book together. I’d written about Rabbi David Z. Hoffmann, while he had written his thesis about Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, who’d been Rabbi Hoffmann’s teacher. “We’ll take my chapters on Hildesheimer, your chapters on Hoffmann, add another legal authority or two, do an Intro and a Conclusion, and we’ll have a book,” he said.

It seemed like a great idea. During those decades, though, he became President of HUC. I moved to Israel. We both had more kids. And so on.

So it took us twenty years to write the book. Twenty.

While we were both proud of the book, what I really valued about it was the hundreds of hours we spent pouring over Jewish legal texts, editing, and more often than not … talking and laughing about everything but the book.

Hence, twenty years …

David Ellenson loved the people of Israel, the Torah of Israel and the State of Israel with every fiber of his being. The war in which we are still mired caused him no end of anguish and worry, and the conversations we had about that continue to reverberate as I watch the conflict progress. I so wish that he’d lived to see that maybe, just maybe, things will be OK.

David Ellenson was a giant of a human being, a man of kindness and warmth with a boundless heart, and a prodigious scholar.

On this one year anniversary of his passing, I miss him more than ever. I thus take this moment to thank him, once again, for being my friend and my teacher.

Today, we continue with the next installment of our “The state of the State” series, assessing Israel’s strengths and weaknesses a year into this war, and the sources of keen observers’ wellsprings of optimism and causes for concern.

Our guest today is Dr. Masua Sagiv, who has appeared on Israel from the Inside in the past, and we’re delighted to welcome her back.

Dr. Masua Sagiv is a Senior Faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute based in the San Francisco Bay Area and the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at the Helen Diller Institute, U.C. Berkeley.

Sagiv earned her doctorate in law from Tel-Aviv University, where she wrote her dissertation on the topic of law and social change in the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel. Her dissertation won the Ben Halpern Award for Best Dissertation in Israel Studies. Masua has an LL.B. in law and political science (magna cum laude) from Bar-Ilan University and an LL.M. (with honors) from Columbia University School of Law. Her book, Radical Conservativism (in Hebrew), on the Halachic Feminist struggle in Israel, will be published by the end of the year by Carmel publishing House.

A full bio for Dr. Sagiv can be found here.

The link at the top of this posting will take you to the full recording of our conversation; below you will find a transcript for those who prefer to read, prepared for our paid subscribers.

Our guest today is someone that I've had the pleasure of interviewing before on Israel from the Inside, somebody that I had the pleasure of having lunch and coffee with in Israel this past summer when the war was already well underway, and for whom I have a tremendous amount of regard. Dr. Masua Sagiv is a senior faculty member of the Shalom Hartman Institute. She's based now in the San Francisco Bay Area and is the Koret Visiting Assistant Professor of Jewish and Israel Studies at the Helen Diller Institute at Berkeley. She's a scholar. Her scholarly work, and we're going to put her entire bio on the notes so you can read it in full, focuses on the development of contemporary Judaism in Israel as a culture, religion, nationality, and as part of Israel's identity as a Jewish and democratic state. And it's because of her focus on Israel as a Jewish and democratic state that we actually interviewed her in the good old days when the only issue that Israel was facing was the meltdown of its judicial system. And because this is an area of her expertise, she came on and taught us a tremendous amount.

But I've invited Dr. Sagiv to do something a little bit very different today. A little bit very different is a contradiction in terms, but very different. I want to hear her as an Israeli, as an Israeli woman, a wife, a mom, a scholar, somebody who's now in the Bay Area, but we'll be back here not that long in the future as part of the State of the State series, to talk the thoughtful Israelis left and right, religious and secular, people who've been on the podcast before, people who've not been on the podcast before, people who want a hostage deal, people who don't want a hostage bill, people that love Bibi, people that don't. I mean, really everybody. And just to hear their souls, not so much to talk about their academic work, but to hear their souls and their feelings about Israel as a state going forward. And I'll just share with you, Masua, I got an email about 15 minutes before we went on from a student of ours who just got back from reserve duty, who's had a really rough time and wrote, I just need to talk to you about my future and the country's future.

And I don't know what he wants, but those are the kinds of emails that you never used to get. Nobody ever used to say, I need to talk about the country's future. And all of a sudden, everybody wants to talk about the country's future. So before we get in, just give people a sense of the woman that they're hearing from, where you grew up, how you grew up, family, all of that, and then we'll jump in.

Yeah. So First of all, thank you so much, Danny, for having me here. I told you before, the daily emails from you are really grounding for me, and it's an honor to be here again. I grew up in Holon in Israel. To a religious Zionist family.

People that know Israel would know that it was the first thing, like Masua, it had to be a religious Zionist family, right? I mean, almost certainly.

Yeah, it has to be a religious Zionist I'm a family. I'm the fourth of four girls. I went to school in Tel Aviv, and then I went to the university to study law. I studied my second degree in law in the US at Columbia Law School, and then I did my PhD at Tel Aviv University. I'm married. I have four kids ranging on ages between 15 and 4, two girls and two boys. And I think you said about the future.

I don't remember talking about the future that often before our life changed. But now, I think it's almost daily.

Talking about the future in what sense?

Everything that I do, I teach and I write, and And I teach and write about law and gender and Jewish peoplehood and Judaism, all of these things. Everything that I do, I do because I think about the world and the country that we are leaving to our children, I mean, my children, but also other children.

My children, too.

Yeah, your children.

My grandchildren, all that.

All of our children. And I'm thinking a lot about our responsibility as parents, our responsibility as educators. So I'm thinking about the fact that I have two boys that are getting closer to get enlisted to the military. My daughter is very close to that age, too. In two years, she's going to be in the military. I'm thinking about the type of country, what would be... We had so many options growing up, and the world seemed so open. I grew up in the 1990s. It is true that I was always growing up politically. I think that I found myself always on the losing side, politically. During the 1990s, I was more right wing. And it was the 1990s, it was Rabin and it was Barak. And then when I became more center and center left, I started the political The map changed completely. But we had so many... The future really seemed open, and that's not really the case anymore.

When you say it seemed open, what do you mean? Do you mean socioeconomically, that religious opportunities were expanded? What do you mean by open? How did it feel to you as a young woman in Israel of the '90s? When you say open, what felt open?

So definitely socioeconomically. I could choose to be whoever I wanted to choose. I think my parents and their parents have worked so, so hard. My two of my four grandparents were Holocaust survivors. All four. All four. It was A very big influence on both of my parents. My maternal grandfather, who was a rabbi before the Holocaust and who lost all of his family. He lost a wife and three kids during the Holocaust. When they came to Israel, he worked in physical work in supermarkets in order to allow for my mom to buy all the books that she wants and to go to medical school. My parents, too, they di...