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.

Israel is in the midst of a period unlike anything it has ever experienced, unlike any we ever imagined. If you would like to share our conversation about what Israelis are feeling and expressing at this unprecedented moment in our history, we invite you to subscribe today.

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 above will take you to a brief excerpt of our conversation; the full conversation, along with a transcript for those who prefer to read, is being made available to paid subscribers to Israel from the Inside.

Music credits: Medieval poem by Rabbi Shlomo Ibn Gvirol. Melody and performance by Shaked Jehuda and Eyal Gesundheit. Production by Eyal Gesundheit. To view a video of their performance, see this YouTube:

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