Video: Between Nationalism and Violence: Confessions of a Jewish ultra-Orthodox Pacifist

February 10, 2025

In this session of "Religion and Just Peace | A Series of Public Online Conversations," which took place on January 27, 2025, Shaul Magid, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies, looked at a few of the texts of Aaron Shmuel Tamares (1869-1931), an enigmatic ultra-Orthodox rabbi from Belarus who developed a theory of pacifism over the course of the first Russian revolution, the Young Turk revolt, and the Great War.

Tamares’s theory was founded on the principle that nationalism was a recipe for perpetual violence and destruction. Reading his pacifist theory back through the two failed Jewish commonwealths in antiquity, Tamares offers a fascinating traditional Jewish notion of peacemaking, which rejects the nationalist frame and proposes “exile” as a moral positionality whereby collectives can thrive by viewing themselves as partners in creation, without the force of redemptive politics. Magid engaged with this particular Jewish notion of peacemaking and helped us decipher its potential for our day.

This is the first event of a five-part series of online public conversations with members of the HDS faculty to explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to the work of just peacebuilding.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:

SPEAKER 1: Harvard Divinity School.

SPEAKER 2: Between Nationalism and Violence-- Confessions of a Jewish ultra-Orthodox Pacifist. January 27, 2025.

DAVID HOLLAND: Welcome and good evening, students, faculty, staff, honored guests, graduates, and friends of Harvard Divinity School to this evening's session of our series of public online conversations about religion and just peace. My name is David Holland and I teach American religious history here at HDS. I also currently serve as the Associate Dean for Academic and Faculty Affairs, as well as the interim director of Religion and Public Life.

It's my distinct privilege to serve as host for our conversations this evening. I'd like to take a moment and to express my gratitude and appreciation to my colleague, Diane Moore, the Founding Associate Dean and Director of Religion and Public Life, who's been the intellectual force behind these public conversations generally and behind this year's series in particular.

I also want to express my gratitude to my colleague, Professor Shaul Magid, visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies at Harvard Divinity School and distinguished fellow of Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. It's a gift to have Professor Magid with us here tonight to have this conversation. And it's a distinct blessing to have him kick off this important series this semester.

Before we get further into this evening's event, we pause to acknowledge the land and people affirming that Harvard University and Harvard Divinity School are located on the traditional and ancestral land of the Massachusett, the original inhabitants of what is now known as Boston and Cambridge. We pay respect to the people of the Massachusett Tribe, past and present, and honor the land itself, which remains sacred to the Massachusett people, a land which is crucial to everything that we do here at this University.

This year's series is part of a recurring set of programs that seek to showcase the work of Harvard Divinity School faculty that has particular relevance for the social challenges and injustices of our present moment. Contrary to sometimes too common perceptions, even scholars whose research focuses on times and places very different from our own are doing scholarship that can meaningfully inform the moral imaginations and political possibilities of our present moment. These events in this series of conversations seek to shine a light on these pressing points of connection.

This year's series, beginning tonight, will include conversations with four faculty colleagues from four different areas of academic expertise whose research has important things to say about the question of what just peace is and how it relates to this thing that we call religion. Such a topic speaks explicitly to the stated vision of Harvard Divinity School, to provide an intellectual home where scholars and professionals from around the globe research and teach the varieties of religion in service of just world at peace across religious and cultural divides.

Tonight's presenter, Professor Shaul Magid, has spent a scholarly lifetime in just that pursuit. Professor Magid is among the foremost scholars of Jewish thought in the United States. With graduate training from Hebrew University, the Shalom Hartman Institute of Jewish Studies, the Seminary of Judaic Studies, and a PhD from Brandeis in Near Eastern and Judaic Studies, he brings profound erudition to his work. And that work is immense. I sometimes smile at the proverbial many articles and books attributed to speakers.

But in Professor Magid's case, it is indeed many, including Hasidism on the Margin, From Metaphysics to Midrash, The Bible, the Talmud, and the New Testament, A Biography of Meir Kahane, and most recently, The Necessity of Exile. Professor Magid is also a public-facing intellectual with many contributions to important conversations beyond the academy, including writings in Religious Dispatches, The Jewish Journal, and The Forward, and more.

Here, at Harvard Divinity School, Professor Magid has taught on, among other things, Jewish mysticism and Jewish religion and politics in the 20th century. Tonight, he'll be speaking about the space between nationalism and violence and the confessions of a Jewish ultra-Orthodox pacifist. With no further ado, Professor Shaul Magid.

SHAUL MAGID: Thank you, David, and thank you, Diane, for organizing this. And thank you all for coming out and participating in this important series of conversations. And I have the privilege and the honor to kick it off.

So I want to spend about 45 minutes talking to you about a person that most of you have probably never heard of but he's a person whose voice, I think, is an important one in this time. And I'll explain a little bit who he is in a moment. And what I'd like to do is to engage a few texts of his, I'll share a screen in a few minutes, juxtaposed to two other people who many of you probably have heard of Ernest Renan and his famous 1882 essay, "What is a Nation?," and Hannah Arendt, who penned an essay called "Nation, States, and Democracy" that was found in her archives. We don't exactly know what the date is, but it was probably written sometime in the early 1940s.

And these figures really are engaging a series of intersecting issues around nationalism, violence, and the changing times that are happening in the last decade of the 19th century up to the time of the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and then the 1940s. So let me begin to just introduce our main figure and then say a few words about just peace.

Aaron Samuel Tamares was a ultra-Orthodox or ultra-traditional rabbi who really lived his entire life in a very small town in Belarus. He lived from 1869 to 1931, which means he lived through the Emancipation of the Jews. He lived through the pogroms of the 1880s. He lived through the first Russian Revolution. He lived through the Young Turk revolution. He lived in a certain sense through a very, very tumultuous time, specifically the devastation and mass death of World War I. And that's going to be a very important moment for him, and a lot of what he writes is responding to that war.

Before getting to him and before getting to our other two figures, I wanted to talk about the title of this series, Religion and Just Peace. What does just peace mean? It's not religion and peace, but just peace. And this really brings me to two things that I want to mention very, very contemporary as a prelude to the discussion.

The first is something that President Trump said I think the day after his inauguration, where he said that he wanted to, quote, "end all wars," end quote, which on one reading means bringing peace. I have a word to say about that in a moment.

And the second thing I just want to recommend to all of you out there is Peter Beinart's op ed in today's New York Times called "States don't Have a Right to Exist, People Do," which raises a series of questions about nationalism and violence that I think will be relevant.

So to go back to Trump wanting to end all wars and his so-called peace project, it seems to me that what he meant by that was not necessarily just peace, but a combination of peace through domination, peace through intimidation, a piece of the empires, in a certain sense, peace between wars. And this really reminded me of Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay, "Perpetual Peace," and the first sentence in that essay reads as follows. And I want to just-- I want to quote that as a response to that to Trump's statement.

So Kant begins his essay "Perpetual Peace" with the following sentence. No treaty of peace is valid on which is tacitly reserved matter for future war. This is how I really understand this notion of just peace. Just peace is not peace between wars, but it's creating a kind of collective structure whereby peace becomes what Kant called perpetual and what our Harvard Divinity School calls just.

So if I had more time, I would really actually begin with Kant's essay and then move to Rousseau, and then to Hobbes's "Leviathan," and then to Hegel's "Notion of the State," and really talk about how the issue of state and violence and collective flourishing functions within the European tradition of modern philosophy. But I don't have that time, and I just want to mention that to say that there's a lot more to do. But I'd like to actually begin with an essay of Ernest Renan's in 1882, because I think that Renan's essay, "What is a Nation?," really does introduce the modern concept or contemporary 20th century concept of the nation and the nation state, and then move on to Arendt.

So Renan's essay, "What is a Nation?," is really often considered to be one of the most important and consequential documents concerning modern nationalism. In it, what Renan tries to do is to situate the modern nation state as an extension, but also separate from the empire that preceded it.

One of the salient points in Renan is that the modern nation state is a composite of a variety of facts, none of which are determinant. And I want to share screen here with you if I can to give you a sense of what he's saying. So in 1882, Renan writes as follows. And there are three quotes that I want to read consecutively and then talk about them.

So Renan claims, the modern nation is therefore a historical result brought about by a series of convergent facts. Sometimes unity has been affected by dynasty, as was the case in France. Sometimes by the direct will of the provinces, as is the case with Holland, Switzerland, and Belgium. Sometimes it has the work of a general consciousness, belatedly victorious over the caprices of feudalism, as was the case in Italy and Germany.

Now, I think before we go to number two, it's important to note that when Renan talks about a nation, he is not talking about what we might call an ethno state. That is, nations are not determined by race or by language or by ethnos. Rather, they are determined by a sense of what he's going to call consensus.

So if we see in the second quote, nations are not eternal. They have beginnings and they will end. Yet though there are various and often opposed faculties, nations contribute to the common task of civilization, each sounds a note in this great concert of humanity. Interestingly, the great architect of modern nationalism is making the claim that this is just one step toward something else that he later, in other parts of his essay, calls a confederacy.

And then the third comment, which is also quite salient, so long as his moral consciousness demonstrates its strength by the sacrifices that the abdication of the individual for the benefit of the community demands. It is legitimate and has a right to exist. An interesting throwback to Peter Beinart's op ed about whether states have a right to exist or whether Israel has a right to exist, which is the subject of his op ed.

So long as his moral consciousness demonstrates its strength by the sacrifices, so on and so forth. If doubts arise regarding its frontiers, consult the disputed populations. It's interesting to think about the conditions that Renan is putting for the nation state, really, between Kant's notion that the nation state is really-- the focus of the nation state is on individual freedom, and Rousseau's notion that the nation state is a notion of collectivity.

If we move to Arendt, we'll see that this is-- now this is written in 1882. Arendt is written on the other side of World War one, which is the War of the nations. According to some, it was the end of the nation state. That's what Tamares is going to argue in a moment. But she makes a couple of different claims that I think are important to state.

The European nation states-- now this is in the 1940s-- which have received the inheritance of absolutism, rests on the trinity of people, territory, and state. What she means by the absolutism is really the absolutism of the feudalism and empire period that preceded it. And she develops this further later in her book in the 1950s, The Origin of Totalitarianism.

And this feeds into the second quote. The experiences of recent decades have shown many times over in numerous countries that once it has been united as a nation, people seem prepared to fall under almost any tyranny as long as its national interests remain protected. Thinking about the 1940s when this was written, it's obviously what she's referring to. The more cultured and civilized the people in question, the more decisive linguistic affiliation will be, the more barbaric The life of the nation, the more valid purely völkisch considerations will be.

But the principle that one can only be a citizen if one belongs to the same people or has completely assimilated to that people, is the same in all nation states. Interesting she does make a distinction between America as a liberal democracy, but we won't get into it right now.

But it seems to me, Arendt says, this is quote number four, that today all these undoubted advantages of the nation state, that is, the nation state as advantageous over the empire, over feudalism, are things of the past and are no longer permitted to carry much weight. The nation states unsuitability for life in the modern world has long been demonstrated. And here, I think she's referring back to World War I. And the longer people cleave to it, the more wickedly and restlessly will the ways in which the nation state and nationalism have been perverted assert themselves.

And finally, number five, nationalism, with its egocentric narrow mindedness and the nation state with its fundamental inability to transcend its own borders, may well provide the worst imaginable preconditions for this, that is, taking active responsibility for public affairs. So in some sense, we're getting in the back side of Renan's essay with the optimism that the nation state can serve as a stepping stone from the empire to the confederacy.

After World War I with the rise of Nazism, Arendt sees that, in fact, that project will fail because it will not provide the necessary protection and security of not only the people that it serves, but the people that are a part of the larger Europe, of larger European society.

Now, Tamares probably had read Renan, probably had not read Arendt, but in some way, I think that he is engaging in a similar types of questions and issues. Now, I think that one caveat that I want to introduce here in terms of Renan, is that-- of course, of Tamares is that Tamares is living a fully insular Jewish life, meaning that he doesn't really have the cosmopolitan view of these other thinkers. He doesn't have a universalist view.

His interests are the Jews and the Jewish people. And therefore, his interest in interrogating and criticizing nationalism is all going to come out around his critique of Zionism, which is a complicated critique, as we'll see. But we'll see that for Tamares, what concerns him is not nationalism more generally, but rather Jewish nationalism in the form of Zionism that was taking form in the first decades of the 20th century and then later into the 1920s.

So he wants to make a distinction between what he considers to be the European nationalism and what he considers to be the true Torah position of liberation. So on the first text in an essay written on liberty in 1906, we read as follows. They seized their freedom at the time of the French Revolution. And by the way, these are my translations. They seized their freedom at the time of the French Revolution, by means of barricades and bombs aimed at one despot or another.

We, meaning the Jews, on the other hand, strive to achieve our freedom through the enactment of the Seder by eating matzo, celebrating within family, the liberation of the freedom of the Jews from Egypt. Each Jew participating in the ceremony is own home with his family circle, which is to say that by recalling and re-enacting the liberation from Egypt, Tamares says, we fan within our souls the divine flame of remembrance of God's merciful deeds.

So there's somewhat of a simplistic juxtaposition between the celebration of freedom through a 21-gun salute, or the celebration of freedom through some kind of act of vengeance, and the freedom that the Jews are mandated to experience through the biblical narrative, which is basically the celebration of liberation through a family gathering and a remembering of servitude and a remembering of the divine promise.

He continues in the same essay. However, the strategy of these revolutions-- and here, he's talking about Europe-- the answering of evil with evil-- I think he's talking about vengeance-- is questionable. It may succeed, but on the other hand, it is just as likely to aggravate original evil. The only true cure for this despotism, the only remedy which removes the evil at its roots, is the truly revolutionary activity of the Jewish people, embodied in the enactment of the Seder, rightly understood, of course.

So I think we have to realize that Tamares is really, in a certain sense, attacking what he considers to be the devastation of the mass deaths of World War I and, at the same time attacking the emerging Zionist movement, which he sees as an absorption of the nationalism of Europe, which can only produce the antithetical result of what actually should be produced according to his understanding of the biblical narrative, which is the celebration of liberation by thanking God as opposed to the celebration of liberation by destroying one's enemy.

So I think there are two things happening. In a certain sense, what his real attack is on the Jewish absorption of nationalism as a form of assimilation, which I'm going to talk about in a minute or two. But I want to move on a little bit, to try to get through as much of this to get a sense of what Tamares is really talking about.

In 1905, he writes-- actually, it's a book called On Liberty and Judaism, a book that is an attack-- an interesting for those that are in the inside of the kind of Zionist debates at that time. It's an attack on Zionism that was published by Hayim Nahman Bialik. So that itself says something interesting in terms of the complexity of that story, which we can talk about in the Q&A.

So Tamares says On Liberty and Judaism in one word, how is it that the whole world is filled with biting, kicking, wrestling and fists, ever since the horn of nationalism was raised on high? What is this? So again, think of Renan in 1882 and Tamares in 1905, where the optimism of what nationalism can produce suddenly becomes, in a sense, corrupted through again the first Russian Revolution, the Young Turk rebellion. I mean, Tamares's watching nationalism begin to show its dark side.

In short, the latest version of nationalism was the beginning of cancerous growth in the cells of the body of humanity. It resembles exactly the disease in the body of the individuals. At first, it seems like the cells have become more cohesive, more brotherly.

Going back to Renan, in truth, however, the exaggerated clinging comes from lack and soon weakens the body, striking at the vital fluids and natural warmth, which sustains all the cells in the body equally. And again, what he's trying to do is warn his Jewish constituents that the absorbing the nationalist spirit that the Jews were seeing as a solution to the problem of Jewish life in Europe, was really a fool's errand.

Text number three. It is precisely in this guise that I see the crowd of vacuous Zionists with their incessant chanting of nationalism, nationalism, experience has shown that they're selecting the lovely word "nationalism" is not to be explained away as merely a case of worthy doctrine in an ugly, unworthy vessel. It's a Talmudic passage.

Such an excuse argues that the term nationalism was borrowed in order to awaken and stir within the Jewish camp a love for divine morality and justice. But our eyes behold a draining away of that spirit and a terrible ignorance of Torah whenever the feet of the nationalists-- wherever the feet of the nationalists have trod. The more they claim nationalism nationalism, the more they barbari's the tradition, and the more strongly they establish the spirit of Edom, which in Jewish parlance is really Christianity in this context within Jewish life. I want to go to this last text and then and then step back a little bit.

Our sole cure and consolation-- he's speaking to the Jews-- is the purification and the cleansing that we received in the crucible of affliction. And the spirit of humanity, the spirit of the great morality that exile planted within us. In simple terms, this is the desire not to be trampled on. The desire for equality and the recognition of human rights, not the aspiration to be aggressors included in the aspiration for sovereignty.

So I want to stop share for a moment just so I could see myself at least and go and talk about this a little bit. So let's begin by saying that Tamares is a person who is living in a world of pogroms, in a world of revolution, in a world where emancipation of the Jews gave birth to a dire situation for physical safety and spiritual revival.

His views are not some kind of a product of utopian thinking. He certainly recognizes the problem of the Jews in Europe. And he certainly sympathizes and understands with the adaptation of nationalism as a potential solution to the physical problem of the Jews.

What he's suggesting, though, is that this is a kind of substitution, which will devastate and undermine, not only the Jewish covenant as he understands it, but actually the very ways in which the Jews can play a role in humanity by arguing for a position of what he calls galut or exile. But he doesn't mean it only in the geographical sense. He means it in an existential sense that in a certain way, the idea of being an aggressor, which he argues is the necessary condition of statist nationalism, the ability to avoid violence, which he argues is at the centerpiece of the prohibition of thou shalt not kill, which he understands to be actually the centerpiece of the entire Torah.

That there's something that the Jews are being confronted with. And they are making a mistake because they think that somehow nationalism will be the solution to the problem, whereas it will be a solution to a problem, but at the price of undermining that which the Jews have to offer the world.

So he talks about in elsewhere this idea of what he calls twin sisters, that is assimilation on the one side and nationalism on the other side. Assimilation, in a certain way, results in the Jews forfeiting their covenant in order to be accepted by the nations. And nationalism is that he sees as absorbing the very idea whereby the Jews may physically survive, but they will forfeit the very teaching that can save them and the nations from the perdition of destruction.

And this becomes exemplified for Tamares in the model of liberation, as it is practiced as born in the exodus of Egypt. Now, for those that know the story of the exodus out of Egypt and the Passover Haggadah will also know that, in fact, there's a lot of vengeance in the Passover Haggadah, or there's a little bit of vengeance there. And Tamares is, of course, aware of that, but he still wants to focus in on this idea that Jews will experience the defeat of their enemies, not by celebrating that defeat, but by actually turning toward God, who they feel are is the cause of that defeat.

So I want to get back to what I think this actually could mean for us. But for a few more minutes, I just want to say that for Tamares, the true price, the tragic price of nationalism, as he understands it, is violence. And in a certain sense, he's not really far off from what Arendt writes in the 1940s, as we'll see and we'll see Yuli Tamir also alludes to in her more recent book.

He understands that nationalism for the Jews is a negation of exile. And the negation of exile destroys the very delicate combination of religion and ethics that he believed the Jews had cultivated in their exilic experience. And so in a certain sense, for Jews to maintain a sense of their covenantal responsibility and ethical sensibilities, that is necessary in order to become what the prophets call a light to the nations, and that, for Tamares, happens within an exilic context. Now, again, I think when we talk about context, he's not talking about only geographically.

The problem, in a way, is something that Peter alludes to in his op ed piece, and that is the way in which nationalism itself can become idolatry. And this is something that Tamares talks about in his 1921 book. He has this line, I'll say it in Hebrew and then in English, [HEBREW] Homeland is idolatry.

Now, he doesn't mean that the concept of Homeland itself is idolatry, but the essentialization of homeland and the use of homeland as a tool to rule over others, as a weapon against the rights of others, he claims, is idolatry. And I think looking around the world, the wars that are happening, the way in which nationalism is still driving this sense of inequality, where nationalism is still driving violence, justifying vengeance, it's worth it to take this very kind of far-flung rabbi from the early 20th century who was a kind of idiosyncratic Jewish pacifist, and think a little bit more carefully about what the possibility is.

I just want to share screen for one more moment. I want to go back to Renan. Renan says, and I repeat this before, nations are not something eternal. They had their beginnings. They will end. A European confederacy will probably replace them.

Now that really hasn't happened. But Renan's advocacy of nationalism, of nation is predicated on the idea that it is a stepping stone to something beyond. Post-World War I, I think Tamares clearly believed that nationalism had come to its end, that this World War I was the War of the nations. World War I was that which should have never happened. The very construction of nation states in Europe was meant to protect the expansions of borders from one country to another that would have resulted in war. But obviously, it didn't happen.

And then finally, before some concluding remarks, Yuli Tamir, an Israeli historian of nationalism in her book, Liberal Nationalism, 1995, says it pretty openly. The ideal of a nation state, therefore, should be abandoned in favor of another more practical and just.

So if I can just offer a few concluding remarks, where we are here is that I think that Tamares is an interesting and important intervention into the dilemma of the nation state more generally, into the dilemma of Jewish nationalism, into the dilemma of what has become of the Jewish nation state, and the way in which he understands it as being a subversion, not a fulfillment, of the biblical covenant of the Jews.

And I think also there's something to be said of the way in which-- now it is true, Tamares is being very selective in his choosing sources. And somebody can come up and provide as many sources as I just provided and many more to make the opposite claim. But it's important to note, Tamares is not claiming to be a historian here. He's not claiming to actually offer the definitive idea of what Torah is.

What he's trying to do is use the template of scripture, and I would say, not only Jewish scripture, but all scripture in order, to create alternatives for the rise of political realities that are actually, in practice, destroying us. And that Trump's I want to bring piece is not just peace that Kant is talking about. And it's not the covenantal peace that Tamares is talking about, and it's not the peace that Renan is talking about. In fact, it's the peace-- it's the peace of domination and intimidation, the peace of the empire.

So in some sense, I want to conclude, given that we're at Harvard Divinity School and religion is what we teach that in some sense-- and here, I'm kind of channeling Adorno and Horkheimer in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, that, in fact, what Tamares is suggesting, in a selective, creative way, is that maybe we've kind of gotten it backwards. The enlightenment posed reason as the solution to the primitive nature of religion, as the liberation from religion, or as Kant argued, religion within the limits of reason.

But perhaps, in some way, bizarre way, that it's religion all along understood in a more evolved, creative, and yet selective way. That really is the solution to the corrosive nature of human reason and where we are today. Thank you very much.

DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you, Shaul, for this illuminating and engaging and even provocative talk and generative. I think of what will undoubtedly be a very rich conversation here. We are very grateful to you.

It seems to me that Tamares's vision involves an interesting tension between the particularity of certain religious practices or religious narratives, and the universal benefit that accrue to those beyond the borders of that religion. So if I understand you correctly, that the Seder is a kind of antidote to the poison of violent nationalism. How does the religiously particular become universally relevant or universally applicable in Tamares's vision for the future, not only of Jews, but of the nations?

SHAUL MAGID: That's a good question. And I think in some sense, it's the classical question that those of us who study Judaism ask, negotiating the relationship between the particular and the universal. And I think from the beginning, from the Hebrew Bible, through the prophets, through the rabbis and so on, that was always a question. But let's just stay with Tamares.

I mean, Tamares was an interesting-- he offered an interesting intervention between what I would say is European reform and nationalism. He was an advocate. And I think a certain kind of standard ultra-Orthodoxy or insular ultra-Orthodoxy.

He certainly believed in a strictly Orthodox rendering of the covenant. But he believed that that covenantal life, the life of Torah and mitzvot and so on and so forth, that covenantal life not only sustains the Jew, but offers an alternative. It's kind of a Judaism as counterculture. It offers an alternative to what he sees is going on around him in the Christian world.

Now, I will say that he's very Eurocentric. He's not seeing beyond Europe. So for him, the Gentile is the Christian. He doesn't really understand Islam. He doesn't really understand other religions. That's not the world that he's coming from.

And I think that he sees that in a certain sense, Torah can be a corrective to the development of human society. If the Jews are willing to actually refrain from the inclination to assimilate, either through integration or through, in this case, nationalism.

DAVID HOLLAND: We're just about at the end of our time here. Shaul, I want to make sure you have some time to address anything that you wish had been asked, or anything that you'd like to address as we move toward a conclusion.

SHAUL MAGID: Well, first of all, thank you all for coming and thank you for staying, as my friend's grandmother used to say. I think that this conversation is going to go on. We're going to move into other traditions. We're going to move into other time periods. And I just hope that this question and I really wanted to-- I focused on this in the beginning, but this question of just peace. It's not religion and peace. It's religion and just peace. And I think that's an important thing to remember.

I'm not saying that pacifism is the only vehicle for that. I'm not saying that a critique of nationalism is the only vehicle for that. But it seems like the meta story, the larger story, outside of individual conflicts, outside of politics, is something that those of us who study religion have something to contribute to. And Tamares is a particular voice. I'm sure there are many people who are listening who thinks he's completely naive. But tell me any great figure throughout the annals of human history who wasn't considered to be naive during their lifetime.

So I don't think that his naivete is a weakness. I think his naiveté is actually a strength. And I hope that his work and the work that I'm doing on him can actually extend beyond the Jewish community and create resources for a larger conversation thinking about how to change the world.

DAVID HOLLAND: Thank you very much. Very appropriate note to end on. We're deeply indebted to you, Professor Magid, for this time and for the expertise and for your generosity in engaging with so many of us and the questions that we've had on this crucial topic and fascinating figure. It's been a rich and rewarding conversation in every way.

Our next session, I'll just note for our audience, our next session will convene a week from tonight on Monday, February 3rd, again, at 6:00 PM, when we'll be in conversation with my colleague Annette Yoshiko Reed, who is Krister Stendahl Professor of New Testament and Early Christianity, who will speak on "Empire and Epistemic Side-- Historical Perspectives on the Rhetoric of Peace and Its Erasures." We look forward to seeing you then. Thank you all very much.

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