ABSTRACT
The State of Israel represents an unprecedented historical “return,” a messianic enterprise of Jews who no longer expected a miraculous redemption in the Land of Israel and who were quite certain that the ancient laws of the Torah no longer had a normative call on their loyalties. In composite, the paradigm, “discovered” in the Torah, dictated the patterns of Jewish life for many centuries of exile, and generations of Jewish children were raised upon it. Paradigms are a comfort. Once solidified, they present themselves as lucid portraits of perennial reality that can domesticate or neutralize all seemingly new and bewildering situations. The scholar Ephraim Urbach has given, in one historical study, an enlightening example of how paradigms work and become worn, with particular reference to the centrality of Eretz Yisrael and the authority of its sages in the era of the Second Common wealth.
