Religious Zionists have been the driving force behind the settlement project in Israel for the past 40 years. They often see settling in the Greater Land of Israel as a messianic activity. It might be thought that when state policy clashes with radical messianic movements, the result would be violent, bloody confrontations. This study seeks to explain why this has not been the case in Israel despite the dismantling of settlements in the Sinai and Gaza and the controversial Oslo process. Although there has been turmoil and resistance, most religious Zionists have refrained from serious violence. We suggest that a “theological-normative balance” prevents all-out de-legitimation of the state and life-threatening violence against it.

Since its final destruction in antiquity, the memory of the temple in Jerusalem has served as the nexus of Jewish liturgy and messianic worldview. This article has sought to examine the ideological and cultural roles played by the image of the Jewish temple in the Hebrew literature of 1848–1948. Toward this end, I formulated a broad corpus comprised of homogeneous genres and authors, namely those which situate the temple as their main focus. The evidence arising from this corpus suggests that the conceptual role of the temple underwent no dramatic transformations; the temple in this literature, taken as a whole, is mostly indistinguishable from the historical, religious, and nationalistic symbol that featured in the Jewish tradition over nearly 2,000 years. The bulk of the present corpus places the temple in conceptual and historical contexts that are familiar and very similar to those of the historical temple in all its contexts, without removing it from the domains of Jewish nationalism or classical religiosity. These findings contravene my initial presupposition that the discourse of the temple had undergone a metamorphosis in the 19th and 20th centuries, the image of the temple had changed into an abstract symbol for world peace, moral perfection, and intellectual and scientific excellence.

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In The Theology of Oral Torah: Revealing the Justice of God, 1 after describing his attempt to formulate a descriptive theology throughout his publications, Professor Jacob Neusner writes:So much for historical and descriptive theology. What of the constructive kind? It remains to take note of my one effort at constructive theology [. . .] Judaism's Theological Voice: The Melody of the Talmud. To date, I have not found even the correct contemporary starting point for a systematic and also constructive, not merely descriptive, theology for Judaism of the Dual Torah; most work that people label theology turns out to be nothing more than sociology made urgent by exhortation or mere sloganeering. I have not attempted a systematic, constructive theology, and I have not persuaded myself that I am capable of doing so.

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