"From its inception, Israel has had to prepare for war while retaining its humanity," says Ehud Luz, professor of Jewish history and thought at Haifa University. "What kind of education do you create for fighters and searchers for peace?"

As a visiting professor at Hebrew College this year, Luz grapples with this question in his fall semester course, Power, Morality and Modern Jewish Identity. Based largely on his book Wrestling with an Angel: Power, Morality and Jewish Identity (translated by Michael Swirsky, Yale University Press, 2003), the class is exploring debates between secular and religious Jews on the use of military power in the past two centuries.

Luz's 40-year teaching career has taken him to educational venues in both camps, ranging from the Oranim Teacher's Seminary (part of the largely secular Kibbutz movement) to the pluralistic Shalom Hartman Institute in Jerusalem. "Ehud Luz is one of the premiere educators in Israel today," says Provost Barry Mesch, "one who is able to bridge the gap between the religious and secular communities there."

For Luz, the key to overcoming deep divisions in these communities on the use of force and other vital issues is to integrate strands of Jewish and western culture into a common Israeli Jewish identity. But to do that, he cautions, will require new ways of studying Jewish sources. "My concern is to show how leading Jewish philosophers of the past century thought of new approaches to Jewish text in order to find a way to revive the study of sources in the modern age," he says.

With that goal in mind, Luz plans to teach a spring semester course in modern Jewish hermeneutics, or theories of how to interpret Jewish sources. He is currently at work on a book on the topic, with funding from the National Academy of Sciences in Israel. In the forthcoming course and the book, notes Luz, the central question is: "What is the approach we bring to the text in order to decipher it and read it as a living source for our identity and for the truth?"

For Luz this question hits home. Born in 1936 in Kibbutz Degania, Luz recalls a secular Zionist education that he says failed to infuse his life with existential meaning. It wasn't until the age of 22, when he first studied Talmud and Jewish philosophy at the university level, that he discovered the importance of the Jewish tradition for him. "From then on," he stresses, "Judaism became a central foundation for my thinking and my activity."

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