Mondays, 6-7:30 pm (Eastern Time Zone) - Zoom
Harvard Divinity School Spring Semester 2025 - Religion and Just Peace: A Series of Public Online Conversations - What contributions can the study of religion bring to definitions and practices of just peacebuilding?
This five-part series will take place live on zoom and is free and open to the public. Sessions must be registered for individually.
Hosted by Diane L. Moore, Associate Dean for Religion and Public Life.
Sponsored by Religion and Public Life and by HarvardX. The first two sessions are also co-sponsored by the Center for Jewish Studies.
January 27: Between Nationalism and Violence: Confessions of a Jewish ultra-Orthodox Pacifist
Shaul Magid, Visiting Professor of Modern Jewish Studies
In this session, Shaul Magid will look 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 will engage with this particular Jewish notion of peacemaking and help us decipher its potential for our day.
Shaul Magid is a Distinguished Fellow in Jewish Studies at Dartmouth College. His area of expertise are Jewish Thought, Kabbalah, Hasidism, and American Jewish Culture.
The vision statement of Harvard Divinity School is “to provide an intellectual home where scholars and professionals from around the globe research and teach the varieties of religion, in service of a just world at peace across religious and cultural divides.” Harvard Divinity School will host a series of online public conversations in which five featured faculty members present a case study from their individual areas of expertise that considers the above question. Consider the relationship between religion and just peacebuilding along with these scholars and explore what an expansive understanding of religion can provide to this work.
Source & Upcoming Events: Religion and Just Peace | Religion and Public Life at Harvard Divinity School