Haim Rechnitzer’s article engages the contemporary intellectual and moral crisis revealed within Western and Israeli academia in the aftermath of October 7. The essay situates this crisis within the broader trajectory of Western modernity, where the postmodern critique of truth and universality has paradoxically hardened into new dogmas—detached from moral judgment and blind to historical and cultural particularity. Against this backdrop, Rechnitzer turns to the thought of Leo Strauss (1899–1973) as a resource for re‑establishing political philosophy and education on new yet classical grounds.
Strauss, a leading critic of Enlightenment rationalism, traced the roots of moral relativism and nihilism to the Enlightenment’s separation of reason from revelation and of facts from values. In his view, modern political science abandoned the question of “the good” in favor of technical efficiency and historical contextualism, leading to a loss of philosophical and ethical orientation. Rechnitzer reconstructs Strauss’s intellectual project as an attempt to recover the classical horizon of political philosophy—one that combines the philosophical inquiry into human nature with the civic quest for justice and virtue. The key to this renewal, Strauss argued, lies in liberal education: a disciplined yet open engagement with the “great conversation” of human civilization. Such education is not ideological indoctrination but a cultivation of intellectual humility and moral excellence through study, dialogue, and the acknowledgment of enduring philosophical disputes.
Rechnitzer shows that for Strauss, the enduring tension between “Jerusalem” and “Athens”—between revelation and reason—is not a problem to be resolved but a dynamic balance that sustains cultural creativity and moral seriousness. The theological–political problem, in this sense, anchors both the limits and the promise of human reason. Political theology, understood in this Straussian sense, is a call not for clerical rule but for the recognition that every political order rests upon ultimate, and therefore contestable, moral foundations.
Applying this framework to the Israeli context, Rechnitzer proposes a renewed political theology suited to a Jewish and democratic society. Drawing on the rationalist legacy of Maimonides, he envisions a civic education that integrates philosophical reflection with theological awareness. Such an approach could train a new generation of moral and intellectual leaders—individuals capable of bridging divides between religious and secular communities, between Jewish and non-Jewish citizens, and between inherited traditions and democratic responsibility. By reclaiming the interplay between revelation and reason, Israel might revitalize its democratic ethos and resist both nihilistic relativism and authoritarian fundamentalism.
Ultimately, Rechnitzer’s essay calls for a reawakening of political philosophy as a living dialogue between faith and reason, law and wisdom, tradition and critique. His reading of Strauss illuminates the possibility of a modern political theology—one that deepens, rather than diminishes, democratic life in Israel and beyond.
