Professor Eliezer Shavid, the thinker, educator and winner of the Israel Prize in the Study of Jewish Thought, has died at the age of 92.
Shavid, born in Jerusalem (1929), was educated by parents of the Third Aliyah.
His father, Zvi Yisrael Shavid, was a Hebrew writer and poet, and his mother, Osnat Rosin, was an educator.
After graduating from the "Workers' Stream" high school in Jerusalem, he went to agricultural training at Kibbutz Kfar Blum and after the War of Independence in which he fought in the Upper Galilee, he was one of the founders of Kibbutz Tzora.
In 1953 he began studying Hebrew philosophy, Kabbalah and the history of the Jewish people at the Hebrew University, and after graduating with honors with a master's degree, he wrote a doctoral dissertation on "The Informed Critique of Aristotelianism among Jewish Philosophers in the Middle Ages."
After a few years - 1967 - we have already become a senior lecturer.
At this point, his uniqueness stood out in light of his research in the field of the new Jewish philosophy - about which information in those years was quite scarce.
In parallel with his work, he has taught at a number of schools and universities, including the universities of Haifa and Ben-Gurion, in the years of their establishment, the Institute of Education and Research at Beit Berl, Lida High School and more.
From Shavid's books, Photo: David Baron
In addition, he advised the Ministry of Education on a number of issues, including proposing a program for teaching Jewish studies as culture in public public schools - which was not finally implemented - and co-founded the Kerem Institute for the Training of Humanities in the Humanities and taught there for a decade.
In his ideological conception, Shabid captured the Jewish cultural-spiritual basis as such essential to Israel's Zionist identity and its existence as a democratic nation-state.
In this context, he often challenges both secular and religious in his perception of Jewish culture.
In 1994, he received the Israel Prize for Jewish Thought.
He has taught at a number of institutes and universities in Israel and as a guest lecturer at universities in the United States and England, including Stanford, Yale and Oxford.
His many pursuits have yielded exceptional results in their breadth: Shavid has published about 40 books and 900 articles dealing with issues of youth and Jewish education in Israel, between Israeliness and Judaism, between Jewish secularism and religion, dealing with the streams of the Jewish religion and between Israel and the Diaspora and more.
Another part of his letters and thought concerns the history of the Zionist idea and Jewish nationalism in its incarnation.
Among his books: "Three Reserves" (1964), A Longing for the Fullness of Being "(study of Bialik and Tchernichovsky's 1968)," The Lonely Jew and Judaism "(1974)," The Book of the Period of Time "(1984)," Towards Modern Jewish Culture "(1995) ), "The Existential and Moral Dilemma of Armed Resistance in the Ghetto" (2006), "The Idea of the Elected People and the New Liberalism" (2016).
In addition to the Israel Prize, he received an honorary doctorate in Jewish studies from the Jewish Theological Seminary in New York (1996), an honorary doctorate from Hebrew Union College (2007) and the darling of Jerusalem in 2015.
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