A secular cosmology has the world revolving around us; Avraham Avinu saw the world as revolving around Hashem
The most bizarre shiur that I can recall was delivered by a bare-headed American Jewish professor to a group of mostly-secular Israelis in a left-leaning Jerusalem think-tank.
The event — a lecture on the influence of Jewish sources on European political thought — wasn’t actually billed as a shiur. But presenter and venue apart, it felt like one.
Harvard professor of government Eric Nelson’s subject was the fascinating debate that broke out in early Enlightenment Europe about whether kings had a divine right to rule. The dispute pitted Catholics against Protestants, supporters of the old monarchical order against advocates of new forms of governance.
Both sides attempted to buttress their claims with Biblical sources. But, as the Christian scholars discovered, the Bible seems ambivalent about monarchy as an institution. So, in an extraordinary twist, they resorted to Gemara and Medrash to prove their point.
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