The Bernard Revel Graduate School of Jewish Studies invites you to a discussion: Elul: The Season of Repentance 7:00 PM: A Time of Soul Searching: The Yiddishist Intelligentsia and the Crisis of 1939 DR. JOSHUA KARLIP Associate Professor of Jewish History at Revel In their youth, East European Yiddishist intellectuals rejected Jewish religious tradition as an impediment to their creation of a new, secular Jewish national identity based upon the Yiddish language and culture. But on the eve of World War II, Nazism’s assault on the Jews led these intellectuals to question the humanistic assumptions upon which their secular ideologies rested. Many, in turn, sought solace and solutions to the Jewish plight in the very religious tradition that they had once believed to be obsolete. 7:30 PM: Rav Kook on Repentance (or Does the World Really Revolve Around Us?) DR. DANIEL RYNHOLD Associate Professor of Jewish Philosophy at Revel I 7:30 p.m. In the preface to Orot ha-Teshuva, Rav Kook writes that “our literature, which explores every area where there is manifest the poetry of life, did not probe at all into this wonderful treasure of life.” Given the existence of works such as Rabbeinu Yonah’s Sha’arei Teshuvah and the Rambam’s Hilkhot Teshuvah, not to mention numerous Talmudic references, this seems like a strange comment to make. So what did Rav Kook mean? What was so unique about his view of Teshuvah that enabled him to make such a claim?