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And when halakhic man stands up and prays, "May it be Thy will... that Thou wilt replenish the deficiency of the moon and it will no longer be diminished" [in the prayer following the blessing over the new moon], he refers to the replenishing of the deficiency of the real cosmos which does not correspond to the ideal image of reality. Halakhic man's yearnings for the national redemption ... draw upon his hidden longings for the full and complete realization of the ideal world in the very nub of concrete reality?
One is hard pressed to imagine the longings for national redemption crashing up against the "nub of concrete reality" in a more fraught way than for a young, idealistic, hesdemik returning weary from the battles of the Yom Kippur War. Israeli society, and the Religious Zionist community in its own particularistic way, felt the deficiencies and diminishments of the redemptive aspects of Zionism's promises following the traumatic and near calamitous conflict. Literature, in ways that rival and at times surpass history or philosophy, can often serve as the keenest prism to explore such themes. As Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein observed, this is because "great writers are preeminent" among
[t]hose who have at least attained and revealed some measure of knowledge___In reading them, we can confront the human spirit doubly, as creation and as creator.... [imaginative artists have been more illuminating than theoreticians-not only because they have described more powerfully but because they have also probed more deeply.... [The author] melds precision and sensitivity, intuition and acuity, to perceive and portray concrete personal and social reality2
A quarter century following the events of Yom Kippur 1973 one such treatment was offered by Rabbi Haim Sabato in his autobiographically inspired novel, Ti'um Kavvanot (Adjusting Sights).3 The imagery of sanctifying the waxing moon, and the implicit fear of darkness and waning, alongside the themes of kiddush levana in which the moon's phases are compared to the Jewish nation and the vagaries of our history, are not in any way out of place in this literary masterpiece penned by a "halakhic man": "[T]he moon, the Sages said... was like the People of Israel. For as the moon's light reflects the sun, so does Israel reflect God's presence, and as...