By Aaron Wander. Amnon Raz-Krakotzkin’s Toda’at Mishnah, Toda’at Mikra: Tzefat Ve-HaTarbut Ha-Tzionit (Biblical Consciousness, Mishnah Consciousness: Safed and Zionist Culture) is an act of recollection. At the center of the book stands the 16th-century Kabbalistic community of Safed, with its poets, mystics, hermits, and halakhists. In Raz-Krakotzkin’s telling, historic Safed offers an alternative vision of Jewish living and flourishing in the land of Israel to that historically prop...
