Podcast: Rick Richman on History and Devotion

Podcast: Rick Richman

Patriotism—or one form of it at least—is an acknowledgment of the obligations that flow from recognizing all that one owes to previous generations and what they undertook and passed down.

And if one wanted to inculcate that form of patriotism, how would one do it? Rick Richman has a simple and powerful answer to that question. A regular Mosaic author, Richman recently published And None Shall Make Them Afraid: Eight Stories of the Modern State of Israel, a book that tries to foster connection to Israel and the Jewish people by telling stories from the past.

Richman’s answer: teach history. History, as he sees it, has an irreplaceable role to play in the formation of devotion to the Jewish people. It helps Jews see all that they owe by relaying the stories of all that their predecessors accomplished, and by implication, what Jews now have an opportunity and obligation to pass on to their own descendants.