“Like a Sacrifice Ascending from the Flames”: Hadar Goldin’s Mesilat Yesharim in Israeli Religious Nationalist Thought

This article tracks how Mesilat Yesharim, an eighteenth-century devotional work of pietistic asceticism, has been transformed by Jewish religious Zionists in Israel and the West Bank into an experience of military and civic duty. It specifically focuses on a contemporary popular commentary on the text authored by Lieutenant Hadar Goldin, a religious Zionist casualty of Israel’s 2014 conflict with the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. It argues that the study and interpretation of the Mesilat Yesharim by religious Zionists in Israel ultimately functions as a sacred textual medium through which these communities are able to better navigate between the competing obligations that characterize their social, political, and theological positions within Israeli society. When seen through this lens, Mesilat Yesharim serves as a sacred literary vehicle through which young men and women, facing years of national service, work through some of the conflicting loyalties of their own moral worlds.