(photo credit: Shmuel Silver) I wish he had written a lot more about women, but this piece which you can read here by Shaul Magid is an important bit of spiritual memoir recounting the charismatic spiritual counter-culture of Moshav Mevo Modi’im in its heyday in the early 1970s and 1980s, particularly as it formed around Shlomo Carlebach, but not exclusively. The moshav went up in flames this week during catastrophic fires in Israel. For those who knew it, this must be a wrenching moment. Not so much a “way of life” as per Shaul’s mother, it reads like an alternative universe. Shaul gets at the place warts and all, the sense of possibility and realized possibility.

About the actual name of the place, Shaul writes, “It is interesting to recall that the original name of the moshav was Mevo Modiim (the Entrance to Modiim), indicating its location as an entry point to Ezor Modiim (the Modiim Region). But its members petitioned to change the name to Me’or Modiim (the Light of Modiim) gesturing toward the Maccabees and Hanukkah as well as, perhaps, marking their aspiration that the moshav would contain the fire of Torah.”