Why I’m in Favor of Making a Joyful Noise to the Lord

From King David to American Pentecostals, boisterous worshippers have always annoyed those who prefer their worship quiet and dignified. “Stop jumping up and down—we’re Episcopalians,” said a proverbial Protestant mother to her children. But the eminent sociologist Peter Berger approves:

There is ample biblical warrant for noisy worship. Perhaps King David was the prototypical Pentecostal when he sang and danced before the Ark of the Lord as it was brought to Jerusalem, along with his men, “making merry . . . with songs and lyres and harps and tambourines and castanets and cymbals . . . and with the sound of the horn.” Perhaps Mikhal, the daughter of Saul, who rebuked David for this unseemly behavior, was the prototypical guardian of properly polite etiquette. The mention of “joyful noise” is repeated in several Psalms, for example in Psalm 100: “Make a joyful noise to the Lord, all the lands! Serve the Lord with gladness! Come into his presence with singing.”

Read more at American Interest

More about: Christianity, King David, Prayer, Religion, Shofar

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF