Shlomo Riskin, a leading figure in Modern Orthodoxy, has held the position of rabbi of Efrat for over 30 years. The Israeli chief rabbinate is now trying to force him from his post, as David M. Weinberg writes:

[The chief rabbinate] is taking advantage of a never-before-used loophole to “review” Rabbi Riskin’s tenure at seventy-five, and threatening to deny him the automatic five-year extension as city rabbi that he richly deserves.

It’s true that Riskin is a maverick religious leader, who has been willing to push the envelope of accepted public policy beyond conventional thinking within Orthodox circles. He has been a critic of the chief rabbinate and the rabbinical courts on various issues, including its policies on marriage, divorce, and conversion. More than that, he has established independent conversion courts and appointed women to formal positions as spiritual advisers.

Yet Riskin’s approach always has been one of pleasantness. He moves cautiously and civilly, always watchful to respect his senior colleagues and careful to anchor his moves within valid halakhic boundaries. Even those who disagree with him have no cause or right to strike at him so brutally. At most, they should continue to debate and challenge him. . . .

Crushing him will be considered open warfare against Modern Orthodoxy and religious Zionism—and I expect that those communities will fight back. They will fight back by doing the one thing they have debated and debated and so not wanted to do, and until now have tried to avoid: support the dismantling of the state rabbinate. But a nasty and radical rabbinate that humiliates Rabbi Riskin will have lost its legitimacy.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”