In the 1948 film Key Largo, a character played by Bogart mentions a “fairy story” that explains the existence of the philtrum—the small hollow above the lips. This is a variation on a traditional Jewish legend—no doubt known to the movie’s Jewish screenwriter—that first appears in the Babylonian Talmud. It states that an angel teaches every fetus the entire Torah in utero; at the moment of birth, the angel smacks the baby on the mouth, causing it to forget what it has learned. Abraham Socher comments on the tale’s meaning, and origins:

The philosophical point that seems to hover over this talmudic passage and its later elaborations is that learning is really an act of recall. As Joseph B. Soloveitchik once wrote, [the Talmud] “wanted to tell us that when a Jew studies Torah, he is confronted with something . . . familiar, because he has already studied it and the knowledge was stored up in the recesses of his memory.” As Soloveitchik and others . . . recognized, this seems to be a version of Plato’s famous theory of knowledge as recollection. However, it’s worth noting that although these texts speak of the unborn child as forgetting, they don’t explicitly describe its later learning as remembering.

The Maharal [Rabbi Judah Loew] of Prague came close when he suggested that the angel slaps the unborn child’s mouth to create “a lack and a desire,” by which he seems to have meant both a desire to nurse and a desire to learn. But the Maharal lived in 16th-century Prague when Plato was, once again, on every intellectual’s lips. Some 200 years later, Rabbi Elimelekh of Lizhensk explicitly argued that if we hadn’t learned Torah before we entered the world it would be impossible to grasp it now—a ḥasidic footnote to Plato.

Early Friday morning, Israel attacked military installations near the Iranian cities of Isfahan and nearby Natanz, the latter being one of the hubs of the country’s nuclear program. Jerusalem is not taking credit for the attack, and none of the details are too certain, but it seems that the attack involved multiple drones, likely launched from within Iran, as well as one or more missiles fired from Syrian or Iraqi airspace. Strikes on Syrian radar systems shortly beforehand probably helped make the attack possible, and there were reportedly strikes on Iraq as well.

Iran itself is downplaying the attack, but the S-300 air-defense batteries in Isfahan appear to have been destroyed or damaged. This is a sophisticated Russian-made system positioned to protect the Natanz nuclear installation. In other words, Israel has demonstrated that Iran’s best technology can’t protect the country’s skies from the IDF. As Yossi Kuperwasser puts it, the attack, combined with the response to the assault on April 13,

clarified to the Iranians that whereas we [Israelis] are not as vulnerable as they thought, they are more vulnerable than they thought. They have difficulty hitting us, but we have no difficulty hitting them.

Nobody knows exactly how the operation was carried out. . . . It is good that a question mark hovers over . . . what exactly Israel did. Let’s keep them wondering. It is good for deniability and good for keeping the enemy uncertain.

The fact that we chose targets that were in the vicinity of a major nuclear facility but were linked to the Iranian missile and air forces was a good message. It communicated that we can reach other targets as well but, as we don’t want escalation, we chose targets nearby that were involved in the attack against Israel. I think it sends the message that if we want to, we can send a stronger message. Israel is not seeking escalation at the moment.