Moses Maimonides, citing the Talmud, suggests changing one’s name as a way of repenting for sin. It is a measure also traditionally taken by the gravely ill. Benjamin Corn, an oncologist who works in Israel, estimates that some 15 percent of his patients change their names. He writes:

For some, their name change manifests Maimonides’ cryptic, if not mystical, remark [that, after a name change, one ceases to be] the same person who committed previous (sinful) actions. Another explanation goes like this: as Scripture equates disease (and even death) with punishment for transgressions, if the afflicted changes his name, then he is no longer that person and therefore cannot be the object of God’s retribution. Yet, even among my religious patients—some even conduct a formal name-change ceremony in the hospital chapel—only a minority maintains such a fundamentalist view. What’s more, at our cancer center, I’ve observed that name changes are undertaken by equal percentages of religious and secular patients; there must be another reason.

When I first became aware of this name-changing phenomenon, I concluded that it must be a sign of desperate fear. But I have come to appreciate that while the ritual may, on occasion, be motivated by fear, it is actually far more often a statement about hope—a hope to find a better day and to affirm faith in the human ability to re-invent oneself in the face of hardship. As a result, name change, it now seems to me, is less about a new name and more about the opportunity for change.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.