While the kaddish may be the best known piece of Jewish liturgy, particularly in its function as a prayer for the dead, there is no mention of mourners reciting it until the 12th century, and then only in texts from France and Germany. David Shyovitz, questioning previous theories of the prayer’s origin, suggests his own:

The fact that a prayer for mourners would have been newly introduced in [12th-century Ashkenaz] seems logical. After all, the year 1096 had witnessed a deeply traumatic series of massacres inflicted on the Jews of the Rhineland by armies of Crusaders headed east to the Holy Land, who thought it expedient to wipe out the enemies of Christ living within their borders before pursuing foes beyond them.

The throngs of newly grieving mourners, in this telling, required a ritual outlet, and found one in the kaddish, with its stirring proclamation of divine majesty and promise of impending redemption. . . . This explanation, . . . however, is wholly unsupported by the sources.

The custom is first attested in a copy of Maḥzor Vitri, the liturgical guide composed in the 12th century by Rabbi Simḥa of Vitri, a student of Rabbi Solomon ben Isaac (Rashi), and the overt and explicit rationale for the practice in this text is not commemoration but . . . redeem[ing] the souls of deceased relatives from suffering in hell. The martyrs of the Crusade massacres were the last people who would have been thought to require such posthumous assistance. . . .

A more compelling explanation for the rise of kaddish as a mourner’s prayer emerges from an analysis of the tale that accompanied the earliest halakhic discussions of the practice. . . [T]his story describes [the 2nd-century sage] Rabbi Akiva’s run-in with a dead man suffering in the afterlife on account of the sinful deeds he committed during his lifetime.

There is little doubt that if Hizballah had participated more intensively in Saturday’s attack, Israeli air defenses would have been pushed past their limits, and far more damage would have been done. Daniel Byman and Kenneth Pollack, trying to look at things from Tehran’s perspective, see this as an important sign of caution—but caution that shouldn’t be exaggerated:

Iran is well aware of the extent and capability of Israel’s air defenses. The scale of the strike was almost certainly designed to enable at least some of the attacking munitions to penetrate those defenses and cause some degree of damage. Their inability to do so was doubtless a disappointment to Tehran, but the Iranians can probably still console themselves that the attack was frightening for the Israeli people and alarming to their government. Iran probably hopes that it was unpleasant enough to give Israeli leaders pause the next time they consider an operation like the embassy strike.

Hizballah is Iran’s ace in the hole. With more than 150,000 rockets and missiles, the Lebanese militant group could overwhelm Israeli air defenses. . . . All of this reinforces the strategic assessment that Iran is not looking to escalate with Israel and is, in fact, working very hard to avoid escalation. . . . Still, Iran has crossed a Rubicon, although it may not recognize it. Iran had never struck Israel directly from its own territory before Saturday.

Byman and Pollack see here an important lesson for America:

What Saturday’s fireworks hopefully also illustrated is the danger of U.S. disengagement from the Middle East. . . . The latest round of violence shows why it is important for the United States to take the lead on pushing back on Iran and its proxies and bolstering U.S. allies.