Written and first published in the late 16th century, and taking its title from a verse in the Song of Songs, the Ts’enah Urenah is a Yiddish Pentateuch that draws freely on midrashic and medieval interpretations, folklore, and rabbinic ethical literature to produce something far more than a translation. The resulting work, in the words of Adam Kirsch, is, on the one hand, “didactic” and filled with “useful moral lessons” and, on the other hand, able to “adorn biblical stories with imaginative details, bringing them to more vivid life by piling new myths and miracles on the old ones.” The book’s intended audience was Jewish women, although many men read it as well. There is no doubt, Kirsch writes, that it did much to shape the worldview of Glikl of Hameln (1646-1724), a well-to-do German Jewish woman who documented her remarkable life in her even more remarkable diaries:

The Ts’enah Urenah power comes from the way it manages to make the biblical stories at once more exotic, by emphasizing or inventing supernatural details, and more domestic, by extracting useful advice about ethics and conduct. A reader could marvel at the miracles God performed for Abraham and Moses, and yet recognize something of her own life in the details about motherhood and matchmaking and moneymaking.

Most important, perhaps, the generations of Jews, men and women alike, who relied on this book for their knowledge of Judaism’s holiest texts were taught not just a collection of tales, but a way of reading. . . . In this way, the Ts’enah Urenah initiated common readers into the classic Jewish approach to texts, so that even if they never read a page of Talmud—much less a philosophical treatise by Maimonides—they would have some sense of what it means to read as a Jew. . . .

[For Glikl,] the sad end to her prosperous career [brought about when her second husband went bankrupt and then died] gives ample opportunity to remind her children, her intended readers, of the evanescence of wealth and the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. . . . Just as she [remarked] at the beginning of the Memoirs, Glikl is not a saint. . . . Like most of us, she is more concerned with respectability and success than with the fate of her eternal soul.

But when it comes to ultimate values, she continually upholds what she learned from the Ts’enah Urenah and books like it. She knows that wealth is meaningless, that God is watching over the universe, that the best Jewish life is one of prayer and study. Her achievement, like that of generations of Jews, was to be able to hold in productive tension the real and the ideal, the world she lived in and the world as God wanted it to be. As she told her children: “Put aside a fixed time for the study of Torah, as best you know how. Then diligently go about your business, for providing your wife and children a decent livelihood is likewise a mitzvah—the command of God and the duty of man.”

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.