This week’s Torah reading opens with God telling Moses that he, unlike the patriarchs, has been privileged to have God reveal Himself by His ineffable name—picking up on the passage in the previous week’s reading where God announces Himself as “I will be what I will be.” Analyses of these texts in the Jewish tradition, writes James A. Diamond, fall into two categories. According to the philosophical or rationalist approach, championed by Maimonides, the Tetragrammaton—which itself seems to be derived from the Hebrew verb to be—represents God as “Being itself,” or, in Aristotelian terms, as “the necessary existent.” Yet rabbinic, midrashic, and kabbalistic approaches, Diamond argues, are more faithful to the biblical texts:

While rationalists attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through its midrashic genres and on through kabbalah, actually picked up on that myth—developing, expanding, and enhancing it.

How else can one characterize God wearing t’fillin, accompanied by a debate that appears early on in the Talmud as to what biblical passages are inserted in these divine t’fillin! It turns out that God’s t’fillin are the mirror image of their human counterparts. Just as the latter contains the passage declaring God’s uniqueness, so the former contains an analogous declaration: “Who is like your people Israel, a unique nation on the earth?”

As such, the Tetragrammaton conveys more of a relational being in a partnership of reciprocity with Israel. It connotes a God of endless becoming, as the imperfect tense of “I will be” indicates, a deity who cannot but be elusive, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom He establishes relationship. Other divine names then . . . correlate to various dimensions of God such as compassion, mercy, or justice, which are all manifest in relationships.

As opposed to Maimonides’ detached, unaffected, necessary existence, [the medieval commentator] Rashi exquisitely captures this God of relationship by fleshing out the meaning of “I will be what I will be” as “I will be with [the people of Israel] during this affliction [i.e., Egyptian bondage] as I will be with them during their oppression by other kingdoms.” . . .

[A] mythic continuum stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, and onward. Conversely, the philosophical abstractions consistent with notions of divine perfection actually require a violent distortion of the original text, imposing a notion of the deity that is foreign both to the written text and to its voluminous oral traditions.

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.”