In his short story “The Sign,” the great Hebrew writer S.Y. Agnon recounts hearing of the murder by the Nazis of the Jews of Buczacz, the Polish city where he was born. The story ends with the narrator sitting in his Jerusalem synagogue, reading one of the works of the great medieval Spanish poet Solomon ibn Gabirol—whose masterful liturgical poems can be found in many prayer books—when Gabirol’s ghost appears to bring him the sad tidings. Stuart Schoffman reflects on the story itself and on the two luminaries of Jewish literature who are its main characters:

The towering medieval poet will be on my mind as I search my soul on Yom Kippur. His best-known work, Keter Malkhut, a magisterial meld of Jewish theology, Ptolemaic cosmology, and personal confession, is read on Kol Nidre night in various communities. A tiny sample, as translated by Peter Cole: “Who could speak of your wonders,/ surrounding the sphere of fire/ with a sphere of sky where the moon/ draws from the shine of the sun and glows?”

Little is known of his life. Born in Malaga in 1021, 1022, or maybe 1026, Solomon ibn Gabirol lived in Saragossa and died circa 1057 or thereafter, maybe in Valencia. . . . He was orphaned young and suffered from a painful skin disease. His massive Az’harot (literally, “Warnings”) is a verse rendition of the Torah’s 613 commandments, all the dos and don’ts in a dazzling acrostic that Gabirol wrote when he was sixteen, or so we are told. . . . Ibn Gabirol was also a prolific secular poet and a neo-Platonic philosopher famed in the Christian world as Avicebron, the author of the treatise Fons Vitae (The Fountain of Life).

Agnon ends “The Sign” in the local shul in Talpiot [the Jerusalem neighborhood where he had settled in 1929], a humble wooden shack where the narrator recites Gabirol’s Az’harot. The doors of the Holy Ark open, and he sees the kingly figure of a man. Gradually he realizes this is Gabirol himself, and weeps. . . . [T]he mystical visitor weaves a memorial acrostic [about Buczacz] that the narrator cannot remember, but “the poem sings itself in the heavens above.” If Rabbeynu Shlomo [“our teacher Solomon,” as Agnon calls him], shows up on Yom Kippur at my shul in Jerusalem—and why wouldn’t he?—I have a question or two to ask him.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.