While Rabbi Judah Loew ben Bezalel of Prague (d. 1609), known by the Hebrew acronym Maharal, is most famous today because of the legend that he used kabbalistic magic to create a golem that could defend the Jews of his city from anti-Semites, his real legacy consists of his towering achievements as a talmudist, philosopher, mystic, and leader of one of the world’s largest Jewish communities. The golem legend stems from a popular Hebrew work, published in Poland in 1909, that record various stories about the Maharal’s wondrous doings. Zack Rothbart recounts one of these—concerning the rabbi’s wife, Perl.

Reb Shmelke Reich was a wealthy and respected figure who arranged for a marriage between his daughter Perl and Judah Loew, a promising fifteen-year-old Torah scholar. Young Judah headed off to yeshiva to study and in the meantime, Reb Shmelke’s fortunes reversed and he became very poor, unable to pay a dowry for his daughter to wed.

Three years after the marriage was arranged, Reb Shmelke wrote to his son-in-law to be, letting him know that seeing as he could not afford a respectable dowry, the young man was freed of his commitment and didn’t have to marry Perl after all. The young man wouldn’t hear of it, writing back that he would wait for assistance from on high.

The righteous young Perl decided to help her parents out by opening a small bakery and selling bread to support her family. She worked in the bakery for ten years, while her betrothed continued studying Torah, waiting for the day he could marry his beloved. . . .

The story, of course, concludes with a fairy-tale ending.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.