In such books as The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev, the American novelist Chaim Potok (1929-2002), explores the lives and struggles of young men from the ḥasidic world as they find themselves drawn away from it. Wesley Hill, who left the devout evangelical Christian milieu of his childhood while maintaining his commitment to the Christian religion, has found that “Potok’s characters” have helped him “to understand [his] complicated feelings.”

But Hill finds particular relevance in Potok’s lesser-known Davita’s Harp, which is not a tale of the rejection of and return to religion, but of coming to religion from outside it. The eponymous heroine is the child of a secular Gentile father and a Jewish Communist mother, and finds herself anything but at home in a synagogue:

Yet in 1937, . . . after learning of her father’s death in the bombing of Guernica, where he had been working as a journalist, . . . Davita goes back to a synagogue and, finding herself in a kind of daze, says softly aloud the kaddish, the traditional doxology that asks for the sanctification of God’s name. Davita mouths the words in memory of her father. She can see the men’s side of the synagogue through the curtain. She watches the men rise.

Maybe it is because I think about [the French philosopher] Paul Ricoeur’s diagnosis of modern readers of the Bible and would-be believers in its God—“Beyond the desert of criticism, we wish to be called again”—that I am tempted to regard Davita’s budding curiosity about Judaism as one of the most immediately relatable entries into Chaim Potok’s work as a whole. A religiously observant life is less and less accessible or intelligible to modern Westerners, yet many of us remain haunted by its possibility. Even the demographic designation “nones” invokes religious sensibility by naming its absence, tacitly acknowledging that, even in the desert, faith’s echo can be heard. Davita’s halting entry into an observant life dramatizes a journey we too might take. Her story makes the prospect of finding a home within a religious tradition, even in a secular age, a live, beguiling one.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.