Leonard Cohen arrived in Israel for the first time in 1973, worried that he “would not get the blessing.” As the Mosaic contributor Matti Friedman documents in a new book, he somehow ended up at the front during the Yom Kippur War, performing for dumbfounded young soldiers. Ari Hoffman writes in his review:

By the time he reached Israel, Cohen’s early star was no longer at its brightest. He was not a prodigy anymore, and the promise of his school-day literary career seemed to have given way to something far more bitter: what he described as living “inside of hatred and keeping to my side of the bed and always screaming, ‘No, this can’t be my life,’ inside my head.”

The man who decided to go to Israel was pushed just as much by a sense of Zionist longing. He was worried that he “would not get the blessing,” an especially dire fate for someone descended from the priests of the ancient Temple in Jerusalem whose ancestral job it was to dispense benedictions.

The existence of what Mr. Friedman calls “a concert tour, maybe one of the greatest, certainly one of the strangest” ever taken is a certainty, but those hoping for a minute-by-minute transcription won’t find one. It lives on as “underground history,” and pinning down exactly why Cohen went and what he did once he was there is akin to counting grains of sand.

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.