The Yiddish poet and novelist Chaim Grade is best known for his literary depictions of religious life in prewar Eastern Europe—and of his own disillusionment from that particular life. Much of his work is centered around the great yeshivas of Vilna and its environs, heirs of the anti-ḥasidic countermovement of the late 18th century. Yet in the 1960s, Grade began a correspondence with the rebbe of the Chabad-Lubavitch Ḥasidim, facilitated by Israel’s then-president Zalman Shazar and encouraged by Grade’s wife, who generally wanted little to do with Jewish affairs. Eli Rubin tells the story, and presents a translation of some of the correspondence:

In July 1966, Chaim Grade . . . received a phone call. Zalman Shazar, the journalist and Labor activist who was now president of Israel, had arrived in New York on his first official visit to the United States, and would soon be heading to Washington to meet his counterpart, President Johnson. But Shazar had something else on his mind. As Grade recalled in a letter penned a few weeks later, “the [Israeli] consul told me that a constant stream of warnings are coming from Israel” that President Shazar “should not visit the Lubavitcher rebbe, and it is making the president ill, depressed, and agitated.”

Grade soon arrived at Shazar’s hotel, together with his wife, Inna Hecker Grade, for a heart-to-heart. “If you go,” Grade told the president, “there will be a storm outside of you, in Israel. But if you don’t go, there’ll be a storm within your own self, and it will never quiet down!”

“Now I see two things,” Shazar excitedly replied, “you are a poet, and you are a friend!”

A couple of days later, the New York Times was . . . reporting that “Mr. Shazar had clearly placed his own deep spiritual attachments ahead of the criticism of some Israeli newspapers when he made an unscheduled midnight visit to Rabbi Menahem M. Schneerson, head of the Lubavitcher movement in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn.” At Shazar’s request, and with Inna’s encouragement, Grade was in the presidential entourage.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].