While Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart has been variously portrayed—not wholly inaccurately—as a defiant rebel with a ribald sense of humor and as a consummate Enlightenment rationalist, Richard Bratby points out that he was also devoutly religious:

[T]he Mozarts also enjoyed a long and affectionate relationship with the monks of the Benedictine Abbey of St Peter’s. . . . Wolfgang wrote numerous works for the Abbey—beginning with his Mass K.66 at the age of thirteen, and culminating in the stupendous unfinished Mass in C minor, K.427 of 1783, a work that, if completed, would have matched Beethoven’s Missa solemnis and Bach’s B minor Mass in scale.

Bratby praises this particular setting of the Catholic liturgy for “the towering force and beauty with which it affirms the divine mysteries expressed in the text.” He also observes the religious sentiments found in the composer’s personal writings:

Whether he’s assuring his father that he would never settle in a Protestant country, or convincing the atheist Parisian philosophe Baron von Grimm to believe in miracles, religion is in the air Mozart breathes. He might not have signed his scores Laus Deo, as did his friend Joseph Haydn, but both [his father] Leopold and Wolfgang were convinced that his gift was God-given (“it would be impious to pretend otherwise,” commented Wolfgang).

And where did this idea of artistic talent as divinely inspired come from? According to Jacob Wisse, an early articulation can be found in the book of Exodus.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.