In his Leo Strauss and the Rediscovery of Maimonides, Kenneth Hart Green newly configures the approach taken to the age-old problem of reason and revelation by the towering 12th-century philosopher Moses Maimonides and by his 20th-century interpreter Leo Strauss. Daniel Rynhold writes in his review:

Modern thought, Green argues, has approached religion by either refuting it or “claiming to contain it in versions of rational moralism,” which amounts “merely to [putting] it to sleep by attempting to . . . repress or deny the deeper conflict in the soul of each human being.” . . . As [Friedrich] Nietzsche had before him, Strauss recognized “the frailty of reason as a substitute for religion in political life, never mind what its absence from morality and psychology yields as an access to the human soul.” But while Nietzsche’s response to the threat of nihilism called on man to fill the vacuum himself, . . . Strauss came to understand through his study of Maimonides that Nietzsche’s post-religious nihilism could only be avoided through a return to revelation. . . .

For Green’s Strauss, the key to Maimonidean wisdom is the view that the dialectic between Jerusalem and Athens defines Western civilization; the modernist attempt to dissolve that tension ignores the centrality and power of the religious impulse for human endeavor. . . . Thus . . . Strauss echoes a number of modern Jewish philosophers . . . in thinking that “a balance of forces and a dynamic tension is healthier in the mind than a single dominant view or form of thought in complete control,” and it is in his unearthing of the hidden Maimonides that Strauss discovers the way to navigate this necessary tension. Green’s Strauss is not, therefore, a cynical atheist—and neither is his Maimonides.

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.