Written and first published in the late 16th century, and taking its title from a verse in the Song of Songs, the Ts’enah Urenah is a Yiddish Pentateuch that draws freely on midrashic and medieval interpretations, folklore, and rabbinic ethical literature to produce something far more than a translation. The resulting work, in the words of Adam Kirsch, is, on the one hand, “didactic” and filled with “useful moral lessons” and, on the other hand, able to “adorn biblical stories with imaginative details, bringing them to more vivid life by piling new myths and miracles on the old ones.” The book’s intended audience was Jewish women, although many men read it as well. There is no doubt, Kirsch writes, that it did much to shape the worldview of Glikl of Hameln (1646-1724), a well-to-do German Jewish woman who documented her remarkable life in her even more remarkable diaries:

The Ts’enah Urenah power comes from the way it manages to make the biblical stories at once more exotic, by emphasizing or inventing supernatural details, and more domestic, by extracting useful advice about ethics and conduct. A reader could marvel at the miracles God performed for Abraham and Moses, and yet recognize something of her own life in the details about motherhood and matchmaking and moneymaking.

Most important, perhaps, the generations of Jews, men and women alike, who relied on this book for their knowledge of Judaism’s holiest texts were taught not just a collection of tales, but a way of reading. . . . In this way, the Ts’enah Urenah initiated common readers into the classic Jewish approach to texts, so that even if they never read a page of Talmud—much less a philosophical treatise by Maimonides—they would have some sense of what it means to read as a Jew. . . .

[For Glikl,] the sad end to her prosperous career [brought about when her second husband went bankrupt and then died] gives ample opportunity to remind her children, her intended readers, of the evanescence of wealth and the inscrutable wisdom of Providence. . . . Just as she [remarked] at the beginning of the Memoirs, Glikl is not a saint. . . . Like most of us, she is more concerned with respectability and success than with the fate of her eternal soul.

But when it comes to ultimate values, she continually upholds what she learned from the Ts’enah Urenah and books like it. She knows that wealth is meaningless, that God is watching over the universe, that the best Jewish life is one of prayer and study. Her achievement, like that of generations of Jews, was to be able to hold in productive tension the real and the ideal, the world she lived in and the world as God wanted it to be. As she told her children: “Put aside a fixed time for the study of Torah, as best you know how. Then diligently go about your business, for providing your wife and children a decent livelihood is likewise a mitzvah—the command of God and the duty of man.”

How did Qatar, an American ally, become the nerve center of the leading Palestinian jihadist organization? Natalie Ecanow explains.

When Jordan expelled Hamas in 1999, Qatar offered sanctuary to the group, which had already become notorious for using suicide-bombing attacks over the previous decade. . . . Hamas chose to relocate to Syria. However, that arrangement lasted for only a decade. With the outbreak of the Syrian civil war, the terror group found its way back to Qatar.

In 2003, Hamas leaders reportedly convened in Qatar after the IDF attempted to eliminate Hamas’s founder, Sheikh Ahmed Yassin, following a Hamas suicide bombing in Jerusalem that killed seven people, including two American citizens. This episode led to one of the first efforts by Qatar to advocate for its terror proxy.

Thirteen years and five wars between Hamas and Israel later, Qatar’s support for Hamas has not waned. . . . To this day, Qatari officials maintain that the office came at the “request from Washington to establish indirect lines of communication with Hamas.” However, an Obama White House official asserted that there was never any request from Washington. . . . Inexplicably, the United States government continues to rely on Qatar to negotiate for the release of the hostages held by Hamas, even as the regime hosts the terror group’s political elite.

A reckoning is needed between our two countries. Congressional hearings, legislation, executive orders, and other measures to regulate relations between our countries are long overdue.