A Volume from the Vilna Gaon’s Own Collection Surfaces in Israel

Famed even in his own lifetime for his vast erudition and single-minded devotion to study, Elijah ben Shlomo Zalman Kramer (1720-1797)—better known as the Vilna Gaon—became after his death a symbol of old-fashioned learning and piety. A bookbinding from a volume of the Bible that once belonged to the Gaon was recently put on auction in Jerusalem, as the Jerusalem Post reports:

As proof of its . . . origin, an antique slip of paper glued to the inner binding attests, “Tanakh studied by the teacher and master of Israel, the pious Vilna Gaon, may the memory of the righteous be a blessing.” Additionally, the inside paper lining of the back of the binding states the name of the owner: “Rabbi Yaakov Moshe, grandson of the Gaon.”

[Thus], this 18th-century Tanakh was apparently bequeathed by the Vilna Gaon to his grandson Yaakov Moshe of Slonim, son of Rabbi Avraham, the son of the Vilna Gaon, who was a prominent Torah scholar who toiled to edit and publish his grandfather’s legacy.

[T]here are very few remaining items known to have belonged to the Vilna Gaon or even to have been touched by his hands. Among the extant items is his set of the Talmud with his personal annotations.

As the Gaon did not write for publication, much of what are now known as his commentaries were in fact the annotations he wrote in the margins of his books, brought to the public posthumously by his sons. Most of his other works were manuscripts located among his effects after his death.

Read more at Jerusalem Post

More about: Books, Hebrew Bible, Vilna Gaon

What a Strategic Victory in Gaza Can and Can’t Achieve

On Tuesday, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant met in Washington with Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin. Gallant says that he told the former that only “a decisive victory will bring this war to an end.” Shay Shabtai tries to outline what exactly this would entail, arguing that the IDF can and must attain a “strategic” victory, as opposed to merely a tactical or operational one. Yet even after a such a victory Israelis can’t expect to start beating their rifles into plowshares:

Strategic victory is the removal of the enemy’s ability to pose a military threat in the operational arena for many years to come. . . . This means the Israeli military will continue to fight guerrilla and terrorist operatives in the Strip alongside extensive activity by a local civilian government with an effective police force and international and regional economic and civil backing. This should lead in the coming years to the stabilization of the Gaza Strip without Hamas control over it.

In such a scenario, it will be possible to ensure relative quiet for a decade or more. However, it will not be possible to ensure quiet beyond that, since the absence of a fundamental change in the situation on the ground is likely to lead to a long-term erosion of security quiet and the re-creation of challenges to Israel. This is what happened in the West Bank after a decade of relative quiet, and in relatively stable Iraq after the withdrawal of the United States at the end of 2011.

Read more at BESA Center

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hamas, IDF