Once home to the largest Jewish community in the western part of Georgia, Lailashi is now a remote village with no Jews to speak of, although efforts have been made recently to preserve its synagogue. It is also the location of an extremely rare codex of the Pentateuch, thought to have been written in the 10th century and complete save for a few chapters. Thea Gomelauri writes in a December 2020 article:

The provenance of the Lailashi codex . . . is as mysterious as its authorship and its ownership. According to the legend, the codex was brought to Georgia on an angel’s wings. The villagers saw a floating book in an unnamed river, and they rescued it from the stream. This unique codex was said to have miracle-working powers. It became an object of [veneration] for both Jews and Georgians.

How this priceless codex was “found” in a small, unprotected community synagogue during the unfortunate times of the Soviet reign is unclear. . . . The codex . . . was seized by the Communist authorities, and was brought to Tbilisi. Originally, it was kept in the Georgian Museum of Jewish History, but the museum was closed in 1951 [at the height of Stalinist anti-Semitism]. In 1957, the Lailashi manuscript emerged in the possession of the Kekelidze Institute of Manuscripts of the Georgian Academy of Sciences.
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What makes the Lailashi codex unique among its counterparts is that this treasure of biblical scholarship is entirely understudied. The only scholarly article about it appeared in 1968 in [a Georgian-language journal], but the codex has never been studied by Hebrew paleographers. . . . Supposedly, it was written by different people and at different locations: in Palestine, Egypt, and Persia.

Yesterday, the beepers used by hundreds of Hizballah operatives were detonated. Noah Rothman puts this ingenious attack in the context of the overall war between Israel and the Iran-backed terrorist group:

[W]hile the disabling of an untold number of Hizballah operatives is remarkable, it’s also ominous. This week, the Israeli defense minister Yoav Gallant told reporters that the hour is nearing when Israeli forces will have to confront Iran’s cat’s-paw in southern Lebanon directly, in order to return the tens of thousands of Israelis who fled their homes along Lebanon’s border under fire and have not yet been able to return. Today’s operation may be a prelude to the next phase of Israel’s defensive war, a dangerous one in which the IDF will face off against an enemy with tens of thousands of fighters and over 150,000 rockets and missiles trained on Israeli cities.

Seth Frantzman, meanwhile, focuses on the specific damage the pager bombings have likely done to Hizballah:

This will put the men in hospital for a period of time. Some of them can go back to serving Hizballah, but they will not have access to one of their hands. These will most likely be their dominant hand, meaning the hand they’d also use to hold the trigger of a rifle or push the button to launch a missile.

Hizballah has already lost around 450 fighters in its eleven-month confrontation with Israel. This is a significant loss for the group. While Hizballah can replace losses, it doesn’t have an endlessly deep [supply of recruits]. This is not only because it has to invest in training and security ahead of recruitment, but also because it draws its recruits from a narrow spectrum of Lebanese society.

The overall challenge for Hizballah is not just replacing wounded and dead fighters. The group will be challenged to . . . roll out some other way to communicate with its men. The use of pagers may seem archaic, but Hizballah apparently chose to use this system because it assumed the network could not be penetrated. . . . It will also now be concerned about the penetration of its operational security. When groups like Hizballah are in chaos, they are more vulnerable to making mistakes.