Some 50,000 soldiers serving in the IDF will soon receive a booklet, titled “Why I am a Jew,” that contains a chapter from Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’s book Radical Then, Radical Now. That the late British chief rabbi’s words have such appeal to young men and women on the frontlines is testimony to the power of his words for the Jewish people, whose fate now lies in these brave soldiers’ hands. But Sacks also possessed an unrivaled ability to share Jewish wisdom with the world at large, and that ability is the subject of this essay by Mosaic’s editor Jonathan Silver:

Freedom, the capacity for self-rule at the heart of the American ideal, thus expresses itself ambiguously. At times, liberty seemed a natural right, endowed to all men by their Creator. But other voices . . . suggested that liberty was not a right but a precious and hard-won achievement, the result of moral formation, a learned discipline that draws on classical and biblical resources considerably older than the American constitutional order. . . . [N]o one would convey that older and more capacious understanding of human freedom more eloquently than the British lord and chief rabbi of the United Kingdom, the late Jonathan Sacks.

Silver focuses on two addresses that convey these ideas:

Taken together, these two speeches suggest precisely what is needed for freedom in America to rebound: we must recover the arts of family formation, which not only bring love and life into society but also impress upon parents the sort of generational perspective they need to take responsible civic action. And we must be willing to do this in opposition to a culture that has mistaken liberty for license and that encourages us either to indulge shallow pleasures or at least to dull our pains. Sacks can help us recover the biblical truth that it is possible to erect structures of inner freedom even on the shores of Babylon.

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.