Last Thursday the celebrated pop musician Meir Barnai died at the age of fifty-five. Banai, a member of what might be termed the royal family of Israeli rock, never became religiously observant, as did his brother Evyatar and cousin Ehud (also highly successful recording artists). But like them he was at the forefront of a movement among secular Israelis to rediscover the Jewish religion, as Daniel Gordis writes:

Ḥayyim Naḥman Bialik, David Ben-Gurion, Shimon Peres, Eliezer Ben-Yehudah and dozens of others of the giants of early Zionism were raised in Orthodox homes and—to one degree or another—abandoned the rigors of that way of life. They sought sanctity not in the synagogue but in their ancestral homeland. They replaced prayer with labor. They ached not for ritual purity, but for the dirt of the land of Israel and the messiness of state-building. Early Zionism was, in many ways, a rebellion against Judaism. . . .

Somewhere along the line, though, Israelis’ infatuation with secularism began to crack, and their anger at the religion of their great-grandparents began to give way to curiosity. . . . [B]y the late 1970s, and with increased energy thereafter, younger generations of Israelis . . . wanted to be part of the conversation that had been Judaism for centuries. . . . Meir [Banai] was . . . swept along by the interest in religion and issued albums like Sh’ma Koli [whose name was taken from party of the Yom Kippur liturgy] that included songs like “L’kha Eli” (“To You, My God”), the words for which were composed by the medieval Jewish sage, Abraham ibn Ezra.. . . .

Banai’s life and work was a reminder that it is never too late to ask ourselves what the Jewish state is all about. There are many ways to answer that question, of course, but the move from the secularism of Israel’s early generations to the heartbreak of 1973 to the religious inquisitiveness of recent decades suggests that more than anything, Israel is the place where Jews have come to reimagine what Jewish peoplehood might mean when it resides in its ancestral homeland and is coupled to sovereignty.

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.