Israel’s chief rabbinate has been criticized from many quarters for its recent action delegitimizing conversions to Judaism performed by rabbis it deems too moderate. The problem, Elli Fischer writes, is not—or not just—malice against other Jews, it’s the rabbinate’s organizational dysfunction and incompetence, rooted in a vast bureaucracy never before seen in the Jewish world:

The chief rabbinate, the Ministry of Religious Services, and other expressions of religion-state entanglement, are responsible for providing religious services—certify food as kosher, build synagogues and eruvin [ritual enclosures], marry, divorce, construct and staff ritual baths, bury the dead, administer holy sites, and more—for over six million people. This entails a rabbinic bureaucracy whose scope outstrips, by several orders of magnitude, any historical precedent.

It is here, in the middle and lower levels of the bureaucracy, where jobs are given out to nephews (Latin: nepos) and as political favors. It is here where real pain can be inflicted before the matter arrives at the desk of someone with a moral pulse. The monster lives in the cellar; it hardly matters who occupies the upper stories, or what sort of hat they wear. The problem with the rabbinate is not that it is too Orthodox or insufficiently Orthodox, but that through it the government confers power on those unfit to wield it.

As long as religious services remain an arm of government, control of them will remain the spoils of coalition politics. As long as Israel remains in a precarious geopolitical situation, Israelis will continue to consider control of religious service an acceptable price to pay for a few years of domestic stability. And so, the average encounter with the official arms of the Jewish religion will remain impersonal and alienating, and sometimes downright nightmarish.

On Tuesday, a Hizballah drone attack injured three people in northern Israel. The next day, another attack, targeting an IDF base, injured eighteen people, six of them seriously, in Arab al-Amshe, also in the north. This second attack involved the simultaneous use of drones carrying explosives and guided antitank missiles. In both cases, the defensive systems that performed so successfully last weekend failed to stop the drones and missiles. Ron Ben-Yishai has a straightforward explanation as to why: the Lebanon-backed terrorist group is getting better at evading Israel defenses. He explains the three basis systems used to pilot these unmanned aircraft, and their practical effects:

These systems allow drones to act similarly to fighter jets, using “dead zones”—areas not visible to radar or other optical detection—to approach targets. They fly low initially, then ascend just before crashing and detonating on the target. The terrain of southern Lebanon is particularly conducive to such attacks.

But this requires skills that the terror group has honed over months of fighting against Israel. The latest attacks involved a large drone capable of carrying over 50 kg (110 lbs.) of explosives. The terrorists have likely analyzed Israel’s alert and interception systems, recognizing that shooting down their drones requires early detection to allow sufficient time for launching interceptors.

The IDF tries to detect any incoming drones on its radar, as it had done prior to the war. Despite Hizballah’s learning curve, the IDF’s technological edge offers an advantage. However, the military must recognize that any measure it takes is quickly observed and analyzed, and even the most effective defenses can be incomplete. The terrain near the Lebanon-Israel border continues to pose a challenge, necessitating technological solutions and significant financial investment.