Faced with Ballistic Missiles, Israelis Turned to Biblical Psalms

Oct. 22 2024

I want to end today’s newsletter where it began: looking back to this time on the calendar last year. Rabbi Meir Soloveichik recalls an article he submitted for publication on October 6, 2023, about the enduring power of the book of Psalms, and reflects on the essential role these timeless prayers have played in Jewish religious life over the past year:

I found myself, on the morning of October 7, with only fragments of information, instructing my congregation to engage in a liturgical activity I could not really recall doing before on a festival day: reciting psalms of distress. Saying such psalms on Shabbat and the holidays as a form of beseeching [God] is permitted in Jewish law only in times of great crisis; and I could certainly not have predicted that such psalms, rather than joyous ones, would become our weekly fare. . . .

[On] April 14, 2024, when Iran launched its first missile attack on Israel at 2 a.m. local time, there was one term that bleary-eyed Israelis seem to have googled again and again. The most popular search during the Iranian missile attack on Israel, the Jerusalem Post informed us, was “T’hillim, the book of Psalms.” In a striking joining of ancient and modern, citizens sought Scripture on their iPhones, in order to commune with God in the words that David wrote when he faced his enemies in the very same land.

We must ponder how astonishing this is. One would wager that few, waking up after midnight in Rome or Athens in a moment of crisis in modern times, would turn to the original words of Virgil or Pericles. And no one in Iraq is seeking solace in the words of the Code of Hammurabi. But here Jews were reading words written in their land thousands of years ago, in the very same language.

Read more at Commentary

More about: Gaza War 2023, Hebrew Bible, Israeli society, Psalms

Egypt Is Trapped by the Gaza Dilemma It Helped to Create

Feb. 14 2025

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.

Read more at The Editors

More about: Egypt, Gaza War 2023