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.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.