In 2019, Rabbi Jeremy Borovitz and his wife, residents of Berlin, decided to spend Yom Kippur with the small Jewish community of Halle. That happened to be the year that an anti-Semitic and anti-immigrant fanatic attacked the Halle synagogue with a rifle and Molotov cocktails. Borovitz recalls:

Instead of our planned intergenerational Yom Kippur service, we found ourselves in an intergenerational nightmare. We were Jews gathered in a synagogue in Germany, fearing for our lives as an armed Nazi banged on the doors outside. Within a few days, the public began referring to us as survivors. It was a strange label. In my childhood, survivors had numbers on their arms and thick accents. I had always thought of survivors as heroic, but I didn’t feel like a hero.

A few days after the attack, lying in my bed unable to sleep and replaying the attack in my head, I realized that the first shots were heard just as the Torah reader had chanted a verse from Leviticus about offerings and expiations: “Aaron shall offer his offering. BANG. He shall make expiation with his offering. BANG-BANG.” The passage describes how the high priest, Moses’ brother Aaron, would take two goats, sacrifice the first to God, and lead the second into the wilderness.

Amid the high priest’s burning of incense, slaughtering of animals, and confession of sins, I noticed a character who was usually overlooked: the ish iti, the “designated man,” literally, the “man of the moment,” who took the scapegoat from the high priest and led it into the wilderness.

The Talmud mentions in passing that in the final years of the Second Temple, a man named Arsela was given this task:

We know nothing of Arsela except that when it was his time to perform a task, he was there. . . . Arsela was the “man of the moment,” a person who is remembered despite being otherwise unmemorable.

Considering the current state of Israel-Arab relations, Ghaith al-Omari writes

First and foremost, no ceasefire will be possible without the release of Israeli hostages and commitments to disarm Hamas and remove it from power. The final say on these matters rests with Hamas commanders on the ground in Gaza, who have been largely impervious to foreign pressure so far. At minimum, however, the United States should insist that Qatari and Egyptian mediators push Hamas’s external leadership to accept these conditions publicly, which could increase pressure on the group’s Gaza leadership.

Washington should also demand a clear, public position from key Arab states regarding disarmament. The Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas endorsed this position in a June letter to Saudi Arabia and France, giving Arab states Palestinian cover for endorsing it themselves.

Some Arab states have already indicated a willingness to play a significant role, but they will have little incentive to commit resources and personnel to Gaza unless Israel (1) provides guarantees that it will not occupy the Strip indefinitely, and (2) removes its veto on a PA role in Gaza’s future, even if only symbolic at first. Arab officials are also seeking assurances that any role they play in Gaza will be in the context of a wider effort to reach a two-state solution.

On the other hand, Washington must remain mindful that current conditions between Israel and the Palestinians are not remotely conducive to . . . implementing a two-state solution.