Pondering the nature of Jewish identity in today’s world, and the respective challenges faced by Jews in Israel and the Diaspora, Yehudah Mirsky looks to the writings of Abraham Isaac Kook (1865-1935), founder of Israel’s chief rabbinate:

In a justly famous set of reflections written around 1912 or 1913, Kook points to three distinct dimensions of Jewish identity: nation, universal ethics, and the sacred. In pre-modern Jewish life, these all clustered together and reinforced each other. In modern times they split apart, each becoming the property of a specific party—in Kook’s day, respectively, Zionists, socialists, and the Orthodox. These “camps” [did not merely represent] different ways of addressing problems practically, they were vehicles of identity, of articulating and living different visions of Jewishness. But the one thing that they shared—to me, still the indispensable prerequisite to being part of the Jewish conversation today—was a passionate commitment to Jewish physical and cultural survival, each by its own lights.

For Kook, the true meaning of the “sacred” is the ultimate unity of all three: Jewish peoplehood at once particular and universal and thus enacting God’s [nature as a being that is both] universal and particular, [both] transcendent and immanent. . . .

In our day, Jewishness simultaneously affirms the global and the local, the universal and the particular, while lodging a permanent protest against the idea that any one particular identity, and any one—even universalist—ideology is the one-size-fits-all God-like answer to the human condition in all its diversity.

While President Trump has begun his term with a flurry of executive orders, their implementation is another matter. David Wurmser surveys the bureaucratic hurdles facing new presidents, and sets forth what he thinks should be the most important concerns for the White House regarding the Middle East:

The cease-fire agreement between Israel and Hamas may be necessary in order to retrieve whatever live hostages Israel is able to repatriate. Retrieving those hostages has been an Israeli war aim from day one.

But it is a vital American interest . . . to allow Israel to restart the war in Gaza and complete the destruction of Hamas, and also to allow Israel to enforce unilaterally UN Security Council Resolutions 1701 and 1559, which are embedded in the Lebanon cease-fire. If Hamas emerges with a story of victory in any form, not only will Israel face another October 7 soon, and not only will anti-Semitism explode exponentially globally, but cities and towns all over the West will suffer from a newly energized and encouraged global jihadist effort.

After the last hostage Israel can hope to still retrieve has been liberated, Israel will have to finish the war in a way that results in an unambiguous, incontrovertible, complete victory.