Taking a position that many of his Jewish peers would have considered heretical, the 14th-century theologian Nissim of Marseilles maintained that the specific details of biblical law were in fact created by Moses alone, based on the use of his own reason; only the general outline was of literally divine origin. Nissim’s source was an ancient midrashic commentary on the construction of the tabernacle, described in painstaking detail in the second half of the book of Exodus that concludes with this week’s Torah reading. David Frankel writes:

Nissim was unconventional. Whereas Moses Maimonides was often circumspect and ambiguous in his formulations, Nissim was more explicit and more radical. He denied God’s personal intrusion into the course of events and provided a naturalistic interpretation of creation and biblical miracles. . . .

Nissim [interpreted the Midrash to mean] that God merely stated “Build Me a tabernacle,” the way a king would commission someone to build a palace, without getting involved in the details. God thus trusted Moses to determine all the details, . . . which he in fact did. Moses’ great merit, however, consisted in modestly attributing all of these details to God. . . .

More strikingly, Nissim understands the tabernacle here as representing “all the commands of the Torah.” In other words, God commissioned Moses, in a general sense, to write for Him a Torah for Israel, and it was [to Moses’ credit] that he presented all the laws of that Torah as if they were individually commanded by God.

While it is commendable that administrators of several universities finally called upon police to crack down on violent and disruptive anti-Israel protests, the actions they have taken may be insufficient. At Columbia, demonstrators reestablished their encampment on the main quad after it had been cleared by the police, and the university seems reluctant to use force again. The school also decided to hold classes remotely until the end of the semester. Such moves, whatever their merits, do nothing to fix the factors that allowed campuses to become hotbeds of pro-Hamas activism in the first place. The editors of National Review examine how things go to this point:

Since the 10/7 massacre, Columbia’s Jewish students have been forced to endure routine calls for their execution. It shouldn’t have taken the slaughter, rape, and brutalization of Israeli Jews to expose chants like “Globalize the intifada” and “Death to the Zionist state” as calls for violence, but the university refused to intervene on behalf of its besieged students. When an Israeli student was beaten with a stick outside Columbia’s library, it occasioned little soul-searching from faculty. Indeed, it served only as the impetus to establish an “Anti-Semitism Task Force,” which subsequently expressed “serious concerns” about the university’s commitment to enforcing its codes of conduct against anti-Semitic violators.

But little was done. Indeed, as late as last month the school served as host to speakers who praised the 10/7 attacks and even “hijacking airplanes” as “important tactics that the Palestinian resistance have engaged in.”

The school’s lackadaisical approach created a permission structure to menace and harass Jewish students, and that’s what happened. . . . Now is the time finally to do something about this kind of harassment and associated acts of trespass and disorder. Yale did the right thing when police cleared out an encampment [on Monday]. But Columbia remains a daily reminder of what happens when freaks and haters are allowed to impose their will on campus.