In his review of Jonathan Sacks’s Not in God’s Name: Confronting Religious Violence, Phillip Cary pays special attention to the book’s treatment of the various sibling rivalries in Genesis, and of the metaphorical sibling rivalry among Jews (descendants of Jacob), Muslims (who consider themselves descendants of Ishmael), and Christians (who, in rabbinic literature, are seen as descendants of Esau). These biblical rivalries are complicated by God’s choosing of certain sons over their brothers, from Abel to Ephraim. Cary writes:

It seems God has favorites, yet he wants us sympathizing with the others, those who are not favored. Sacks shows us how the Bible enlists our feelings on their behalf, highlighting their emotions. For example, in contrast to the terse narrative of Abraham going off to sacrifice his son Isaac, which leaves all human emotion unspoken, there is the previous chapter in Genesis, which is clearly meant as its counterpart, where Hagar goes off with her son Ishmael into the desert, raising her voice and weeping because she cannot bear to watch her son die, and the child, too, crying aloud in his thirst.

Who would not hear such crying? God does, and sends an angel to address Hagar’s emotions with tender words he does not give to Abraham in the next chapter: “Fear not.”

Likewise, argues Sacks, Jews can continue to see themselves as chosen while tolerating, and even loving, Christians and Muslims, while devotees of the other two religions can do the equivalent. Cary explores what exactly this would mean for believing Christians:

To take up Sacks’s invitation . . . requires [Christians] to renounce a crucial element of their own sibling jealousy, which theologians have come to call “supersessionism”: the notion that Christians have now superseded and replaced the Jews as God’s chosen people—as if only Christians were the true Israel, the proper heirs of Jacob, because the Jews have sold their birthright like Esau. Renouncing supersessionism is something most Christian theologians since the Holocaust have been glad to do, supported now by the Vatican II document Nostra Aetate. . . .

[It] is [a] fundamental biblical teaching that Gentiles are blessed through the Jews, who are chosen and beloved by God for precisely this purpose. Genesis repeatedly tells us that in the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, “all nations shall be blessed.” If we who are Gentile Christians really believed this, . . . we would rejoice that the Jews are God’s chosen people. This is a way of unlearning the murderous jealousy of Cain: to be glad that blessing for us comes from them. When Christian teaching makes this kind of rejoicing its own, then Jews will at last be safe from Christian anti-Semitism.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”