Considering the biblical story of Moses descending from Mount Sinai to find the Israelites worshipping an idol, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes:

On the top of the mountain, God informs Moses what has just happened at its base: “Go on down, for your people, whom you have brought out from the land of Egypt, have acted basely” (Exodus 32:7). God’s words . . . bring Moses a dreadful revelation: in his people’s eyes, he has become an idol, his charisma symbolizing nothing other than itself. The people have known all too well exactly what they needed. He has failed to represent the infinite, to stir their imagination. . . . They have inflated him and at the same time vulgarized him.

In his absence, he has been replaced by the even more vulgar fascination of a golden calf: “They have been quick to turn aside from the way that I commanded them. They have made themselves a molten calf and bowed low to it and sacrificed to it, saying: ‘This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt’” (Exodus 32:8). Using the same formula again, God ironically points up the essential problem. Beyond all the rites of idolatry—the actual making of the calf, the worship, and the sacrifices—there is what the people are saying, what they are thinking: the calf is the new object of adoration, filling the vacuum left by Moses himself. . . .

In endowing him with too much power, they have surrendered to their desire for fetish objects. The immediacy with which they replace him with the calf seems to indicate that it serves the same psychic purpose. Unhesitatingly, they substitute for the man Moses a hackneyed object of adoration.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.