Having spent Passover as the only Jew at a medical mission in East Africa, where patients routinely die from conditions easily treated or prevented in the U.S., Aaron Rothstein considers the frustrations and disappointments of his work in light of Jewish history:

This Passover overflows with a sense of displacement, disorder, and exile. This is not an unusual feeling for a Jewish physician. It is probably closer to what most Jewish physicians have experienced throughout Jewish history, not merely because of what they saw and whom they treated but because of who they were. . . . In the 14th century, a prominent Gentile physician, Arnold of Villanova, told Pope Boniface VIII [that] “every Christian who entrusts his body to the medical treatment of Jews merits excommunication and is guilty of a capital crime.”

[Nonetheless], Jewish physicians occasionally had more freedom than their fellow Jews. True, Jewish physicians were maligned, but often with a wink and a nod. When Queen Isabella married King Ferdinand in 1479, thus creating a unified Christian Spain that would hunt down the Jews, exceptions were made. Ferdinand and Isabella retained Jewish physicians in the court. . . .

The royal courts persecuted the Jews but defended the retention of Jewish court physicians in the same breath. Thus, the tension between exile and redemption, or freedom and bondage, is inextricably linked in Jewish history and in the medical profession. Indeed, for Jewish physicians that tension is particularly poignant as Jewish physicians had some sense of freedom but mostly remained in bondage.

To be sure, I have been fortunate not to experience any kind of discrimination here. . . . But I still recognize that tension and experience it, being in a city devoid of Jews and saturated with tragic medical outcomes. . . . As Jews we know freedom never exists without exile; redemption never exists without slavery. We are poised on the brink of freedom, but it is a freedom that is always in question, always with an asterisk.

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.