In his book God Is in the Crowd, Tal Keinan examines the difficult situations into which Israeli and American Jewry have (in his view) fallen, and seeks to find a solution by appealing to the notion of the “wisdom of the crowd”—namely, that the aggregated opinions of a large number of people are often likely to be accurate. Thus, ask several hundred people to guess the number of gumballs in a gumball machine, and the average of their answers is apt to be very close to the correct one. Abraham Socher finds much compelling in Keinan’s book, but deems both its diagnoses and its prescriptions lacking—starting with the author’s ascription of Diaspora Judaism’s past success to a sort of crowdsourcing:

Keinan suggests that the “evolving Jewish moral code” is like a “moving stock average of more than 3,000 years of religious, cultural, and moral data points.” But charting a moving average to eliminate “noise” and smooth the trend line presupposes that the data points are just that: points on an x/y graph. But how does one graph, to take a simple case, a biblical verse through its various commentaries and literary uses? The ungraphable details matter; one might even say that God is in them (and not in the graphable crowd).

Keinan’s proposal for the revitalization of Jewish life is high-tech gumball counting. . . . The problem [with his idea] is not . . . even its sheer incoherence—how exactly does one teach one’s children “constantly evolving Crowd Wisdom,” and why?—but rather the premise that if we just had good enough data on what most Jews think Judaism should be, to the extent that they have thought about it at all, then that’s what it should be.

In the absence of a “wisdom machine” [that could magically aggregate the wisdom of millions of Jews], Keinan ran a poll of varied Jewish acquaintances asking them to list ten identifiers that “form the de-facto pillars of contemporary Jewish identity.” The top five results were justice, education, challenge and dissent, ritual and tradition, and community. (Neither God nor Torah made the list.) On this basis, he proposes a world Jewish tax that would fund summer camps, a high-school tikkun olam project, and college tuition for all participating Jews (has he heard about Jewish life on American college campuses?). In other words, more of the same at the cost of, he estimates, $13.75 billion.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.