Earlier this year, the Catholic Church proclaimed John Henry Newman, one of Victorian England’s foremost religious thinkers, a saint. Newman, after a long and prestigious career in the Anglican church, embraced Roman Catholicism and was eventually given the rank of cardinal. To Shalom Carmy, Jews—and Orthodox Jews in particular—have much to learn from this extraordinary figure:

Newman argued that knowing what to think and how to think contributed to being a better person in the same way that being physically healthy is better than not being healthy. He understood that a university education that excluded the most important truth—that about God—was not a satisfactory education. Therefore to compromise by compartmentalizing religious doctrine from the rest of our education is a dangerous falsification.

More importantly, Newman regarded the university as a place of education, independent of its practical technical utility. In our culture, education usually means training that will enable one to get a job doing something that benefits society or at least earn a salary. In Newman’s day as in our own, secular pundits and political spokesmen held that exposure to popular science and literature could supply modern people, especially the lower orders who did not get a liberal-arts curriculum, with the sense of meaning that had previously been fostered by religious education and, in a different way, by humanistic study. Newman saw clearly that such “neutral” information could not take the place of wisdom, let alone revelation. An unwillingness to take these matters seriously is responsible, to some degree, for the indifferent state of Orthodox [Jews’] intellectual life.

Another area where Newman’s preoccupations overlap with Jewish concerns is the question of development and tradition in religious doctrine. . . . Newman’s stress on the propagation of doctrine through the church runs counter to a prevalent modern tendency to treat belief as the product of individual reflection, what Newman calls “private judgment.” . . . Unlike the Roman Catholic Church, Judaism does not have a centralized authority like the papacy. . . . Nonetheless, one cannot adhere to Judaism either in action or in thought without some robust sense that our connection to God is formed by the collective experience of the Jewish people mediated through cumulative rabbinic interpretation.

Addressing a recent meeting of the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Central Committee, Mahmoud Abbas criticized Hamas more sharply than he has previously (at least in public), calling them “sons of dogs.” The eighty-nine-year-old Palestinian Authority president urged the terrorist group to “stop the war of extermination in Gaza” and “hand over the American hostages.” The editors of the New York Sun comment:

Mr. Abbas has long been at odds with Hamas, which violently ousted his Fatah party from Gaza in 2007. The tone of today’s outburst, though, is new. Comparing rivals to canines, which Arabs consider dirty, is startling. Its motivation, though, was unrelated to the plight of the 59 remaining hostages, including 23 living ones. Instead, it was an attempt to use an opportune moment for reviving Abbas’s receding clout.

[W]hile Hamas’s popularity among Palestinians soared after its orgy of killing on October 7, 2023, it is now sinking. The terrorists are hoarding Gaza aid caches that Israel declines to replenish. As the war drags on, anti-Hamas protests rage across the Strip. Polls show that Hamas’s previously elevated support among West Bank Arabs is also down. Striking the iron while it’s hot, Abbas apparently longs to retake center stage. Can he?

Diminishing support for Hamas is yet to match the contempt Arabs feel toward Abbas himself. Hamas considers him irrelevant for what it calls “the resistance.”

[Meanwhile], Abbas is yet to condemn Hamas’s October 7 massacre. His recent announcement of ending alms for terror is a ruse.

Abbas, it’s worth noting, hasn’t saved all his epithets for Hamas. He also twice said of the Americans, “may their fathers be cursed.” Of course, after a long career of anti-Semitic incitement, Abbas can’t be expected to have a moral awakening. Nor is there much incentive for him to fake one. But, like the protests in Gaza, Abbas’s recent diatribe is a sign that Hamas is perceived as weak and that its stock is sinking.