In 1831, a cholera epidemic swept through Europe. Elijah Guttmacher, the rabbi of a West Prussian community, wrote for guidance to his mentor, the famed Rabbi Akiva Eger. In response, Eger gave a long list of advice, from reciting the biblical and talmudic descriptions of the Temple’s incense service to “modern” medical instructions: clean your houses, wash your hands, don’t eat pickles, and avoid crowding by holding prayer services in groups of no more than fifteen. Around the same time, writes Elli Fischer, Eger issued a seminal ruling:

The pandemic produced so many mourners that the longstanding custom of rotating the recitation of kaddish, [the mourner’s prayer, so that each mourner would be able to say it individually], would have left each mourner with few opportunities to recite the prayer for his deceased parents. So, for that year, Rabbi Eger allowed multiple mourners to recite kaddish simultaneously. That one-time exception has become the norm.

In 1851, a second cholera epidemic hit, and this time Guttmacher was himself a famed rabbinic authority, who, although not ḥasidic, played a role similar to that of ḥasidic rebbes—responding to a steady stream of petitions for advice, wonderworking, and divine intercession.

In the fall of 1852, [Guttmacher] was presented with a dilemma: there were too many corpses piled up for the local Jewish burial society to perform taharah—the ritual cleansing and preparing a Jewish body for burial—and sew enough shrouds to meet the demand. Could they enlist the help of non-Jews in this endeavor? If need be, could they dispense with the rituals altogether and bury the unpurified bodies in regular clothing? Rabbi Guttmacher responded by prioritizing the various practices and outlining which could be dispensed with most easily when necessary. He ultimately concluded, however, that if there was really no choice, it was permissible to bury a body with a symbolic shroud over plain clothes, and without performing a taharah.

Evidence of Guttmacher’s unique role can be found in a pamphlet published in 1874, shortly after his death, that offers prayers and advice for confronting the disease:

The manual . . . contains several amulets, including an “expert amulet from [Rabbi Guttmacher], of blessed memory.” This amulet, the reader is told, was “an amazing protection against that disease,” that is, cholera, during the 1866 cholera pandemic [that was] “sent to every boundary of Israel, and the plague then ceased from upon Israel.”

Recent satellite imagery has shown a buildup of Egyptian tanks near the Israeli border, in violation of Egypt-Israel agreements going back to the 1970s. It’s possible Cairo wants to prevent Palestinians from entering the Sinai from Gaza, or perhaps it wants to send a message to the U.S. that it will take all measures necessary to keep that from happening. But there is also a chance, however small, that it could be preparing for something more dangerous. David Wurmser examines President Abdel Fatah el-Sisi’s predicament:

Egypt’s abysmal behavior in allowing its common border with Gaza to be used for the dangerous smuggling of weapons, money, and materiel to Hamas built the problem that exploded on October 7. Hamas could arm only to the level that Egypt enabled it. Once exposed, rather than help Israel fix the problem it enabled, Egypt manufactured tensions with Israel to divert attention from its own culpability.

Now that the Trump administration is threatening to remove the population of Gaza, President Sisi is reaping the consequences of a problem he and his predecessors helped to sow. That, writes Wurmser, leaves him with a dilemma:

On one hand, Egypt fears for its regime’s survival if it accepts Trump’s plan. It would position Cairo as a participant in a second disaster, or nakba. It knows from its own history; King Farouk was overthrown in 1952 in part for his failure to prevent the first nakba in 1948. Any leader who fails to stop a second nakba, let alone participates in it, risks losing legitimacy and being seen as weak. The perception of buckling on the Palestine issue also resulted in the Egyptian president Anwar Sadat’s assassination in 1981. President Sisi risks being seen by his own population as too weak to stand up to Israel or the United States, as not upholding his manliness.

In a worst-case scenario, Wurmser argues, Sisi might decide that he’d rather fight a disastrous war with Israel and blow up his relationship with Washington than display that kind of weakness.