The interval between the holidays of Passover and Shavuot is traditionally a period of mourning, during which the observant refrain from getting haircuts and holding weddings. While these customs took shape in the wake of the Crusades, when many massacres of Jews occurred during this time of year, rabbinic authorities cite as their source an episode described by the Talmud. According to this passage, the great sage Rabbi Akiva, who lived in the early 2nd century CE, had “12,000 pairs of disciples,” scattered throughout the Land of Israel, all of whom died of disease because “they did not accord respect to one another.” Basil Herring discusses some of the questions this story raises, and seeks to answer them:

[Most importantly], we can note the unusual description of these students. Why were they not referred to more simply as “24,000 disciples,” rather than the unusual “12,000 pairs?” And why did they all die “at one time,” i.e. over a period of a few weeks, rather than—as one might have expected—over the course of many months or even years, in staggered fashion? Furthermore, in the aftermath of their death why did Akiva, [as the talmudic passage adds], go to “the scholars in the south” to revive the study of Torah, rather than simply repopulate the existing study halls and . . . with new students?

In the light of the worldwide pandemic that we are currently experiencing I would venture to suggest . . . that these students in fact were felled at the hands of a powerful epidemic that swept through Judea. . . . [B]ecause the paired students engaged in close-contact Torah study they naturally infected one another. [The epidemic’s] spread would have been accelerated when those students gathered in larger groups to participate in classes led by their teachers in a lecture hall, [as described in many other talmudic passages].

It also makes sense that Akiva . . . sought out an area “in the south,” [much of which was then sparsely inhabited desert], that for one reason or another had not been exposed or subject to the epidemic and thus was likely to have been better protected from the disease.

[T]he sad fate of so many of Akiva’s disciples at the hands of a terrible infectious disease in a period of Jewish history that was already so filled with pain, suffering, and death [because of the Roman persecutions], and the response of their near contemporaries to use that traumatic event as an opportunity for personal self-examination, should at the very least give us added reason to engage in our own modest attempts at introspection.

Yesterday, Israel’s Channel 12 reported that Israeli representatives have been involved in secret talks, brokered by the United Arab Emirates, with their Syrian counterparts about the potential establishment of diplomatic relations between their countries. Even more surprisingly, on Wednesday an Israeli reporter spoke with a senior official from Syria’s information ministry, Ali al-Rifai. The prospect of a member of the Syrian government, or even a private citizen, giving an on-the-record interview to an Israeli journalist was simply unthinkable under the old regime. What’s more, his message was that Damascus seeks peace with other countries in the region, Israel included.

These developments alone should make Israelis sanguine about Donald Trump’s overtures to Syria’s new rulers. Yet the interim president Ahmed al-Sharaa’s jihadist resumé, his connections with Turkey and Qatar, and brutal attacks on minorities by forces aligned with, or part of, his regime remain reasons for skepticism. While recognizing these concerns, Noah Rothman nonetheless makes the case for optimism:

The old Syrian regime was an incubator and exporter of terrorism, as well as an Iranian vassal state. The Assad regime trained, funded, and introduced terrorists into Iraq intent on killing American soldiers. It hosted Iranian terrorist proxies as well as the Russian military and its mercenary cutouts. It was contemptuous of U.S.-backed proscriptions on the use of chemical weapons on the battlefield, necessitating American military intervention—an unavoidable outcome, clearly, given Barack Obama’s desperate efforts to avoid it. It incubated Islamic State as a counterweight against the Western-oriented rebel groups vying to tear that regime down, going so far as to purchase its own oil from the nascent Islamist group.

The Assad regime was an enemy of the United States. The Sharaa regime could yet be a friend to America. . . . Insofar as geopolitics is a zero-sum game, taking Syria off the board for Russia and Iran and adding it to the collection of Western assets would be a triumph. At the very least, it’s worth a shot. Trump deserves credit for taking it.