Log on to social media or turn on a cable news network, and one can easily find Americans—of many political persuasions—speaking of their partisan rivals as not only wrongheaded, but even as evil. Leon Morris and Zvi Hirschfield find in the Talmud a model for a more constructive approach:

In the Bible, the worst thing a person can be is an idolater. . . . The Bible also sees idolatry as an assault on truth, the foundation upon which a good society is built. In its day, idolatry was the sin of monumental proportions that was always threatening the vitality of the Israelite community. . . . The Bible’s punishment for the sin of idolatry is utter destruction.

The rabbis of the 2nd century CE changed this conversation in a clear way. Their approach was decidedly different from the literal approach of the Bible they studied. Many of them lived in mixed cities alongside populations that worshiped idols. They understood that they would not have the power to conquer Rome. The talmudic tractate of Avodah Zarah, [literally, “foreign worship”], is replete with attempts to draw boundaries that enable faithful Jews to avoid inadvertently supporting the idolatrous practices they disagreed with, while simultaneously embracing a shared public square.

America, it seems, is rediscovering the Bible’s approach to idolatry—but it is the rabbinic approach that is most desperately needed in our time. We simply cannot afford to see our diverse society with its very significant political and ideological differences in biblical terms. The rabbinic tradition helps us to understand that we cannot remove or wipe out difference. We do have to draw lines, of course, as they did. Yet, we need to learn to live with difference.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].