Reflecting on the death of his own father, Atar Hadari considers three of the texts traditionally recited at Jewish funerals: the liturgical poem known as the “Justification of the Sentence over the Dead,” and Psalms 49 and 16. He includes as well his original translations of these prayers. On the first of these, he writes:

[This prayer] is quite simply a recitation of praises for the Lord and repeated declaration of how He could not possibly have gotten things wrong by taking your loved one away at just this juncture. The Talmud relates this prayer to Ḥaninah ben Tradion, a rabbi martyred by the Romans for teaching Jewish law in public in the 2nd century CE. All the stories [about Ḥaninah] revolve around the essential commandment of acknowledging that what is done to you is just, and the text includes the requisite statement you make upon hearing of a death: “Blessed be the true judge.”

This vision of the afterlife struggles with God’s implacable wrath and the arbitrariness of death, but affirms over and over that he is just, and closes with a comforting suggestion of the departed being seen to their own little bed in a hospital ward of sorts, finally home.

The Psalms express some greater difficulty with this whole state of affairs.

Representative of this attitude is Psalm 49, a meditation on death itself that includes such troubling verses as “Like sheep to the underworld they amble—death will herd them/ And honest angels will beat them each morning, their form in the wastes of hell will fester.”

This is one of the hardest psalms in the entire book to understand, including some lines that no Jewish commentators gloss with any confidence, such as the beating from honest angels. It is of interest here as a prayer Jews recite that is not addressed to Jews but to all who live on the earth, its metaphysical struggles applying to anyone who worships or even does not worship—as much as anything it is a prayer addressed to those who worship mammon and wonder at the injustice of the wicked rich around them. Or as Rabbi David Kimḥi, the medieval Hebrew grammarian and author of the first complete commentary on Psalms, wrote, “This song is about the business of this world and the world to come, therefore it [begins by apostrophizing] ‘all the nations and all who dwell in the world,’ all who want the good way, from whatever nation they may be.”

On the same day the cease-fire went into effect along the Israel-Lebanon border, rebel forces launched an unexpected offensive, and within a few days captured much of Aleppo. This lightening advance originated in the northwestern part of the country, which has been relatively quiet over the past four years, since Bashar al-Assad effectively gave up on restoring control over the remaining rebel enclaves in the area. The fighting comes at an inopportune moment for the powers that Damascus has called on for help in the past: Russia is bogged down in Ukraine and Hizballah has been shattered.

But the situation is extremely complex. David Wurmser points to the dangers that lie ahead:

The desolation wrought on Hizballah by Israel, and the humiliation inflicted on Iran, has not only left the Iranian axis exposed to Israeli power and further withering. It has altered the strategic tectonics of the Middle East. The story is not just Iran anymore. The region is showing the first signs of tremendous geopolitical change. And the plates are beginning to move.

The removal of the religious-totalitarian tyranny of the Iranian regime remains the greatest strategic imperative in the region for the United States and its allies, foremost among whom stands Israel. . . . However, as Iran’s regime descends into the graveyard of history, it is important not to neglect the emergence of other, new threats. navigating the new reality taking shape.

The retreat of the Syrian Assad regime from Aleppo in the face of Turkish-backed, partly Islamist rebels made from remnants of Islamic State is an early skirmish in this new strategic reality. Aleppo is falling to the Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, or HTS—a descendant of Nusra Front led by Abu Mohammed al-Julani, himself a graduate of al-Qaeda’s system and cobbled together of IS elements. Behind this force is the power of nearby Turkey.