To observe the biblical prohibition against having ḥamets—foods and beverages made from leavened or fermented grain—in one’s possession during Passover, Orthodox Jews customarily sell such products to a Gentile before the holiday begins. Rabbi Mordechai Willig, a highly regarded scholar, first sold ḥamets on behalf of his congregation in the Bronx to a real-estate agent named John J. Brown in 1977, and since then many of his students followed suit with their own congregations. Brown, a Bronx native and Korean War veteran, died on February 6 at the age of eighty-eight. Ben Sales writes:

Every year from 1977 to 2019, [Brown] bought ḥamets from the congregants of dozens of synagogues in and around New York City, completing the sales via the synagogues’ rabbis.

“It meant an awful lot to him,” said Paul Jacobs, Brown’s son-in-law. . . . “There was an extremely high level of mutual respect. It was a business transaction and John treated it as a business transaction, so that was part of it. John had this commitment to real estate and contracts and all that.” But Jacobs said that to Brown, it was more than just another business deal. Brown, Jacobs said, had a lot of intellectual curiosity and would pepper his speech with Latin phrases as well as Yiddishisms he picked up in New York.

Brown would then signify that he completed the transaction under Jewish law in a few other ways—by picking up and placing a pen down on the table, signing a document, and shaking the rabbi’s hand. He repeated the same process with each rabbi. Eventually he became so experienced in the particulars of the Jewish practice that he began to teach newer rabbis how it was done.

Analyzing the recent direct Iranian attack on Israel, and Israel’s security situation more generally, Michael Oren looks to the 2015 agreement to restrain Iran’s nuclear program. That, and President Biden’s efforts to resurrect the deal after Donald Trump left it, are in his view the source of the current crisis:

Of the original motivations for the deal—blocking Iran’s path to the bomb and transforming Iran into a peaceful nation—neither remained. All Biden was left with was the ability to kick the can down the road and to uphold Barack Obama’s singular foreign-policy achievement.

In order to achieve that result, the administration has repeatedly refused to punish Iran for its malign actions:

Historians will survey this inexplicable record and wonder how the United States not only allowed Iran repeatedly to assault its citizens, soldiers, and allies but consistently rewarded it for doing so. They may well conclude that in a desperate effort to avoid getting dragged into a regional Middle Eastern war, the U.S. might well have precipitated one.

While America’s friends in the Middle East, especially Israel, have every reason to feel grateful for the vital assistance they received in intercepting Iran’s missile and drone onslaught, they might also ask what the U.S. can now do differently to deter Iran from further aggression. . . . Tehran will see this weekend’s direct attack on Israel as a victory—their own—for their ability to continue threatening Israel and destabilizing the Middle East with impunity.

Israel, of course, must respond differently. Our target cannot simply be the Iranian proxies that surround our country and that have waged war on us since October 7, but, as the Saudis call it, “the head of the snake.”