It would seem difficult to believe that the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche—who assailed Judeo-Christian morality, urged that following the “death of God” it would be necessary to will new values into being, and occasionally dabbled in anti-Semitism—would have much in common with Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the great religious thinker of American Orthodoxy. Yet Soloveitchik received the bulk of his secular education studying philosophy in Weimar Germany, where the influence of Nietzsche’s writings could still be felt. And as much as Nietzsche has been credited as an intellectual harbinger of fascism, he preferred the Old Testament to the New, and was even more contemptuous of anti-Semites than he was of Jews. Alex Ozar, reviewing a new book by Daniel Rynhold and Michael Harris on the two thinkers, writes:

Soloveitchik, writing in the 1940s, includes Nietzsche in a list of those philosophers whose “veneration of instinct, the desire for power, the glorification of the emotional-affective life and the flowing, surging stream of subjectivity,” among other things, have “brought complete chaos and human depravity to the world. And let the events of the present era be proof!” The stakes of the conflict are thus urgent in tenor and civilizational in scope. “Rome against Judea, Judea against Rome,” as Nietzsche puts it.

And yet, Rynhold and Harris show in their masterfully executed work, it is a fact that Soloveitchik’s writing evinces real affinities with Nietzsche’s, affinities too pervasive and substantial to be merely incidental. It is clear, in fact, that Soloveitchik not only looks past Nietzsche’s blistering critique of religion but largely embraces that critique, arguing only that halakhic Judaism, suitably interpreted, can and ought to escape it. Nietzsche diagnoses religion as a pathological retreat from the world, writing that “It was the sick and decaying who despised body and earth and invented the heavenly realm,” and that the very concept of God is a “counter-concept to life.”

And with respect to most religious forms, Soloveitchik seconds the charge: “Christians,” for instance, “developed a theory of contempt for this world,” Soloveitchik says. “Indeed some went and developed the doctrine of hatred for this world.” Indeed, the vicious rejection of worldly reality is intrinsic to religion considered in its generic form: “The ethical and religious ideal of homo religiosus is the extrication of his existence from the bonds of this world.” For Soloveitchik, however, just the opposite is true of Judaism.

Examining the effects of Iran’s decision to launch nearly 200 ballistic missiles at Israel on October 1, Benny Morris takes stock of the Jewish state’s strategic situation:

The massive Iranian attack has turned what began as a local war in and around the Gaza Strip and then expanded into a Hamas–Hizballah–Houthi–Israeli war [into] a regional war with wide and possibly calamitous international repercussions.

Before the Iranians launched their attack, Washington warned Tehran to desist (“don’t,” in President Biden’s phrase), and Israel itself had reportedly cautioned the Iranians secretly that such an attack would trigger a devastating Israeli counterstrike. But a much-humiliated Iran went ahead, nonetheless.

For Israel, the way forward seems to lie in an expansion of the war—in the north or south or both—until the country attains some sort of victory, or a diplomatic settlement is reached. A “victory” would mean forcing Hizballah to cease fire in exchange, say, for a cessation of the IDF bombing campaign and withdrawal to the international border, or forcing Iran, after suffering real pain from IDF attacks, to cease its attacks and rein in its proxies: Hizballah, Hamas, and the Houthis.

At the same time, writes Morris, a victory along such lines would still have its limits:

An IDF withdrawal from southern Lebanon and a cessation of Israeli air-force bombing would result in Hizballah’s resurgence and its re-investment of southern Lebanon down to the border. Neither the Americans nor the French nor the UN nor the Lebanese army—many of whose troops are Shiites who support Hizballah—would fight them.