In his epic poem Paradise Lost, the 17th-century English poet and philosopher John Milton sought to retell the opening chapters of Genesis in the style of Homer and Vergil—needless to say, through a decidedly Calvinist lens. Dov Lerner, an Orthodox rabbi, explains what makes this poem so powerful:

All of his poetic predecessors, from classical Greece to Spenserian Britain, use words to paint pictures that celebrate war. But for Milton, war is simply unworthy. Despite his strenuous defense of regicide and his vindication of a parliamentary rebellion, he sees war as occasionally necessary, but rarely the province of nobility. Myths of monumental conflicts and tales of fights and feasts and steeds and knights are, in Milton’s words, “Not that which justly gives Heroic name to Person or to Poem.”

For Milton, true virtue is found not in the defeat of others but in the mastery of the self, not in armed conflict but in contesting temptation, in what he calls “the better fortitude of Patience.” And this alone is the proper subject of epic poetry. In book after book of Paradise Lost, . . . Milton dismantles the celebration of mortal combat so paradigmatic of Homer and Virgil—depicting belligerence as the blemish of the weak, and resilience as the sign of the strong.

Milton is the first, and in some ways the greatest, to turn the genre on its head, in ways that make his work not just brilliant, . . . but deeply biblical—and not simply as a consequence of its cast. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues, . . . Judaism’s most important moral contribution to the West is “not the clash of titans on the field of battle, but the quiet inner drama of choice and will, restraint and responsibility.” And it is precisely this contribution that Milton absorbs, along with his Puritan peers, and sets at the epicenter of his poem.

If there is to be peace, Palestinians will have to unlearn the hatred of Israel they have imbibed during nearly two decades of Hamas rule. This will be a difficult task, but Cole Aronson argues, drawing on the experiences of World War II, that Israel has already gotten off to a strong start:

The population’s compliance can . . . be won by a new regime that satisfies its immediate material needs, even if that new regime is sponsored by a government until recently at war with the population’s former regime. Axis civilians were made needy through bombing. Peaceful compliance with the Allies became a good alternative to supporting violent resistance to the Allies.

Israel’s current campaign makes a moderate Gaza more likely, not less. Destroying Hamas not only deprives Islamists of the ability to rule—it proves the futility of armed resistance to Israel, a condition for peace. The destruction of buildings not only deprives Hamas of its hideouts. It also gives ordinary Palestinians strong reasons to shun groups planning to replicate Hamas’s behavior.