“Dwell in booths [Hebrew, sukkot] seven days; all that are Israelites born shall dwell in booths.” The Talmud understands this commandment as requiring that one eat and conduct everyday activities in this hut-like structure. Gil Student explores a modern-day implication of this requirement:

A sukkah needs to be usable. Rabbi Moses Isserles (16th-century Poland) writes that a sukkah in which you cannot do certain basic things is an invalid sukkah. . . . According to Isserles, [then], does a sukkah today need WiFi?

I ask this because many people cannot take vacation from work for all of Sukkot. They have to work on some or all of ḥol ha-mo’ed [the last six days of the holiday, during which work and other activities are permitted]. However, particularly since the changes to work habits caused by COVID-19, many people will work from home during Sukkot. Do they need to work in their sukkah? If they do, they probably need WiFi in their sukkah so they can work. If so, a lack of WiFi might raise questions about the validity of the sukkah of someone who needs to work.

Therefore, it would seem that if you have to work from home, you should set up a workstation in your sukkah. If that requires WiFi, then you should make sure your WiFi extends to your sukkah and use it only for things that are permissible in a sukkah. It might even be true that according to Isserles, your sukkah is invalid if you cannot work inside it. . . . However, according to the Mishnah Berurah, [a highly regarded early-20th-century halakhic compendium], even though you should be able to work from your sukkah, if you for whatever reason you cannot, your sukkah is still kosher.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.