In his 1930 book Spinoza’s Critique of Religion, the great scholar of political thought Leo Strauss argues that the choice between religion and reason “is ultimately not theoretical but moral.” His aim, writes Jonathan Yudelman, “is to persuade rationalists to take religion seriously.” But at the same time, Strauss’s formulation challenges religious belief, and specifically Orthodox Judaism, the faith of his and Spinoza’s youths. A number of Jewish thinkers take up this challenge in a recent collection of essays titled Strauss, Spinoza, and Sinai: Orthodox Judaism and Modern Questions of Faith. Reviewing this exercise in “the lost literary genre of religious apologia,” Yudelson writes:

A single unspoken point of agreement emerges amid the dizzying plurality of views: today it is postmodernism—rather than science or rationalism—that constitutes the greatest obstacle to faith.

The problem for faith, in other words, is a general skepticism regarding truth. In the postmodern world, orthodox religion suffers less from being thought demonstrably false than from claiming the authority of truth at all. This absence of consensus about truth is evident in the variety of perspectives contained in the volume itself. In confronting faith’s postmodern problem, the contributors demonstrate that it is more or less every believer for himself. And this is hardly a surprise. After all, if religion had a potent stock of ready defenses against postmodernity, we would all know of it.

Any theoretical defense of a religion is necessarily particular to that religion. And even so, the very diversity and variety of the theoretical defenses of Judaism in this volume may well deepen even a committed Jewish reader’s perplexity. This does not mean that people of faith have no common interest or common work. Postmodernism is a challenge to all religion.

Since Orthodox Judaism places less emphasis than Christianity on authoritative articles of faith, and because it regulates the whole of life, it has emerged slightly less damaged from the onslaught of postmodernism. Gil Student and Shmuel Phillips, [two of the volume’s contributors] are right to insist that religions are much less theories than living traditions. What is seldom properly understood is that postmodernism is likewise not primarily a theory, but rather the living practice of counter-tradition.

Surveying news websites and social media on Sunday morning, I immediately found some intelligent and well-informed observers arguing that Iran deliberately warned the U.S. of its pending assault on Israel, and calibrated it so that there would be few casualties and minimal destructiveness, thus hoping to avoid major retaliation. In other words, this massive barrage was a face-saving gesture by the ayatollahs. Others disagreed. Brian Carter and Frederick W. Kagan put the issue to rest:

The Iranian April 13 missile-drone attack on Israel was very likely intended to cause significant damage below the threshold that would trigger a massive Israeli response. The attack was designed to succeed, not to fail. The strike package was modeled on those the Russians have used repeatedly against Ukraine to great effect. The attack caused more limited damage than intended likely because the Iranians underestimated the tremendous advantages Israel has in defending against such strikes compared with Ukraine.

But that isn’t to say that Tehran achieved nothing:

The lessons that Iran will draw from this attack will allow it to build more successful strike packages in the future. The attack probably helped Iran identify the relative strengths and weaknesses of the Israeli air-defense system. Iran will likely also share the lessons it learned in this attack with Russia.

Iran’s ability to penetrate Israeli air defenses with even a small number of large ballistic missiles presents serious security concerns for Israel. The only Iranian missiles that got through hit an Israeli military base, limiting the damage, but a future strike in which several ballistic missiles penetrate Israeli air defenses and hit Tel Aviv or Haifa could cause significant civilian casualties and damage to civilian infrastructure, including ports and energy. . . . Israel and its partners should not emerge from this successful defense with any sense of complacency.