In the mid-9th century, Natronai Ben Hilai Gaon—one of the leading rabbis of Babylonia—answered a query about the origins of the custom of not holding weddings or betrothals in the seven weeks between Passover and the holiday of Shavuot. Natronai explained that this period—known as s’firat ha-omer because of the ritual of counting (s’firah) of the nights between the holidays—is a period of mourning for the students of Rabbi Akiva, who died in a plague during this time of year. Leead Staller explores the development of this custom over the centuries, and discusses an alternate theory of its origins:

According to Moses Naḥmanides (1194–1270), . . . s’firah was originally considered a joyous period for the Jewish people. [In ancient Israel], the grain harvest was bookended by the holidays of Passover and Shavuot. Based on this, Naḥmanides suggests that this entire season was one of celebration of the harvest, beginning with Passover and ending with Shavuot, with the days of s’firah in between being like ḥol ha-mo’ed [the intermediate days of the Passover and Sukkot festivals, during which activities prohibited on the first and last days are permitted] for the extended harvest holiday.

[T]he earliest and most consistent practice of s’firah is that of refraining from hosting weddings during this period. In fact, a restriction against weddings is also characteristic of the celebration of ḥol ha-mo’ed.

The custom was [originally] a natural outgrowth of the joy felt around the harvest season and the associated Temple rituals. But as the Jewish people were exiled, and they lost both their farmland and their Temple, the natural feeling of excitement for the harvest stopped being relevant, and the original cause for celebration was lost. By the time of [Natronai], people were left wondering why we even had these practices in the first place.

Thus . . . without the Temple, the practice of observing s’firat ha-omer as a minor holiday—a ḥol ha-mo’ed for the joy the Jewish people felt during the harvest—was flipped into a custom of mourning for a period of loss.

As this newsletter noted last week, Gaza is not suffering from famine, and the efforts to suggest that it is—which have been going on since at least the beginning of last year—are based on deliberate manipulation of the data. Nor, as Shany Mor explains, does international law require Israel to feed its enemies:

Article 23 of the Fourth Geneva Convention does oblige High Contracting Parties to allow for the free passage of medical and religious supplies along with “essential foodstuff, clothing, and tonics intended for children under fifteen” for the civilians of another High Contracting Party, as long as there is no serious reason for fearing that “the consignments may be diverted from their destination,” or “that a definite advantage may accrue to the military efforts or economy of the enemy” by the provision.

The Hamas regime in Gaza is, of course, not a High Contracting Party, and, more importantly, Israel has reason to fear both that aid provisions are diverted by Hamas and that a direct advantage is accrued to it by such diversions. Not only does Hamas take provisions for its own forces, but its authorities sell provisions donated by foreign bodies and use the money to finance its war. It’s notable that the first reports of Hamas’s financial difficulties emerged only in the past few weeks, once provisions were blocked.

Yet, since the war began, even European states considered friendly to Israel have repeatedly demanded that Israel “allow unhindered passage of humanitarian aid” and refrain from seizing territory or imposing “demographic change”—which means, in practice, that Gazan civilians can’t seek refuge abroad. These principles don’t merely constitute a separate system of international law that applies only to Israel, but prolong the suffering of the people they are ostensibly meant to protect:

By insisting that Hamas can’t lose any territory in the war it launched, the international community has invented a norm that never before existed and removed one of the few levers Israel has to pressure it to end the war and release the hostages.

These commitments have . . . made the plight of the hostages much worse and much longer. They made the war much longer than necessary and much deadlier for both sides. And they locked a large civilian population in a war zone where the de-facto governing authority was not only indifferent to civilian losses on its own side, but actually had much to gain by it.