In his book Judaism in a Digital Age, Danny Schiff challenges the conventional wisdom that Reform and Conservative Judaism face steeply declining membership because their leaders have been either too strict or too lenient, offering an alternative explanation. Rabbi David Wolpe elaborates in his review:

[The liberal denominations] were created in the 19th century to answer a question Jews no longer need to ask: how do we become modern? Or to take [a] 20th-century version of the question: how do we become American? . . . [B]y the late 20th century, liberal Jews took America for granted (my immigrant congregants notwithstanding). The primary default identity was no longer Jewish; it was American—and thoroughly modern.

Schiff, an ordained Reform rabbi, believes that Judaism must now respond to an entirely different set of questions, arising from the Internet, artificial intelligence, and other new technologies. Wolpe writes:

Schiff’s answer is surely right in its broad outlines. He knows that the core elements of Jewish life—“engaging with God, Torah, Israel, Jewish law, and Jewish time, as translated into patterns of living structured by mitzvah, halakhah, and mores”—must endure for there to be authentic Judaism. But the future can be energized, he suggests, not simply by reiterating the centrality of old forms of Jewish practice but by applying Jewish ideas to emerging ethical concerns.

Judaism, he argues, must find ways to rearticulate and apply the values that emerge from its profound theological humanism in a future in which those values will be endangered. . . . He doesn’t, [however], tell us much about what Jewish texts and ideas should be drawn upon in answering these questions or why the postmodern world will require specifically Jewish answers.

Jewish traditions may indeed have important things to say in the transhumanist future, but first we non-Orthodox Jews have to get there—as Jews. And doing so may require worrying less about, say, the nanotechnology of even the near future and more about the conscious practice of mitzvot and study of Torah in the present.

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.