During the recent festival of Rosh Hashanah, Jews dipped bread and apples in honey to usher in a sweet year; some continue to eat bread with honey until the end of the fall cycle of holidays. A London Jew named David Roth has, since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, been cultivating the substance himself, and has come to see his hobby in religious terms. Honey and its production also have a unique place in Jewish law. For instance, it  is the only kosher food derived from a non-kosher animal. Cnaan Lidor writes:

“I’m a religious person; I don’t believe that the world was created by accident. And when you see the wonders of how bees work and operate, it makes you feel good about God,” [said] Roth, who uses the beeswax candles for Havdalah, the prayer ritual performed at the end of Shabbat.

As a religion with deep agricultural roots, Judaism has a well-documented approach to apiculture, encompassing both the keeper’s responsibility toward their bees and detailing the legal complications that can occur when a swarm leaves its hive. Beekeeping is one of the few situations when children can serve as witnesses according to halakhah: . . . if a child testifies that a swarm originated in an owner’s beehive, then the swarm can be returned to the owner based on his testimony.

Another rare exception, which attests to the significance that beekeeping had before humans learned to mass-produce sugar: bee owners may trespass—a big deal in Judaism—to retrieve escaped or errant bee swarms. They may even cut down branches of other people’s trees—another big deal—but are obliged to compensate the land’s owner for any damage they cause.

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”