Usually, this daily email seeks to bring you a variety of articles on events in the Middle East, Diaspora communities, religion, literature, and history. In the past week, it has for obvious reasons focused on the paramount issue facing the Jewish people. But it is important not to lose sight of those other aspects of Jewish spiritual life and intellectual heritage—all the more so, I would argue, as we work to defend ourselves.

I thus commend to you this essay by Yitz Landes, in which he reviews a recent academic translation of the Mishnah—the 2nd- or 3rd-century text that forms the core of the Talmud—and places it in the context of prior translations, going back to those made by Christian Hebraists in the late 17th century with help from some Jewish scholars. In religious circles, this dense legal primer, on which the entire postbiblical Jewish tradition arguably rests, is seen as an easier-to-study, if less prestigious, alternative to the Talmud. But for outsiders, as well as for academic scholars, it is, as Landes puts it, “something of a mystery.”

It famously begins, without explanation or preamble, with a question: “From what time of day may the evening sh’ma be recited?” Once this question is raised, the conversation continues for some 180,000 words, covering nearly every facet of Jewish life—from daily prayer to Sabbath observance to how to deal with damages, defilement, divorce, defiant sons, sacrifices, purification rituals, court procedures, and more. By the time the Mishnah was codified, more than a century after the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple in 70 CE, many of the topics discussed were no longer exactly practical knowledge. Other sections presuppose institutions of Jewish self-rule that may never have really existed. And no matter the issue, there is almost always a multiplicity of opinions—one rabbi says do x, while another says do y, without the Mishnah clearly stating which view should be adopted.

Repeatedly, Landes returns to the theme of the Mishnah’s “poetry”—an odd term to use when describing a famously terse legal code, but undoubtedly an apt one.

This week, there have been numerous unconfirmed reports about the fate of Esmail Qaani, who is the head of the Quds Force, the expeditionary arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards. Benny Avni writes:

On Thursday, Sky News Arabic reported that Mr. Qaani was rushed to a hospital after suffering a heart attack. He became [the Quds Force] commander in 2020, after an American drone strike killed his predecessor, Qassem Suleimani. The unit oversees the Islamic Republic’s various Mideast proxies, as well as the exporting of the Iranian revolution to the region and beyond.

The Sky News report attempts to put to rest earlier claims that Mr. Qaani was killed at Beirut. It follows several reports asserting he has been arrested and interrogated at Tehran over suspicion that he, or a top lieutenant, leaked information to Israel. Five days ago, the Arabic-language al-Arabiya network reported that Mr. Qaani “is under surveillance and isolation, following the Israeli assassinations of prominent Iranian leaders.”

Iranians are desperately scrambling to plug possible leaks that gave Israel precise intelligence to conduct pinpoint strikes against Hizballah commanders. . . . “I find it hard to believe that Qaani was compromised,” an Iran watcher at Tel Aviv University’s Institute for National Security Studies, Beni Sabti, tells the Sun. Perhaps one or more of [Qaani’s] top aides have been recruited by Israel, he says, adding that “psychological warfare” could well be stoking the rumor mill.

If so, prominent Iranians seem to be exacerbating the internal turmoil by alleging that the country’s security apparatus has been infiltrated.