Although born to Jewish parents, Brian Keating was raised a Catholic, and remembers being draw to the religion as child. Later in life, Keating—a professor of cosmology and the author of several books—rediscovered Judaism and became observant. He discusses the relationship between his academic work and his religious beliefs with Adam Jacobs:

I don’t look to the Torah for science. It’s crystal clear to me that Torah is not a science book. . . . And that’s why I think every scientist needs it, because doing science is the practice of people, and people need wisdom. To practice science (which means “knowledge” in Latin) divorced from wisdom is the ultimate form of pointlessness, as if a surplus of knowledge is tantamount to moral wisdom.

I think science struggles with a meaning crisis, and that what we do is important, but if it’s just used for technology or acquisition of knowledge for its own [sake], then there’s a pointlessness to it. I think to be a complete human being, you need to have both the knowledge that science uniquely can provide, and that the Torah cannot, about the natural world. [But] it’s functionally useless to acquire knowledge without any associated wisdom coming from it or leading to it.

To Keating, that sort of moral wisdom can come only from religion.

Israel will likely respond directly against Iran after yesterday’s attack, and has made known that it will calibrate its retaliation based not on the extent of the damage, but on the scale of the attack. The specifics are anyone’s guess, but Edward Luttwak has a suggestion, put forth in an article published just hours before the missile barrage: cut off Tehran’s ability to send money and arms to Shiite Arab militias.

In practice, most of this cash comes from a single source: oil. . . . In other words, the flow of dollars that sustains Israel’s enemies, and which has caused so much trouble to Western interests from the Syrian desert to the Red Sea, emanates almost entirely from the oil loaded onto tankers at the export terminal on Khark Island, a speck of land about 25 kilometers off Iran’s southern coast. Benjamin Netanyahu warned in his recent speech to the UN General Assembly that Israel’s “long arm” can reach them too. Indeed, Khark’s location in the Persian Gulf is relatively close. At 1,516 kilometers from Israel’s main airbase, it’s far closer than the Houthis’ main oil import terminal at Hodeida in Yemen—a place that was destroyed by Israeli jets in July, and attacked again [on Sunday].