In haredi circles, watching sports is an activity that is generally frowned upon—above all, it is a distraction from the sacred pursuit of Torah study. Yet it is also at least tacitly considered less pernicious than many other forms of worldly entertainment. Enough Haredim now watch the Super Bowl that an Orthodox organization based in New York City, called Chazaq, offers a “Halftime for Torah” consisting of online lectures by popular rabbis and lay speakers. The idea is to get devout Super Bowl-watchers away from the immodest displays of the halftime show, and to make sure they intersperse their football with some Torah study. Ben Rubin describes the idea:

Rabbi Elya Brudny, a scholar at the Mir yeshiva in Brooklyn and a member of Agudath Israel’s Council of Torah Sages, . . . said that allowing children to watch the Super Bowl is not ideal, especially the halftime show. [But] Brudny acknowledged that among some haredi families, concessions must be made to reality. In some cases, if children aren’t allowed to watch the Super Bowl at home, they’ll watch it at friends’ homes instead. For those people, Brudny said, he had a better solution.

“Bring an outside device, just for tonight,” he said, referring to those who don’t otherwise have television sets at home. “And watch the football as a family.”

The “Halftime for Torah” event has been taking place at least since 2019. Last year, [a representative of Chazaq] said, there were 3,000 separate devices tuned into the program. He estimated that those connections represented around 10,000 people, as viewers tend to watch in group settings.

Robert Clark explains why the resumption of hostilities is both just and necessary:

These latest Israeli strikes come after weeks of consistent Palestinian provocation; they have repeatedly broken the terms of the cease-fire which they claimed they were so desperate for. There have been numerous [unsuccessful] bus bombings near Tel Aviv and Palestinian-instigated clashes in the West Bank. Fifty-nine Israeli hostages are still held in captivity.

In fact, Hamas and their Palestinian supporters . . . have always known that they can sit back, parade dead Israeli hostages live on social media, and receive hundreds of their own convicted terrorists and murderers back in return. They believed they could get away with the October 7 pogrom.

One hopes Hamas’s leaders will get the message. Meanwhile, many inside and outside Israel seem to believe that, by resuming the fighting, Jerusalem has given up on rescuing the remaining hostages. But, writes Ron Ben-Yishai, this assertion misunderstands the goals of the present campaign. “Experience within the IDF and Israeli intelligence,” Ben-Yishai writes, “has shown that such pressure is the most effective way to push Hamas toward flexibility.” He outlines two other aims:

The second objective was to signal to Hamas that Israel is not only targeting its military wing—the terror army that was the focus of previous phases of the war up until the last cease-fire—but also its governance structure. This was demonstrated by the targeted elimination of five senior officials from Hamas’s political and civilian administration. . . . The strikes also served as a message to mediators, particularly Egypt, that Israel opposes Hamas remaining in any governing or military capacity in post-war Gaza.

The third objective was to create intense military pressure, coordinated with the U.S., on all remaining elements of the Shiite “axis of resistance,” including Yemen’s Houthis, Hamas, and Iran.