Examining the philosophical works of the great 20th-century sage Joseph B. Soloveitchik, the Catholic thinker Matthew Rose argues that Christians have much to learn from them, especially about how to confront the challenges of modernity. Rose also notes that Soloveitchik’s best-known book, The Lonely Man of Faith—which begins with the distinction between the Adam of Genesis 1 whose task is to “fill the earth and subdue it” and the Adam of Genesis 2 whose task is to “serve and safeguard”—began as a lecture to Catholic seminarians.

Soloveitchik did not accuse modernity of dividing what had once been integrated. He charged it with doing precisely the opposite. He argued, in effect, that modernity’s most powerful ideologies and institutions are trying to unify human nature—not by harmonizing its two discordant aspects, but by abolishing one of them.

In his 1965 lectures at St. John’s Seminary, Soloveitchik spoke out of Jewish loneliness in a Gentile world—a loneliness, he implied, that faithful Christians would soon experience amid the onrushing secular revolution. His reading of Genesis offered subtle advice: relinquish any dreams of building a Christian order that would restore the imagined harmonies of premodern life. Our divided natures, he insisted, and not only our disordered loves, make such a society an illusion. But unlike many Christian thinkers in that disruptive decade, Soloveitchik was no less worried about the demons of secularism, and he warned both Jews and Christians against internalizing the stunted perspective of Adam the First. For the ambition to overcome Adam the Second, and to replace the hope for redemption with the ideal of liberation, masked its own darkness.

As we mentioned in yesterday’s newsletter, Israeli special forces carried out a daring boots-on-the-ground raid on September 8 targeting the Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC) in northwestern Syria. The site was used for producing and storing missiles which are then transferred to Hizballah in Lebanon. Jonathan Spyer notes that the raid was accompanied by extensive airstrikes in Syira,and followed a few days later by extensive attacks on Hizballah in Lebanon, one of which killed Mohammad Qassem al-Shaer, a senior officer in the terrorist group’s Radwan force, an elite infantry group. And yesterday, the IDF destroyed a weapons depot, an observation post, and other Hizballah positions. Spyer puts these attacks in context:

The direct purpose of the raid, of course, was the destruction of the facilities and materials targeted. But Israel also appeared to be delivering a message to the Syrian regime that it should not imagine itself to be immune should it choose to continue its involvement with the Iran-led axis’s current campaign against Israel.

Similarly, the killing of al-Shaer indicated that Israel is no longer limiting its response to Hizballah attacks to the border area. Rather, Hizballah operatives in Israel’s crosshairs are now considered fair game wherever they may be located in Lebanon.

The SSRC raid and the killing of al-Shaer are unlikely to have been one-off events. Rather, they represent the systematic broadening of the parameters of the conflict in the north. Hizballah commenced the current round of fighting on October 8, in support of Hamas in Gaza. It has vowed to stop firing only when a ceasefire is reached in the south—a prospect which currently seems distant.