According to a well-known talmudic tale, the 2nd-century sage Simon bar Yohai, wanted by the Romans for seditious comments, spent thirteen years hiding in a cave with his son Elazar. The two buried themselves in sand up to their necks and spent all their time studying Torah, nourished by a spring and a carob tree. Their emergence from the cave was celebrated on Sunday on the holiday of Lag ba-Omer, but in the Talmud’s telling it was a difficult transition, and Elazar’s subsequent life was far from one of straightforward saintliness.

Kate Rozansky examines the stories surrounding this father and son, and the three unnamed women who appear therein: Simon’s mother, his wife, and his daughter-in-law.

In rabbinic texts, Simon’s reputation for spiritual excellence is almost unparalleled, but [in legal disputes], he is often sidelined in favor of his more worldly peers. As Rabbi Binyamin Lau writes, this phenomenon “reminds us that halakhah is decided by those who are most rooted in the reality of this world.” Rabbi Simon rejects “the reality of this world” which, to him, is the realm of women and other distractions from Torah. Even when he reconciles himself to the world of the mundane, he only sees human beings―Jews―as valuable because they teach him Torah.

Elazar, on the other hand, vacillates wildly between the corporeal and the transcendent, between self-aggrandizement and self-mortification. This struggle causes him great suffering. It is only when he is close to death that he seems to find a kind of balance. Rather than forsake life in the world to come for temporal life, or temporal life for eternal life, Elazar, with the help of his wife finds a way to partake―if only briefly―of both worlds at the same time.

The tradition that grows from this assertion―that is, the halakhic world that the sages built―is doubtless messier and inconstant than the one Simon would seem to prefer. And yet rather than scorn the mundane, the Talmud adores it, bringing us back again and again to places where the holy and the temporal meet and our gross, corruptible selves brush up against eternity.

Below, today’s newsletter will return to some other reflections on the one-year anniversary of the outbreak of the current war, but first something must be said of its recent progress. Israel has kept up its aerial and ground assault on Hizballah, and may have already killed the successor to Hassan Nasrallah, the longtime leader it eliminated less than two weeks ago. Matthew Levitt assesses the current state of the Lebanon-based terrorist group, which, in his view, is now “a shadow of its former self.” Indeed, he adds,

it is no exaggeration to say that the Hizballah of two weeks ago no longer exists. And since Hizballah was the backbone of Iran’s network of militant proxies, its so-called axis of resistance, Iran’s strategy of arming and deploying proxy groups throughout the region is suddenly at risk as well.

Hizballah’s attacks put increasing pressure on Israel, as intended, only that pressure did not lead Israelis to stop targeting Hamas so much as it chipped away at Israel’s fears about the cost of military action to address the military threats posed by Hizballah.

At the same time, Levitt explains, Hizballah still poses a serious threat, as it demonstrated last night when its missiles struck Haifa and Tiberias, injuring at least two people:

Hizballah still maintains an arsenal of rockets and a cadre of several thousand fighters. It will continue to pose potent military threats for Israel, Lebanon, and the wider region.

How will the group seek to avenge Nasrallah’s death amid these military setbacks? Hizballah is likely to resort to acts of international terrorism, which are overseen by one of the few elements of the group that has not yet lost key leaders.

But the true measure of whether the group will be able to reconstitute itself, even over many years, is whether Iran can restock Hizballah’s sophisticated arsenal. Tehran’s network of proxy groups—from Hizballah to Hamas to the Houthis—is only as dangerous as it is today because of Iran’s provision of weapons and money. Whatever Hizballah does next, Western governments must prioritize cutting off Tehran’s ability to arm and fund its proxies.