The 20th-century rabbi Yehuda Leib HaLevi Ashlag—also known as the Baal HaSulam after his commentary on the Zohar known as “The Sulam,” or “The Ladder”—played a major role in the surprisingly widespread popularity of Kabbalah. This was no accident, writes Yehuda Fogel.

Unlike many Kabbalists before him, he believed in the import of sharing and popularizing the esoteric, paving the way for the movements that followed from his influence.

Ashlag lived a curious life, Fogel continues:

He’s said to have studied Hegel and Nietzsche in German, and to have studied with an anonymous teacher for several months. Students of his students went on to found the much-maligned Kabbalah Center, which has since garnered headlines about the financial improprieties of its directors, as well as its celebrity adherents. David Ben-Gurion mentions meeting Ashlag multiple times, and that “while I wanted to talk to him about Kabbalah, he wanted to talk to me about socialism and communism.”

For the past 36 hours, I’ve been reading and listening to analyses of the terms and implications of the recent hostage deal. More will appear in the coming days, and I’ll try to put the best of them in this newsletter. But today I want to share a comment made on Tuesday by the Palestinian analyst Ahmed Fouad Alkhatib. While he and I would probably disagree on numerous points about the current conflict, this analysis is spot on, and goes entirely against most arguments made by those who consider themselves pro-Palestinian, and certainly those chanting for a cease-fire at all costs:

When a cease-fire in Gaza is announced, Hamas’s fascists will do everything they can to frame this as the ultimate victory; they will wear their military uniforms, emerge from their tunnels, stop hiding in schools and displacement centers, and very quickly reassert their control over the coastal enclave. They’ll even get a few Gazans to celebrate and dance for them.

This, I should note, is exactly what has happened. Alkhatib continues:

The reality is that the Islamist terrorism of Hamas, masquerading as “resistance,” has achieved nothing for the Palestinian people except for billions of dollars in wasted resources and tens of thousands of needless deaths, with Gaza in ruins after twenty years following the withdrawal of settlements in 2005. . . . Hamas’s propaganda machine, run by Qatari state media, Al Jazeera Arabic, will work overtime to help the terror group turn a catastrophic disaster into a victory akin to the battles of Stalingrad and Leningrad.

Hamas will also start punishing anyone who criticized or worked against it, and preparing for its next attack. Perhaps Palestinians would have been better off if, instead of granting them a temporary reprieve, the IDF kept fighting until Hamas was utterly defeated.