“Many years back, one of us, Steve, consulted on a study examining spiritual leaders’ well-being,” write two psychologists, Laura Captari and Steven Sandage, in a worrying report on the state of American clergy. “I was convinced there had been some sort of error when nearly one-third of the sample scored above the clinical cutoff for symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.”

Since then, they continue, “our research team at the Danielsen Institute has replicated this finding in a sample of Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders. Once again, we found nearly one-third scored above the clinical cutoff for PTSD symptoms related to work stressors.”

The two relate several reasons for the toll, from the broad decline in religious observance in America to the more specific decline in public trust and esteem for spiritual leaders, which “has been plummeting in recent decades.” Then there are more immediate causes: “Clergy described aggression from congregants and direct exposure to extreme suffering, such as being called to a home amid a domestic conflict or right after someone died by suicide.” On top of these factors, they cite the stresses of leading communities through the COVID-19 pandemic.

While I’ve seen much speculation—some reasonable and well informed, some quite the opposite—about why Jerusalem chose Friday morning to begin its campaign against Iran, the most obvious explanation seems to be the most convincing. First, 60 days had passed since President Trump warned that Tehran had 60 days to reach an agreement with the U.S. over its nuclear program. Second, Israeli intelligence was convinced that Iran was too close to developing nuclear weapons to delay military action any longer. Edward Luttwak explains why Israel was wise to attack:

Iran was adding more and more centrifuges in increasingly vast facilities at enormous expense, which made no sense at all if the aim was to generate energy. . . . It might be hoped that Israel’s own nuclear weapons could deter an Iranian nuclear attack against its own territory. But a nuclear Iran would dominate the entire Middle East, including Egypt, Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Bahrain, with which Israel has full diplomatic relations, as well as Saudi Arabia with which Israel hopes to have full relations in the near future.

Luttwak also considers the military feats the IDF and Mossad have accomplished in the past few days:

To reach all [its] targets, Israel had to deal with the range-payload problem that its air force first overcame in 1967, when it destroyed the air forces of three Arab states in a single day. . . . This time, too, impossible solutions were found for the range problem, including the use of 65-year-old airliners converted into tankers (Boeing is years later in delivering its own). To be able to use its short-range F-16s, Israel developed the “Rampage” air-launched missile, which flies upward on a ballistic trajectory, gaining range by gliding down to the target. That should make accuracy impossible—but once again, Israeli developers overcame the odds.