For some reason, Abraham was especially associated with prayer by post-Civil War American Jews, writes Jenna Weissman Joselit:

“Abraham Prays,” declared the American Israelite [in 1878] in an unabashed salute to the biblical figure and his humanity, noting how “humane emotions overpowered him, commiseration moved his heart and tongue and lips, and he prayed.”

It’s not clear what prompted the weekly to hold forth on Abraham’s belief in prayer; no archaeological discovery, no brouhaha within the ranks of biblical scholars, no impending theological schism seemed to have occasioned it. All the same, the American Jewish newspaper made much of Abraham.

Like their Gentile compatriots, 19th-century American Jews did a lot of praying in public settings, but in the years that followed that activity became increasingly confined to the synagogue—a trend that gave new importance to one particular prayer:

One of the few features of the Sabbath prayer service that Reform, Conservative, Modern Orthodox, and Reconstructionist denominations had, and continue to have, in common, a “prayer for the government” was sacrosanct. The phrasing of its sentences as well as the language in which they were delivered might differ from one branch of American Judaism to the next, but the essential theme—the providential nature of the American experiment—remained constant.

Supplicants no more but citizens, members in full, of the republic, American Jews were now at liberty to cultivate a different relationship to the state and to power than their European cousins; consequently, they brought a different tone to their devotions. No longer compelled by either law or custom to make themselves small, they excised what Sarna describes as the “uniquely plaintive quality” of the Old World entreaties in favor of the more confident, assertive pose of well-wishers.

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.