At the beginning of this week’s Torah reading, the patriarch Jacob departs from his father’s house to sojourn with his kinsmen in Aram—what is now Syria. The region he goes to is not the vicinity of Aleppo, but the land across the Euphrates, currently held by U.S.-backed Kurdish forces. On his way, he has his famous vision of the ladder “standing on the ground and with its top reaching to the heavens,” and of angels ascending and descending. Stuart Halpern catalogues some of the many readings of this symbolism-rich passage. For instance:

To Immanuel of Rome, the medieval Italian poet and theologian, the ladder stood for the intellectual path one needed to climb to reach God. Its rungs, he submitted, were formed from the branches of the Tree of Life, originally planted in the Garden of Eden. By advancing towards a higher intellect, we follow the “path good for the thinker who bypasses his descent to hell by ascending the ladder of wisdom.”

While Immanuel spoke in the language of the Middle Ages, it is striking how similar his reading is to those of two more recent sages:

The 20th-century thinker Rabbi Norman Lamm saw in its steps the means of reassuring a fearful Jacob on his journey. “The ladder is a symbol of Jacob’s attachment to God,” he explained in a 1966 sermon, “like a ladder, he can make his way, step by step, until he reaches the highest point of communion.” Rabbi Jonathan Sacks saw this as a model for not only Jacob’s prayers, but all of ours: “Prayer,” he wrote, “is a ladder stretching from earth to heaven. On this ladder of words, thoughts and emotions, we gradually leave earth’s gravitational field. We move from the world around us, perceived by the senses, to an awareness of that which lies beyond the world—the earth’s Creator.”

In a recent episode of 60 Minutes, a former State Department official tells the interviewer that U.S. support for Israel following October 7 has “put a target on America’s back” in the Arab world “and beyond the Arab world.” The complaint is a familiar one: Middle Easterners hate the United States because of its closeness to the Jewish state. But this gets things exactly backward. Just look at the rhetoric of the Islamic Republic of Iran and its various Arab proxies: America is the “Great Satan” and Israel is but the “Little Satan.”

Why, then, does Iran see the U.S. as the world’s primary source of evil? The usual answer invokes the shah’s 1953 ouster of his prime minister, but the truth is that this wasn’t the subversion of democracy it’s usually made out to be, and the CIA’s role has been greatly exaggerated. Moreover, Ladan Boroumand points out,

the 1953 coup was welcomed by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, [the architect of the 1979 Islamic Revolution], and would not have succeeded without the active complicity of proponents of political Islam. And . . . the United States not only refrained from opposing the Islamic Revolution but inadvertently supported its emergence and empowered its agents. How then could . . . Ayatollah Khomeini’s virulent enmity toward the United States be explained or excused?

Khomeini’s animosity toward the shah and the United States traces back to 1963–64, when the shah initiated sweeping social reforms that included granting women the right to vote and to run for office and extending religious minorities’ political rights. These reforms prompted the pro-shah cleric of 1953 to become his vocal critic. It wasn’t the shah’s autocratic rule that incited Khomeini’s opposition, but rather the liberal nature of his autocratically implemented social reforms.

There is no need for particular interpretive skill to comprehend the substance of Khomeini’s message: as Satan, America embodies the temptation that seduces Iranian citizens into sin and falsehood. “Human rights” and “democracy” are America’s tools for luring sinful and deviant citizens into conspiring against the government of God established by the ayatollah.

Or, as George W. Bush put it, jihadists hate America because “they hate our freedoms.”