After seeking out the perfect minyan (prayer quorum) with which to recite the morning service at the Western Wall (Kotel) early one morning, and being a tad disappointed in his choice, Francis Nataf reflects on the market for public prayer, and the reasons rabbinic tradition prefers it to private meditation:

If most people are better able to focus on their prayers when they are alone, then group prayer must be more than the sum of its parts. Perhaps it is the very acquiescence to a communal version of spirituality that edifies us and brings us closer to God.

Since today’s Jews are more heavily concentrated in cities than ever before, the vast majority are able to choose from many nearby synagogues. In fact, . . . we are almost all buyers looking for just the right minyan, knowing that if the one in which we find ourselves is not completely to our liking, there may be a more suitable one just down the road. Although good for a free-market economy, such an attitude is not necessarily the right mechanism by which to make our spiritual decisions.

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.”