This week’s Torah reading of T’rumah (literally, “donation”) describes the construction of the Tabernacle, the portable temple used by the Israelites during their desert wanderings. Reflecting on the meaning of this sacred space, Elli Fischer considers one of the oldest synagogue dedications ever found:

Discovered in Jerusalem in 1913, the Greek-language inscription, which dates to the time that the Second Temple still stood, recognizes a man called Theodotos for having built the synagogue. . . . He was the leader of this synagogue, the archisynagogos, as were his father and grandfather before him. The inscription also tells us the purpose of the synagogue: reading the Law, explaining the commandments, and providing for the needs of pilgrims: lodgings, perhaps a place to eat, and “water fittings,” which is likely a bathhouse or mikveh. The synagogue was something of an inn or hostel for travelers to Jerusalem from abroad. Surprisingly, this inscription does not mention prayer as one of the synagogue’s functions, perhaps because these pilgrims would pray or bring offerings in the Temple.

In this sense, writes Fischer, the synagogue throughout the ages has come to embody the three pillars on which, according to the Talmud, the world stands: Torah study, the Temple service (for which prayer can be a substitute), and deeds of lovingkindness. Fischer describes the last element as something like a marketplace, whereby money for charity or synagogue upkeep (not always so different) is traded for honor—for instance,

as we saw in the case of Theodotos, by putting a name on a wall or building. Honor, bestowed by the synagogue community, functions as a currency that can be exchanged for resources that help the needy, whether those within the community or those visiting from elsewhere.

The implication here is that synagogues should have socioeconomic disparities. This is brought home by [a passage from the talmudic tractate of] Sukkah (51b) that describes the magnificent synagogue of Alexandria. It records that members of the same profession—goldsmiths, silversmiths, tailors, etc.—would sit together in their own sections. Thus, “when a pauper walked in, he would recognize his fellow craftsmen, and from there he would draw his livelihood and provide for his household.”

Over the weekend, Elliot Kaufman of the Wall Street Journal reported about a formal letter, signed by five prominent sheikhs from the Judean city of Hebron and addressed to the Israeli economy minister Nir Barkat. The letter proposed that Hebron, one of the West Bank’s largest municipalities, “break out of the Palestinian Authority (PA), establish an emirate of its own, and join the Abraham Accords.” Kaufman spoke with some of the sheikhs, who emphasized their resentment at the PA’s corruption and fecklessness, and their desire for peace.

Responding to these unusual events, Seth Mandel looks back to what he describes as his favorite “‘what if’ moment in the Arab-Israeli conflict,” involving

a plan for the West Bank drawn up in the late 1980s by the former Israeli foreign minister Moshe Arens. The point of the plan was to prioritize local Arab Palestinian leadership instead of facilitating the PLO’s top-down governing approach, which was corrupt and authoritarian from the start.

Mandel, however, is somewhat skeptical about whether such a plan can work in 2025:

Yet, . . . while it is almost surely a better idea than anything the PA has or will come up with, the primary obstacle is not the quality of the plan but its feasibility under current conditions. The Arens plan was a “what if” moment because there was no clear-cut governing structure in the West Bank and the PLO, then led by Yasir Arafat, was trying to direct the Palestinian side of the peace process from abroad (Lebanon, then Tunisia). In fact, Arens’s idea was to hold local elections among the Palestinians in order to build a certain amount of democratic legitimacy into the foundation of the Arab side of the conflict.

Whatever becomes of the Hebron proposal, there is an important lesson for Gaza from the ignored Arens plan: it was a mistake, as one sheikh told Kaufman, to bring in Palestinian leaders who had spent decades in Tunisia and Lebanon to rule the West Bank after Oslo. Likewise, Gaza will do best if led by the people there on the ground, not new leaders imported from the West Bank, Qatar, or anywhere else.