The Nobel-Prize winning Israeli novelist S. Y. Agnon was one of the pioneers of twentieth-century Hebrew literature. He is known for the sophisticated, allusive, sometimes cryptic style with which he paints his portraits of religious life and the inner religious world of his characters. His long short story “Twofold,” from 1939, tells of one man’s experience of Yom Kippur in Jerusalem. It has been rendered into English for the first time by Jeffrey Saks.

At that hour I had not prepared myself for Yom Kippur; rather, on the afternoon before Yom Kippur, toward evening, I went to the synagogue in my neighborhood, unlike every other year when I was accustomed to pray in the city. The Holy One blessed be He fills the whole world with His glory; wherever a man prays, his prayer is desired. How much more so in the synagogue, and how much more so in Jerusalem, which is wholly sanctified for prayer? It’s true that the synagogues in town are full of pious and perfect Jews who know how to appease their Creator with prayer and prayer leaders who pray with special intention. But, I said to myself, who am I that I should seek special intents? It’s enough for a man such as myself to pray that which is written in the mahzor.

Between the explosion of thousands of Hizballah pagers on September 17 and now, Iran’s geopolitical clout has shrunk dramatically: Hizballah, Iran’s most important striking force, has retreated to lick its wounds; Iranian influence in Syria has collapsed; Iran’s attempts to attack Israel via Gaza have proved self-defeating; its missile and drone arsenal have proved impotent; and its territorial defenses have proved useless in the face of Israeli airpower. Edward Luttwak considers what might happen next:

The myth of Iranian power was ironically propagated by the United States itself. Right at the start of his first term, in January 2009, Barack Obama was terrified that he would be maneuvered into fighting a war against Iran. . . . Obama started his tenure by apologizing for America’s erstwhile support for the shah. And beyond showing contrition for the past, the then-president also set a new rule, one that lasted all the way to October 2024: Iran may attack anyone, but none may attack Iran.

[Hayat Tahrir al-Sham’s] variegated fighters, in light trucks and jeeps, could have been stopped by a few hundred well-trained soldiers. But neither Hizballah nor Iran’s own Revolutionary Guards could react. Hizballah no longer has any large units capable of crossing the border to fight rebels in Syria, as they had done so many times before. As for the Revolutionary Guards, they were commandeering civilian airliners to fly troops into Damascus airport to support Assad. But then Israel made clear that it would not allow Iran’s troops so close to its border, and Iran no longer had credible counter-threats.

Now Iran’s population is discovering that it has spent decades in poverty to pay for the massive build-up of the Revolutionary Guards and all their militias. And for what? They have elaborate bases and showy headquarters, but their expensive ballistic missiles can only be used against defenseless Arabs, not Israel with its Arrow interceptors. As for Hizballah, clearly it cannot even defend itself, let alone Iran’s remaining allies in the region. Perhaps, in short, the dictatorship will finally be challenged in the streets of Iran’s cities, at scale and in earnest.