What Happened Today: May 11, 2023
Israel's first casualty in clash with Islamic Jihad; Loneliness tops Google searches; Trump brings spectacle back to CNN; Pakistan top court orders Khan's release; Sarkozy in hot water, again
The Big Story
Egyptian officials continued to mediate a cease-fire agreement between Israel and the Gaza-based terrorist group Islamic Jihad on Thursday after the two sides exchanged rocket and air strikes. Late on Thursday, Israel saw its first casualty when one person was killed and five wounded by a rocket that struck a residential building in Rehovot. The Israel Defense Forces has counted at least 550 rockets fired toward Israel so far this week, with about a third of those intercepted by the Iron Dome and David’s Sling defense systems. Three top Islamic Jihad commanders were killed in Israeli air strikes, along with 10 civilians, escalating tensions in what has been the third confrontation between the two sides over the past 10 months.
The current episode began on Tuesday after Islamic Jihad claimed responsibility for a barrage of rockets fired at southern Israel in what the group said was retaliation for the death of Khader Adnan, an Islamic Jihad leader who, while in an Israeli prison, had been on a hunger strike for the 87 days prior to his death.
The chief spokesman for the Israeli military, Rear Admiral Daniel Hagari, said Israel had achieved its goal by eliminating the three commanders and had no appetite for further escalation. “Israel is not interested in war,” he said. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was more bellicose in his assessment of the conflict. Following a call with officials in the southern part of Israel, his office said in a statement that “we are ready for the possibility of an expanded campaign and harsh strikes against Gaza.”
With Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sisi involved in the negotiations for the cease-fire, one senior Israeli official told the media outlet Kan that while Egypt “is doing everything it can to stabilize the situation,” Israel has informed the negotiators that “quiet will be met with quiet.”
Read More: https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog-may-10-2023
In The Back Pages: The Soloveitchik Solution
The Rest
→ After House Speaker Kevin McCarthy canceled Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s “Nakba Day,” a commemoration of the 1948 establishment of Israel as a “catastrophe,” Tlaib found a champion for her cause in Sen. Bernie Sanders, who allowed the event to be hosted in the room used by the Senate’s Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions Committee, of which Sanders is the chair. A vocal critic himself of Israeli policy, Sanders was not in attendance for the event on Wednesday, though Tlaib was no less appreciative, adding in her remarks that called Israel an “apartheid state” that “everyone needs an aamu (an Arabic word for “uncle”) in the Senate. … so I want to also welcome you to Senator Bernie Sanders’s” committee room. Co-chair of the Senate Task Force for Combating Antisemitism, Sen. Jacky Rosen, said that “calling the establishment of the world’s only Jewish state a ‘catastrophe’ is deeply offensive,” a sentiment echoed by Anti-defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt, who wrote on Twitter that the Senate should “condemn this event.”
→ Google says it’s seeing a record number of searches from internet users looking for friends. “How to make friends,” “where to make friends,” and “where to meet people” have all popped to the top of the Google Trend charts, just as U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, released a new report titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation.”
Even before the social isolation and lockdowns administered by American officials during the COVID-19 pandemic, half of U.S. adults were reportedly enduring measurable levels of loneliness, according to the report, a problem that has only worsened since.
Such degraded social connections have serious health repercussions, with loneliness increasing the risk of premature death by 26%, the equivalent of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Written with a profound lack of acknowledgement as to why “many of us felt lonely or isolated in a way we had never experienced before” during the pandemic, Murthy nonetheless advocates for more money to be spent on research into loneliness, building public parks and libraries, and “reforming digital environments” to “ensure products do not worsen social disconnection.”
→ New Hampshire’s St. Anselm College had a sneak preview of the media circus sure to come to town next year during the first Republican primary after CNN hosted a live town hall on Thursday night with Donald Trump. The raucous event in front of a Trump-friendly crowd was the former president’s first CNN event since 2016, drawing cheers as Trump spoke over CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins, even describing her as “a nasty person” as she sought to counter some of the former president’s more erroneous statements. Trump applauded the overturning of Roe v. Wade, said Europe had to spend more to support Ukraine’s war defense, and called Jan. 6 a “beautiful day.” The pro-DeSantis group Never Back Down was quick to jump on these issues (and more) on Twitter after the town hall, suggesting that the contest between Trump and DeSantis could become an ugly one—quickly.
→ The thousands of supporters who took to the streets protesting the detainment of former Pakistani prime minister Imran Khan over corruption charges were cheering Pakistan’s Supreme Court’s ruling on Thursday to release Khan from prison. Finding the arrest to be unlawful, the ruling has set the country’s highest judicial body on a collision course with the powerful Pakistani military. Long seen as an invisible hand orchestrating factions of the government, the military has been thrust into the public spotlight in its opposition to the populist Khan, who had galvanized supporters by claiming military leaders were behind the no-confidence vote that led to his ouster from office. Khan also claims that a top military official orchestrated the shooting that left him wounded last November. After the shooting, Khan’s supporters had flocked to his home, camping out there as something like an unofficial security detail, while others clashed with the military this week, attacking military outposts. The military’s media outlet promised rioters would be met with a “severe” response.
→ Former French president Nicolas Sarkozy may face criminal charges for allegedly taking illegal campaign contributions in 2017 from Libya, French prosecutors said on Thursday. Already previously convicted of corruption in a 2021 trial, Sarkozy became France’s second president to be found guilty of criminal charges after stepping down from office. The new case would find Sarkozy accused of illegal campaign financing and concealing embezzled funds along with 12 other suspects on allegations that Sarkozy’s successful campaign was funded in part by Libya’s former leader Muammar Gaddafi.
→ Hoping to turn down the temperature on what has been months of increased tension between the United States and China, U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan went to Vienna for two days of talks with China’s top diplomat, Wang Yi, running through a gamut of divisive issues, the war in Ukraine included. Both Washington, D.C., and Beijing were quick to issue feel-good statements about the conversation, with the White House describing the talks as “substantive and constructive” while China, for its part, said the “candid” interaction would help remove “the hurdles” in their bilateral relations. It remains to be seen if enough diplomatic headway was made to queue up a presidential call between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping, which the White House has been angling for as part of a recent campaign to separate concerns of national security from economic ties with Beijing. Last month, Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen called for the two countries to maintain a “healthy” economic relationship despite ongoing conflict on security issues.
→ Number of the Day: 1,098%
That’s how high residents in a zip code in Lousiana’s Plaquemines Parish will see their flood-insurance rate rise after FEMA rolls out Risk Rating 2.0, the agency’s new system for evaluating flood risk. Plaquemines Parish residents have the unfortunate distinction of becoming the community with the nation’s highest flood-insurance premiums, though others in flood-prone Louisiana will see big bumps as well, with the state’s average premium going up 134%.
→ The European Union is nearing the end of a two-year process hashing out what will become the world’s first complete set of legal restrictions on emerging artificial intelligence technology, with lawmakers in Brussels on Thursday agreeing to ban the use of facial recognition in public spaces. “This vote is a milestone in regulating AI, and a clear signal from the Parliament that fundamental rights should be a cornerstone of that,” Greens MEP Kim van Sparrentak told Reuters. “AI should serve people, society, and the environment, not the other way around.” The package of regulations will slot AI tools into different levels of risk, from low to unacceptable, and companies and governments will have a two-year grace period to fulfill their obligations to use the tools depending on what level of risk they carry. The full bill will go up to a plenary vote for the European Parliament in June, ahead of a final review of the bill language.
→ A bipartisan group of 70 House lawmakers signed a letter spearheaded by Rep. Bill Keating (D-MA) that’s destined for Evan Gershkovich, the Wall Street Journal reporter who was detained six weeks ago by Russian security forces on charges of espionage. “It is clear that Russia has not only violated your basic human rights, but has stolen part of your life since your detention in March,” the letter says, adding more momentum to the House effort to pass a resolution calling on Russia to release the first American reporter arrested on spying charges since the Cold War. Designated by the State Department as wrongfully detained, Gershkovich is expected to face a protracted legal process with little chance of winning an acquittal.
TODAY IN TABLET:
My Mother on My Mind by Alter Yisrael Shimon Feuerman
What would it have taken to make her happy?
The Long Game by Unorthodox
Ep. 362: Rabbi Ari Lamm on spirituality in the NBA Playoffs; journalist Gabby Deutch on a Jewish cold case; and an up-close look at Maimonides’ 12th-century manuscripts
SCROLL TIP LINE: Have a lead on a story or something going on in your workplace, school, congregation, or social scene that you want to tell us about? Send your tips, comments, questions, and suggestions to scroll@tabletmag.com.
The Soloveitchik Solution
To bridge the growing divide between secular and religious Israelis, look to the founder of modern Orthodoxy
Liel Leibovitz depicts poignantly the conflict between secular and religious Israelis, concluding that “soft appeals to brotherhood and shared destiny aren’t likely to resolve it.” I stand with those who believe that there is no Israel without Torah, but Israel won’t survive without the technological and military prowess of secular Israel—what Leibovitz calls the “First Israel” of the Ashkenazic elite who founded the state as well as the 100,000 scientists and technicians who emigrated from the former Soviet Union.
It may help to focus not on the First Israel in the broad sense that Leibovitz defines it, but instead on the scientific and technical elite who contribute decisively to Israel’s defense and prosperity. This elite is by no means entirely secular—Abraham Fraenkel, the founder of Israeli mathematics, and the computer scientist Moshe Koppel come to mind—but it is mainly secular. But for the most part, mutual antagonism reigns between Israel’s scientific-technical elite and its religious community, for well-known historical reasons.
After Napoleon, the Torah world’s retention rate of the most prominent Jews in secular fields of learning was painfully low. Of the 50 Jews awarded the Nobel Prize for physics, not one to my knowledge was shomer mitzvot as an adult. Among the most prominent Jewish philosophers of the past century, Bergson was agnostic, while Husserl and Scheler converted to Christianity. Shabbat observance excludes the performance of classical music as a Jewish career. It is impossible to account for the disproportionate success of Jewish scientists, mathematicians, musicians, and philosophers without referring to a unique Jewish sensibility. But “majestic man” often becomes too enamored of his majesty to remember the covenant.
The mutual antagonism between the worlds of Jewish observance and secular accomplishment is deep, ingrained, and well-founded. But that does not necessarily mean that it is necessary, let alone right. Secular and religious Israel will never merge, but the two sides might at least be capable of a grudging acknowledgement that both are indispensable to Jewish survival, providing they can find a common language in which to communicate with each other.
That outcome is at least conceivable in terms of Rav Soloveitchik’s Torah. During the second half of the 20th century, Joseph Dov Soloveitchik (1903-93) was the guiding light of the branch of Orthodoxy that supported Torah Umadda—secular studies combined with traditional Jewish learning—or what for lack of a better word we call modern, or centrist Orthodoxy. For more than 40 years, the Rav—as he is called simply in the Orthodox world—led the senior Talmud seminar at Yeshiva University, and gave smicha (ordination) to more than 2,000 rabbis. His bibliography includes 200 original works. He is the subject of 80 books and hundreds of academic articles. His most famous book, The Lonely Man of Faith (1965), is the only work by an Orthodox Jewish writer to reach a broad Christian audience.
In the Rav’s published writings, especially The Halakhic Mind (1984) and even more in newly published lecture notes from his teaching at Yeshiva University in the late 1940s and early 1950s, he advanced a powerful argument that the scientific revolution starting with the 17th-century formulation of the calculus was inspired by Torah. Notes on the Rav’s 1949-50 lectures on Genesis taken by R. Robert Blau and brilliantly annotated by R. Meir Triebitz were published in 2021-22 by Hakirah. I have published several monographs in Hakirah adding philosophical and mathematical context for the Rav’s writing.
Let me therefore offer an outrageous claim as a starting point for this discussion: Torah more than Greek hochma is the source of modern science. Secular Israelis might acknowledge, however grudgingly, the debt of science to Torah. And Torah-obedient Israelis might admit, however reluctantly, that scientific discovery for the betterment of the human condition is a religious obligation.
The hegemonic character of this assertion cannot be overemphasized. The religious literature is filled with harmless homiletics about the compatibility of science and faith, for example the late R. Jonathan Sacks’ Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning. That is not what I am arguing here. Rather, with the collapse of Newtonian physics and with it the tyranny of Newtonian time with the advent of quantum theory, what R. Soloveitchik called “the paradoxical present-day conflict of science and philosophy … may yet give birth to a new religious world perspective.”
The Rav argues that the finitization of the infinite proceeds from the great discovery of modern Jewish thought, namely Isaac Luria’s reformulation of the concept of tsimtsum, or divine self-contraction. In recently published lectures on Halacha, Kabbalah, and Aggadah, R. Soloveitchik wrote:
It is Judaism that has given the world the secret of tsimtsum, of ‘contraction,’ contraction of the infinite within the finite, the transcendent within the concrete, the supernal within the empirical, and the divine within the realm of reality. When the Holy One, blessed be He, descended on Mt. Sinai, He set an eternally binding precedent that it is God who descends to man, not man who ascends to God.
The “secret of tsimtsum” implies no less than the dethroning of the self-contemplating God of Aristotle and Plotinus, and the coronation of the God of the Bible, and a change of intellectual regime from divine passivity to divine turbulence, in Gershom Scholem’s felicitous phrase. Creation is unthinkable under the reign of Aristotle’s god, the “unmoved mover” who is eternally unchanging. As Parmenides demonstrated, differentiation and change must be an illusion. Creation ex nihilo (yesh m’ayin) stumbles into contradictions: If God created the world from nothing, there was nothing but God before creation, and all creation must be part of God. God therefore is everything and everywhere, and we are trapped in Spinoza’s pantheism.
Why would God wait an eternity to create the world, and then create it at a given point in time? Maimonides tries to get around the problem by asserting that time itself is created, but does not explain what time itself is, issues I reviewed in an essay for Hakirah, “The Jewish Idea of Freedom.”
R. Isaac Luria offered a revolutionary solution, implicit perhaps in biblical and rabbinic sources, but formulated with luminous originality: God contracted Himself within Himself to create an empty space in which He could create something that was not God.
Read the rest here: https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/israel-middle-east/articles/rav-soloveitchik-solution
What Happened Today: May 11, 2023
It seems only a short while ago that
Serbia was talking to Kosovo
That Arabs were talking to Israel
Bahrain, the UAE were on the verge of talks and hopefully Oman and Sudan would be engaged in diplomacy with Israel. Then........the world turned upside down ...in the name of what?
Israel-Palestine are on a roll this year!