Taking a position that many of his Jewish peers would have considered heretical, the 14th-century theologian Nissim of Marseilles maintained that the specific details of biblical law were in fact created by Moses alone, based on the use of his own reason; only the general outline was of literally divine origin. Nissim’s source was an ancient midrashic commentary on the construction of the tabernacle, described in painstaking detail in the second half of the book of Exodus that concludes with this week’s Torah reading. David Frankel writes:

Nissim was unconventional. Whereas Moses Maimonides was often circumspect and ambiguous in his formulations, Nissim was more explicit and more radical. He denied God’s personal intrusion into the course of events and provided a naturalistic interpretation of creation and biblical miracles. . . .

Nissim [interpreted the Midrash to mean] that God merely stated “Build Me a tabernacle,” the way a king would commission someone to build a palace, without getting involved in the details. God thus trusted Moses to determine all the details, . . . which he in fact did. Moses’ great merit, however, consisted in modestly attributing all of these details to God. . . .

More strikingly, Nissim understands the tabernacle here as representing “all the commands of the Torah.” In other words, God commissioned Moses, in a general sense, to write for Him a Torah for Israel, and it was [to Moses’ credit] that he presented all the laws of that Torah as if they were individually commanded by God.

Two extraordinary events demonstrate something important about Israel’s most fervent adversaries. One was a speech given at something called The People’s Forum (funded generously by Goldman Sachs), which stated, “When the state of Israel is finally destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most important blow we can give to destroying capitalism and imperialism.”

The suggestion that this tiny state is the linchpin of a global, centuries-old phenomenon like capitalism goes well beyond anything resembling rational criticism. Even if Israel were guilty of genocide, apartheid, and oppression—which of course it is not—it would not follow that its destruction would help end capitalism or imperialism.

The other was an anti-Israel protest that took place in front of New York City’s Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, deemed “complicit” in Israel’s evils. At organizers’ urging, participants shouted their slogans at kids in the cancer ward, who were watching from the windows. Given Hamas’s indifference toward the lives of Gazan children, such callousness toward non-Palestinian children from Hamas’s Western allies shouldn’t be surprising. The protest—like the abovementioned speech—deliberately conveyed the message that Israel is the ultimate evil and its destruction the ultimate good, cancer patients be damned.

The fact that Israel’s adversaries are almost comically perverse does not mean that they can be dismissed. If its allies fail to understand the obsessive and irrational hatred that it faces, they cannot effectively help it defend itself.