Debuting in Atlanta this week, and subsequently coming to New York’s Carnegie Hall, is an oratorio composed by Jonathan Leshnoff and inspired by the foundational text of Jewish mysticism. The Atlanta Jewish Times reports:

Zohar . . . was created as the antithesis to the more somber, hour-long requiem [by Johannes Brahms] in the evening’s program, Leshnoff said. “All I was told was, ‘We’re going to do the [German Requiem]; can’t you do a piece that gives the soprano a little bit more to do?’ That got me thinking; I designed the piece to be a purposeful contrast to Brahms.”

His oratorio, which lasts 25 minutes, is “just long enough to be legit and not too long to be massive,” he said. The difference between the two is thematic as well. “Where Brahms is a comfort, a solace to the bereaved, mine is an ecstatic embrace of the living. Brahms has a secular perspective on the New Testament; mine is from [Jewish] sources. . . . My composition straddles the ecstatic mystical experiences that I glean from the Zohar itself and balances such heightened moments against the human, ‘down-to-earth’ elements of existence.”

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.