In one of its best-known passages, the Haggadah describes four sons—wise, wicked, simple, and unable to ask—each of whom poses a question (or, in the case of the fourth, fails to pose a question) about the seder, and is met with a parental reply. Marc Angel, questioning the usual translation of the Hebrew word describing the third son—who asks only “What is this?”—offers a novel interpretation:

Although tam is usually translated as “simple” or “naïve,” the word also has a much different meaning. It means pure, unblemished, whole. Our forefather Jacob is described as being tam, and so is Job. Noah is called tamim [“perfect,” a word that derives] from the same root. The tam of the Haggadah isn’t simple at all, but is actually the most profound of the four children.

The tam accepts Jewish belief and ritual, but his question isn’t about what to do—but about why. The tam, in search of wholeness, is not satisfied with an intellectual discussion of the laws and customs [as is the wise son]. The tam wants to understand how these laws and customs increase one’s closeness to God, how they enhance spirituality. The tam is saying: yes, I’ll do what the religion requires, but I need something more. I need to know the inner spirit of what the religion demands of me.

The response is: if you are seeking the inner meaning and you want to deepen your spirituality, then you need to understand: God is great; God is a presence in our lives; God’s mighty hand took us out of Egypt; God’s mighty hand continues to play a role in our lives today. The laws and traditions of Judaism aim at one thing: to bring us closer to 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.