This week’s Torah reading of Lekh-L’kha begins with God’s call to Abraham (then still called Abram), a figure only minimally introduced. After examining three contrasting extra-biblical portraits of Judaism’s founding father, Jonathan Sacks explores what can be gleaned about him from the text itself:

What . . . does the Torah say about Abraham? The answer is unexpected and very moving. Abraham was chosen simply to be a father. The av in Avram/Avraham [the Hebrew version of his names] means “father.” In the only verse in which the Torah explains His choice of Abraham, God says: “For I have chosen him, so that he will direct his children and his household after him to keep the way of the Lord by doing what is right and just, so that the Lord will bring about for Abraham what He has promised him.” (Genesis 18:19)

The great scenes in Abraham’s life—waiting for a child, the birth of Ishmael, the tension between Sarah and Hagar, the birth of Isaac and the binding—are all about his role as a father.

Judaism, more than any other faith, sees parenthood as the highest challenge of all. On the first day of Rosh Hashanah—the anniversary of creation—we read of two mothers, Sarah and Hannah, and the births of their sons, as if to say: every life is a universe. Therefore if you wish to understand the creation of the universe, think about the birth of a child.

Abraham, the hero of faith, is simply a father. Stephen Hawking famously wrote at the end of A Brief History of Time that if we had a Unified Field Theory, a scientific “theory of everything,” we would “know the mind of God.” We believe otherwise. To know the mind of God we do not need theoretical physics. We simply need to know what it is to be a parent. The miracle of childbirth is as close as we come to understanding the love that brings new life into the world.

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.