Is it not self-evident that such behavior is wrong? And why not prohibit cursing anyone? Yet, in this week’s Torah reading, the book of Leviticus states specifically, “You shall not insult the deaf, or place a stumbling block before the blind.” Shai Held searches for an answer:

Maimonides interprets the prohibition on cursing the deaf as a signature example of the Torah’s concern with human character and virtue. “We might have thought,” he writes, “that . . . since a deaf person does not hear [the curse] and is not pained by it, there is no sin involved in that case.” [But] our verse works to undercut that line of thought. . . Why? Because the Torah “is concerned not only with the one who is cursed, but also with the one who curses.” The potential character flaw the Torah worries about in this instance, according to Maimonides, is “gearing oneself up for revenge and growing accustomed to being angry.”

[Y]et I am not sure that the character failing the Torah works against here is a proclivity to anger and vengeance. . . . [I]t seems more likely that the Torah’s focus is on the temptation to see people with disabilities (and, perhaps, the vulnerable more generally) as less human than ourselves, and therefore as less deserving of dignity and protection.

In this context, it is important to pay careful attention to the Hebrew word for insult, killel. The root k-l-l also means to be light [in weight]. In its prohibition of verbally abusing the deaf, the Torah is also . . . warning us not to treat the deaf person “lightly,” as if he or she has no importance. The opposite of k-l-l is k-v-d, to treat as weighty, or, more conventionally, to treat with respect. What the Torah seeks to instill, in other words, is kavod, respect, for the deaf, the blind, and those with any one or more of countless other disabilities.

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.