Israel’s chief rabbinate recently attempted to remove Shlomo Riskin—a highly regarded Modern Orthodox rabbi—from his post as chief rabbi of the town of Efrat by refusing to grant a routine waiver of the mandatory retirement age. Shlomo Brody writes that this “attempt to deploy this law capriciously, for ideological reasons . . . is an outrage,” but takes the opportunity to discuss the halakhic basis for mandatory retirement:

The Talmud [asserts that] “the older Torah scholars become, the more wisdom increases within them.” Yet the same passage also cites numerous examples of the physical and emotional toll which old age can take on elderly scholars. . . .

A second text addresses [the question of] whether old age impairs the judgment of senior jurists. The sages ruled that ideally, one should not become a judge until he has sufficiently aged. Yet they also declared that one who has become “very elderly” may no longer hear cases regarding capital crimes, fear[ing] that an elderly judge might have lost his merciful “fatherly” touch because he had forgotten the difficulty of raising children, or that, alternatively, his old age may make him impatient and mean-spirited.

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.