In What’s Divine about Divine Law?, Christine Hayes explores the talmudic sages’ understanding of the divinity of halakhah, and emphasizes the differences between their approach and that of Greek and Roman thinkers who made a clear distinction between divine law, which is made evident by nature, and human law. Benjamin Silver writes in his review:

[T]he rabbis of the Talmud were, like Paul, Philo, and numerous other Jews of the time, . . . responding to the Hellenistic dichotomy of human and divine law. Hayes brings down a mountain of evidence—from the Palestinian Talmud, from the Babylonian Talmud, from early and late midrashic works, and from the Qumran texts (popularly known as the “Dead Sea Scrolls”)—to demonstrate that the sages of the Talmud were well aware of the Hellenistic view, that they considered it seriously, and that they found it lacking.

The result is a law that was authored by God and yet remains, in certain respects, flexible, particular to the Jewish community, irrational, and, interestingly, untrue (insofar as Jewish law does not always align with logical, metaphysical, or empirical “truth”). For the rabbis, these characteristics were not cause for concern; rather, they were precisely evidence of the law’s divinity. This is not a law that would fit into the legal typology provided by Thomas Aquinas in his Summa, or any other subsequent Western legal philosophy or theology. Though the contours of such a view are disorienting to thoroughly Greek-influenced readers like us, Hayes takes pains to trace those contours carefully and clearly.

Though it’s never stated explicitly, the most significant academic conclusion to be drawn from Hayes’s characterization of this intellectual history is that the sages of the Talmud, in contrast to Paul and Philo, were presenting a view of divine law more conceptually faithful to Hebrew Scripture precisely because they rejected a Hellenistic dichotomy which is alien to Scripture.

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.