After tracing the evolution of the Reform liturgy, Clifford E. Librach reviews Mishkan HaNefesh (“Tabernacle for the Soul”), a High Holy Day prayer book (maḥzor) recently released by the Central Council of American Rabbis:

Without question, this maḥzor is the most traditional prayer resource ever produced by the American Reform movement. . . . The maḥzor’s agenda of reclamation is clearest in the Yom Kippur sections. In an unprecedented act, the new book restores to its traditional location . . . the classical description of God as having thirteen divine attributes of mercy. This passage, from the rabbinic interpretation of Exodus 34, is contained in a Yom Kippur evening section, S’liḥot (“penitential appeals”). These attributes are recited to assuage the pain of confession with the assurance of God’s responding mercy, and the reliability of His forgiveness. . . .

The Avodah service [a detailed liturgical description of the holy day’s Temple rites], long a source of Reform consternation because it clearly and deliberately attached Yom Kippur to the Temple, has been reinstated. Avodah had been part of the liturgy [published in the 1970s], but it was almost always entirely skipped or replaced in toto by American Reform congregations. . . .

In another break with the Reform past, . . . [the maḥzor] incorporates the official prayer for the welfare of the state of Israel, as published under the auspices of its (Orthodox) chief rabbinate, complete with its reference to the state as reishit ts’miḥat g’ulateinu (the “first flowering of our redemption”). The Yom Kippur commemoration here ends with the exclamation L’shanah ha-ba’ah biyrushalayim! (“Next year in Jerusalem!”). This unvarnished appeal for the coming of the messiah had been [a] longtime Reform bugaboo.

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.