After listening to Bruce Springsteen for years, and finally attending his first Springsteen concert, Rabbi John Moscowitz reflects on the profoundly religious message embedded in his music:

Springsteen’s music inspires his fans to think about life’s serious matters, all the while making us want to dance. He shies away neither from irreverence nor from religion; he knows that each has its place and purpose.

Often he puts the two together. In “Tenth Avenue Freeze Out,” one of his signature songs, Springsteen gyrates across the stage while regaling his . . . jazzed-up audience of how he went from lonely boy to fulfilled rocker “when the Big Man [Clarence Clemons, his late soul-brother sidekick] joined the band.” Evangelical style, he proclaims, “Take me to the river, wash me in the water. . . . I want to throw a rock-and-roll baptism, a rock-and-roll bar mitzvah. . . . I want to go to that river of life and hope and faith and transformation.” And then his kicker, another zing to the heart, in case you weren’t paying attention: “I want to go there with you because I can’t get there by myself.” . . .

It’s not just that Bruce (you just want to call him that) brings the energy of the old-time preacher to every concert; he fills his songs with religious imagery and language, and suffuses them with an understanding that life’s a tough road to travel, but hope is real, and redemption is available for everybody. He gets loneliness and love, his own included, among other polarities of the human condition. When he sings, we feel the Boss knows what’s in our hearts. And we feel more tied to one another: the guy in the row in front of us begins as a stranger and leaves a friend.

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.