In a recently published collection of essays, Shlomo Riskin—a leading American-born Israeli rabbi—tackles many of the thorniest issues confronting Modern Orthodoxy. David Berger, who has much praise for the book and its author in his review, nevertheless takes issue with Riskin’s attempt to define away the talmudic category of the apikoros, or heretic:

Riskin poses the question “who’s an apikoros?” and essentially responds, “no one.” The argument is that it is wrong to identify anyone as a heretic because it is difficult to define what one is: Maimonides himself was accused of heresy; the Talmud defines heresy by such actions as scorning a scholar, but not by the criterion of unacceptable beliefs; [the early-20th-century sage Avraham Yeshaya Karelitz] said that no one today should be subject to the treatment inflicted on a heretic; and contemporary theological deviationists are generally the product of their education and environment. It is also pragmatically self-defeating to condemn rather than build.

Much of this is, no doubt, correct, but some of it is misleading. The position that heresy should be defined by actions and not beliefs sidesteps the [talmudic passage] (quoted in full by Riskin) which lists a number of beliefs that exclude the one who holds them from the World to Come. While there is much to be said for a tolerant attitude toward contemporary adherents of heretical beliefs, there is great danger in blurring or erasing the category of heresy itself. This essay does not quite do this, but it comes perilously close. The issue is of acute importance nowadays, when we are witness to an assault on the position that beliefs matter at all, and when adherents of positions that are heretical by any historical measure are welcomed—especially in the religious-Zionist community in Israel—as respected Orthodox figures. A religion, certainly an Orthodox version of a religion, requires boundaries.

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.