Although the Hebrew Bible is very much concerned with rituals, the word itself (along with ceremony and rite), rarely occur in the standard English translations. Moreover, there is no word in biblical Hebrew that is the precise equivalent of any of these terms. Peter Leithart speculates about the reason:

A great deal of the Pentateuch, after all, is concerned with what theologians call “ceremonial law,” what we would instinctively identify as “ritual” matters. . . . [T]he lack of a specific biblical vocabulary of “ritual” raises the suspicion that the Bible does not isolate ritual as a distinct sort of activity in the way that we do. In anthropological theories of ritual, it is often assumed that ritual activities are symbolic and expressive forms of action, distinct from the functional and pragmatic activities of daily life. Almost by definition, “ritual” has come to mean “merely symbolic” or “non-functional.” The fact that the Bible does not employ a distinct vocabulary of ritual suggests that it assumes continuities between ritual and other types of activity that moderns find hard to grasp.

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.