Much Jewish practice finds its justification in appeals to precedent and tradition (masorah in Hebrew), even though it is not at all evident why one should do things simply because they were done by one’s ancestors. Making use of the tools of philosophical logic and the ideas of the modern philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, Alex Ozar constructs a defense of tradition, and then explores some of the implications of his own argument:

[According to Wittgenstein], “if one person is considered in isolation, the notion of a rule as guiding the person who adopts it can have no substantive content.” This is because the individual, presented with a new case, has no way of distinguishing between what is really “right” and what one merely, presently, thinks one ought to do. To get beyond subjective whim, Wittgenstein argues, requires accountability to a community. . . . It is through and only through our embeddedness within a community, and that community’s continuing fidelity to a specific form of life, that the facts of past precedent—rules, customs, examples—can provide real guidance.

An intriguing consequence of all this, it is worth noting, is that mere third-person acquaintance with the rules is not enough for faithful interpretation: it will of necessity be only those who truly and deeply feel the pulse of the community’s form of life, and achieve a view not only of the individual norms but of the whole in which those norms are integrally embedded, who will adequately project traditional practice into the future. . . .

But of course . . . just what qualities it takes to qualify an authoritative interpreter of communal tradition will of necessity be itself determined by nothing other than the concerned community and the world it makes. Why, according to Maimonides, are the rabbis of the Babylonian Talmud authoritative? Because the [Jewish] people made a world that made them so.

The meaningfulness of the guidance of precedent, then, requires that the ends and purposes of the statute, custom, or exemplar are the same as, or continuous with, the ends and purposes of the community’s interpretive practice as embedded in its present form of life.

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.