This week’s Torah reading opens with God telling Moses that he, unlike the patriarchs, has been privileged to have God reveal Himself by His ineffable name—picking up on the passage in the previous week’s reading where God announces Himself as “I will be what I will be.” Analyses of these texts in the Jewish tradition, writes James A. Diamond, fall into two categories. According to the philosophical or rationalist approach, championed by Maimonides, the Tetragrammaton—which itself seems to be derived from the Hebrew verb to be—represents God as “Being itself,” or, in Aristotelian terms, as “the necessary existent.” Yet rabbinic, midrashic, and kabbalistic approaches, Diamond argues, are more faithful to the biblical texts:

While rationalists attempted to purge the Bible of all its mythic dimensions, classical rabbinic thought, continuing through its midrashic genres and on through kabbalah, actually picked up on that myth—developing, expanding, and enhancing it.

How else can one characterize God wearing t’fillin, accompanied by a debate that appears early on in the Talmud as to what biblical passages are inserted in these divine t’fillin! It turns out that God’s t’fillin are the mirror image of their human counterparts. Just as the latter contains the passage declaring God’s uniqueness, so the former contains an analogous declaration: “Who is like your people Israel, a unique nation on the earth?”

As such, the Tetragrammaton conveys more of a relational being in a partnership of reciprocity with Israel. It connotes a God of endless becoming, as the imperfect tense of “I will be” indicates, a deity who cannot but be elusive, continually shaped and reshaped by the respective partners with whom He establishes relationship. Other divine names then . . . correlate to various dimensions of God such as compassion, mercy, or justice, which are all manifest in relationships.

As opposed to Maimonides’ detached, unaffected, necessary existence, [the medieval commentator] Rashi exquisitely captures this God of relationship by fleshing out the meaning of “I will be what I will be” as “I will be with [the people of Israel] during this affliction [i.e., Egyptian bondage] as I will be with them during their oppression by other kingdoms.” . . .

[A] mythic continuum stretches from the Bible through rabbinic midrash, kabbalah, and onward. Conversely, the philosophical abstractions consistent with notions of divine perfection actually require a violent distortion of the original text, imposing a notion of the deity that is foreign both to the written text and to its voluminous oral traditions.

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.