For modern Western readers, it seems natural to see a gaping divide between the Torah’s ritual laws (like the prohibitions against eating certain foods) and its civil laws (like those governing torts). The biblical text, by contrast, slips easily from one category to the other, while the Talmud recognizes a distinction but tends to portray both categories as part of a unified and unchanging divine law. Drawing on the work of the early-20th-century Russian talmudist Shimon Shkop, Chaim Saiman argues that the Jewish tradition does recognize a qualitative difference between these two areas of halakhah:

[I]f one confronts a piece of meat of unknown status, halakhah requires abstaining from it to avoid even the possibility of transgression. This principle [of caution] applies to any biblical [as opposed to rabbinic] prohibition. . . . Shkop notes, however, that theft is also a biblical prohibition. The principle of stringency in the case of doubt would therefore counsel that when there is factual or legal doubt as to who owns an asset, whoever has it in his possession should refrain from using the asset for fear of violating the biblical prohibition against theft.

Shkop notes that this is emphatically not the halakhic rule. . . . [H]alakhic civil law, like its secular counterparts, assumes that the plaintiff bears the burden of proof. . . . Unless and until the plaintiff meets his burden, the defendant is permitted to retain and use the disputed asset. But why, asks Shkop, is this instance any different from the meat of uncertain kosher status? . . .

Shkop answers this question by proposing a novel understanding of halakhic civil law. These rules, he argues, are not primarily established by divine mandate. Instead, human rationality and institutions create the system of property, ownership, contract, and tort. . . . While some elements of civil law are indeed determined by biblical exegesis, the bulk are generated by human reason. . . . In Shkop’s account, [therefore], the civil law allows for human intuition and reason to establish legal entitlements and liabilities. But it is the transcendent divine call, a call still heard echoing from Sinai, that calls upon us to live up to these obligations.

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.