Rabbi Moshe Ḥayyim Efraim of Sudilkov (ca. 1740-1800) was a grandson and disciple of the founder of Ḥasidism, Israel Baal Shem Tov, and an innovative thinker in his own right. Published in 1810, his collected sermons would become, in Eitan Fishbane’s words, “one of the most popular and influential works of ḥasidic thought.” In a sermon for the Sabbath preceding Rosh Hashanah, the rabbi explicates Psalms 89:16, the verse recited in the synagogue immediately after the holiday’s central ritual, the blowing of the shofar: “Happy is the people who know the blast, Lord; they will walk in the light of Your countenance”—the word rendered here as “blast” (t’ruah) being the standard term for the  trumpeting of the shofar. Fishbane explains the theology animating the homily:

At the heart of . . . ḥasidic teaching is a radical conception of God in which the Divine Being is held to be literally present in the ordinary objects of the material world—as being within the material “garments” and “shells” of apparently mundane things. Thus, the divine life force, by which the world is sustained, is to be found in every aspect of life, “in eating and drinking and business and the like.”

Precisely because God was believed to dwell within all things, including those of this lower world, the task of the individual was to uncover the spiritual inwardness that is “clothed,” or hidden, by the “outer garments” of existence.

Moshe Ḥayyim Efraim concludes his exegesis by arguing that the shofar could strip off this clothing, playing on the Hebrew term for a specific kind of shofar blast, sh’varim, which derives from the word meaning “to break.” As he puts it, Fishbanes’ translation:

The meaning of “Happy is the people who knows the blast” is that they know how to break apart [l’shaber] the natural realm so as to cast away the outer garments. Then “they will walk in the light of your countenance”—in the inner light, which is the Name of God, which is the meaning of the phrase (Proverbs 16:15): “In the light of the King’s face is 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.