Reflecting upon the story of the binding of Isaac, traditionally read in synagogues on Rosh Hashanah, David Gottlieb considers his own relationship with his father, who in turn had been shaped by two events: the death of his brother, a naval aviator, during a training exercise in 1943 and an emergency heart surgery at the age of sixty-seven. Gottlieb writes:

[In their] commentaries on the Binding of Isaac, . . . the rabbis at once protest against and reimagine God’s most incomprehensible, even indefensible actions. But the story also helped me see my father in a new light: as a man over whom the knife of war (and, later, invasive surgery) had flashed; as someone who had lost a part of himself; and as a person determined to wrest meaning from the potentially meaningless.

Interpretations of the story of Isaac’s binding so often focus on Abraham that the miracle of Isaac’s lifelong response to it—as a loving husband, a peacemaker, and a phenomenally successful agriculturalist—is often overlooked. But Isaac is a key for our time: he epitomizes the lack of agency we hesitate to confront in our lives, and the contradiction between our helpless repetition of parental patterns and the seeming randomness of our encounters with death.

Innocence ends when we are forced to confront our vulnerability, a crisis that often occurs at the hands of those who guide us up the mountain. Then, in the flash of a knife, we understand that our time is short, and that we are on our own. Through a ritual of violent initiation—often enacted accidentally, or without our consent—we are given new vision and new scars. If we are blessed, we get to go on, but we do so shorn of the illusion that those who raised us can protect us from the terror of being an animal conscious of its own mortality. As the Israeli poet Haim Gouri wrote, Isaac’s offspring “are born with a knife in their hearts.”

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.