Since the advent of the smartphone, it has become a cliché to say that ours is an age of distraction. While concern about distracted praying may be as old as prayer itself, perhaps the threat is now greater than ever. Shalom Carmy reflects on the place of focus in the Jewish way of communication with God:

Preachers often deplore routinized, perfunctory prayer, but it is equally true that the life of prayer suffers most when it lacks the regularity imposed by obligation. We do not always pray with proper passion, but it is in our power at least to foster and sustain the atmosphere that facilitates heartfelt prayer. That, [itself], is part of maturity.

Prayer is a specifically God-oriented activity, and Jewish prayer is not only a privilege but a duty performed at particular appointed times. Hence many of us tend to assign it to a religious domain that is sequestered from the profane parts of our lives. Yet I would submit that what is true of prayer and the maturity inseparable from it has implications for many of our daily “secular” commitments.

The attentiveness and concentration we learn through the discipline of prayer both form and mirror the attitudes essential to the rest of our lives. Work, study, creativity, fidelity, and compassion in our personal relations are all impoverished when we fail to develop the maturity and focus of prayer. All that we do and experience is immeasurably enriched when the life of prayer sustains our daily world.

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.