Among much else, the High Holy Days are the time that American Jewish congregations hold fundraising drives on which their financial survival often depends. Many synagogue budgets also count on selling seats for services on Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. But an economic downturn and, for the non-Orthodox, the prospect of praying over Zoom threaten theses sources of income. While it is too soon to know the effects of the most recent holidays, Menachem Wecker notes that there is good news as well as bad:

Reform Jews report . . . feeling more connected to and likelier to recommend and to remain members of their congregations than before the pandemic. For more than five years, Reform congregations have increasingly streamed services online throughout the year, and more and more have waived High Holy Day ticket fees for non-members.

At Temple Sinai (Reform) in Reno, Rabbi Sara Zober [notes that] Friday-night services online have drawn about 100 people, when twelve people might have come pre-pandemic.

With payroll for rabbis and staff representing synagogues’ greatest expenses, some Orthodox synagogues have found respite in Paycheck Protection Program loans. Many are waiving ticket fees altogether this year. [One Los Angeles] congregation, which typically draws 1,000 on High Holy Days compared with 300 on a regular week, [planned] fifteen socially distanced High Holy Day services . . . in congregants’ backyards and in parking lots.

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.