The Yiddish phrase talmid hokhem denotes someone learned in Talmud. But, despite a common misconception, it does not contain the word Talmud. Rather, it comes from the Hebrew talmid hakham, meaning “student of a sage.” To unpack the origins and history of this phrase is to learn something of the history of the rabbinate. Philologos writes;

The distinction in the Talmud between a rav or rabbi and a hakham is one of degrees of knowledge. Although every hakham is a rav, not every rav is a hakham. Thus, a passage in the tractate of Gittin says that the late second- and early third-century rabbi Isi ben Yehuda ranked the sages [hakhamim] as follows: “Rabbi Meir was a sage [hakham] and a Torah scribe. Rabbi Yehuda was a sage when he wished to be. Rabbi Tarfon was a heap of walnuts. Rabbi Yishma’el was a store stocked with everything. Rabbi Akiva was a secret treasure. Rabbi Yohanan ben Nuri was a peddler’s box. Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was a spice box.” All these hakhamim, in other words, were more than ordinary rabbis, but not all were on the same level.

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.