From Obedience to Devotion

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Leviticus should end at chapter 26.

The covenant is complete: blessing and curse, prosperity and famine, exile and return. Bechukotai lays out the full drama of covenantal life and its consequences. The Torah even sounds like it is closing the book: “These are the statutes and laws and teachings that the Lord gave between Himself and the children of Israel at Mount Sinai.”

It feels finished.

And then there is chapter 27. Vows. Valuations. Tithes. Cherem.

It feels almost out of place, like an appendix attached after the ending.

Until you realize it is answering a different question.

For twenty-six chapters, Leviticus has written the script of covenantal life. It teaches what must be done: the sacrifices to bring, the boundaries to keep, the sacred times to observe, the society to build. It is the architecture of obedience.

But a script alone does not create a performance.

A script tells you what must happen. It creates the structure. What it cannot provide is the actor.

That is chapter 27.

After all the commandments have been given, after the covenant is written, the Torah turns back to the individual and asks: what will you bring that was never required?

Will you make a vow? Will you dedicate your field? Will you sanctify what still feels like yours?

That is why the book ends with possessions. Because ownership is where devotion becomes real. Your produce, your livestock, your property, your word itself.

That question feels especially modern. Ours is a culture of minimums—minimum compliance, minimum obligation, minimum sacrifice. We measure success by how much we can retain, not by what we are willing to dedicate.

Obedience is fulfilling what is required. Devotion begins when a person chooses to give beyond the minimum, to consecrate what he could have kept, to bind himself by a word he never had to speak.

That is the final lesson of Leviticus. Holiness does not end with obedience.

Obedience follows the script. Devotion begins where the script ends.

The Torah can command obedience. Only people can choose devotion.

Mamdani Is Coming For Yeshivas

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When New Yorkers hear “private schools,” many still picture the old stereotype: elite Manhattan prep schools, hedge-fund families, sprawling campuses, and tuition bills that rival college.

That image is politically useful for progressives. It makes any fight over “private school funding” sound like a fight over privilege.

But in New York City, that is no longer the reality.

The largest private-school system in the city is not Dalton, Horace Mann, or Trinity School. It is the yeshiva system.

More than 100,000 students in New York City attend Jewish day schools and yeshivas (45% of the total in private schools), making them the largest single bloc in the city’s private education sector. Catholic schools, once the backbone of private education in the city, now rank second with 29% of the total. The political image of private education has not caught up with the demographic reality.

Buses in front of yeshivas in Brooklyn

And that reality matters.

Because when politicians like Zohran Mamdani talk about cutting back the flow of public money into private education, yeshivas are not a side issue. They are the center of the story.

The latest battleground is special education reimbursement.

These are not subsidies for luxury education. They are legal remedies for families of children with disabilities whose needs the public-school system failed to meet. Under federal law, when the city cannot provide an appropriate education, parents can seek private placement and reimbursement.

That system has grown dramatically in cost. Critics argue it disproportionately benefits families with the resources to hire lawyers, navigate hearings, and front tuition costs. And White families in particular.

The rising cost is a legitimate policy concern.

But the answer cannot be to jump to the conclusion that yeshiva kids are taking too much; it must be to evaluate the various needs of children and figure out how to provide for them.

Unfortunately, we are living in a time and with a mayor in New York City who prefers class and racial warfare and is portraying this as a matter of “equity” and confronting “private-school privilege.” It is not. It would primarily target students with special needs at Jewish and Catholic schools.

The charts are misleading because the demographics of public and private schools are dramatically different; There are 940,000 children in public school of which 43% are Hispanic and 23% are Black – generally in line with the disability figures above

It would hit communities that already shoulder the cost of religious education while also paying taxes into a public system they largely do not use.

It would hit families with children who need specialized services.

And it would hit institutions that serve as the backbone of Jewish continuity in New York.

Because yeshivas are not just schools. They are where tradition is transmitted, where Hebrew is spoken, where Torah is learned, where identity is formed, and where Jewish continuity is secured across generations. It is civilizational infrastructure.

And once government begins treating private educational alternatives as a fiscal problem rather than a parental right, the pressure rarely stops with one category. First special education reimbursements. Then transportation. Then security funding. Then textbooks. The pattern is familiar: reduce the supports, increase the burden, narrow the choice.

Zohran Mamdani built his politics around redistribution and expanding public provision. His next target seems to be thousands of Jewish children with special educational needs.

The End of Civilization

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The defining moral line of civilization is simple: civilians are off limits.

Once that line breaks, atrocity is no longer an exception. It becomes a method.

Over the last five years, some of the worst deliberate mass killings of civilians have come at the hands of jihadist movements and regimes built on political Islam.

In Sudan, militias tied to the Rapid Support Forces slaughtered an estimated 10,000 to 15,000 civilians, largely from the Masalit community. Whole neighborhoods were emptied through organized murder.

On October 7, thousands of Gazans crossed into Israel and hunted Jewish civilians deliberately—families in their homes, young people at the Nova Music Festival, children, the elderly. Terror itself was the objective.

In Iran, the regime’s 2025–2026 crackdown on protests has left more than 6,000 civilians dead, according to rights monitors, killed for dissent against an Islamic revolutionary order.

Across Nigeria and the Sahel, Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa Province continue village massacres, church bombings, kidnappings, and executions. Civilians are the intended victims.

These conflicts differ in geography and politics. Sudan is tribal and ethnic. Hamas is nationalist and religious. Iran is a regime. Boko Haram is insurgent.

What unites them is the same moral collapse: the civilian is no longer protected by being uninvolved. Civilian blood becomes a signal of conviction.

And here is where the West has developed its own moral blind spot.

For years, parts of the activist left have embraced an oppressor-oppressed framework so rigid that civilian status itself becomes negotiable. The first question is no longer who was killed, but who held power.

That inversion was laid bare after October 7, when elements within Democratic Socialists of America and allied activist circles framed the massacre in the language of “resistance” and “decolonization,” making slaughter politically understandable so long as it came from the “oppressed.”

The jihadist says civilians may die because ideology sanctifies it. The regime says civilians may die because dissent threatens power. The activist says civilians may die because power determines innocence.

Different justifications. Same result.

Once innocence becomes conditional, civilization becomes conditional too.

Because the moment civilians become fair game, everyone eventually becomes fair game.

An Open Letter to Commencement Speakers: Use Your Podium for Moral Clarity

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To the commencement speakers stepping onto stages this spring:

You are about to speak at one of life’s defining moments. Graduates and their families will remember your words long after the ceremony ends. That podium carries weight. It should be used carefully.

And it should be used with moral clarity.

Do not praise the fashionable activism of the moment simply because it is loud, visible, and rewarded by the culture around it.

Do not mistake popular protest for courage. If you want to speak about courage, speak about the students who stood for Israel.

Speak about the students who defended Israel’s right to wage a just war against Hamas after October 7—the deadliest massacre of Jews since the Holocaust.

Speak about the students who understood that when a terrorist army invades a country, murders civilians in their homes, kidnaps children, rapes women, and openly promises to repeat it, the moral obligation of that country is defense. It is victory. It is the destruction of the machinery of terror.

That is what Israel is doing. And on campuses across America, students who have said so have paid a price.

Speak about that.

Speak about the Jewish students who have walked through hostile encampments and angry demonstrations to get to class.

Speak about the students who removed their kippot, hid their Stars of David, or stopped speaking openly because the atmosphere around them had become threatening.

Speak about the students who stood their ground anyway.

The students who wore hostage pins.

The students who defended the truth of October 7 when others rushed to justify it.

That is moral courage.

Real courage is not standing with a crowd chanting slogans. Real courage is standing when the crowd turns on you.

And that has been the experience of many Jewish students this year.

They have faced harassment, exclusion, intimidation, and hostility—often from classmates and sometimes with the silence or complicity of faculty and administrators.

That reality deserves acknowledgment. It deserves honor.

So if you are going to use your commencement speech to speak about justice, begin there.

To organizations like the American Federation of Teachers and the American Association of University Professors, who speak often about academic freedom and the right of educators to speak their conscience: prove those principles mean something.

Stand behind the educators who speak in defense of Israel.

Stand behind those who praise students fighting antisemitism.

Stand behind those who say openly that Jewish self-defense is moral.

Because if you defend speech only when it flatters your politics, you are not defending freedom. You are defending ideology.

Commencement should be better than ideology. It should tell the truth.

The truth of this year on campus is that some of the bravest students were the ones who stood visibly, unapologetically, and often alone with the Jewish people.

If you want to honor courage from the podium, honor them. That would be a commencement speech worth remembering.

Derek Peterson, chair of the University of Michigan Faculty Senate, speaks during the University of Michigan’s 2026 Spring Commencement at Michigan Stadium in Ann Arbor celebrating pro-Palestinian “activists.”

Palestinians Have Always Been Anti-American

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For over twenty-five years, the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research has tracked Palestinian political opinion. Through wars, peace talks, intifadas, and four American presidents, one pattern remains strikingly consistent:

Palestinians have never been broadly pro-American.

That may sound counterintuitive. The United States has spent decades mediating the conflict, funding Palestinian institutions, and pouring diplomatic capital into the region. If goodwill were built by investment alone, the polling should show it.

It does not.

PCPSR rarely asks, Do you like America? Instead, it asks the more revealing questions: Do you trust the United States as a mediator? Do you want American involvement? Do you believe Washington is fair?

Across twenty-five years, the answers tell the story.

Palestinians burn American and Israeli flags

After the collapse of the 2000 Camp David Summit and the violence of the Second Intifada, positive views of America’s political role sat around 20 to 35 percent. Negative views often exceeded 60 percent. America was seen less as a broker than as Israel’s protector.

That became the baseline.

The mid-2000s brought modest movement. After Mahmoud Abbas replaced Yasser Arafat, some Palestinians supported stronger American engagement. Yet the support was tactical hoping that Washington might pressure Israel. That did not translate into trust.

Then came the only real exception.

Barack Obama produced the highest pro-American opening in the polling record. In 2009, roughly 60 percent supported a stronger American role in negotiations.

Washington read that as goodwill. The polling suggests something narrower: hope that Obama would pressure Israel.

Even at that high point, majorities still believed America fundamentally favored Israel. The atmosphere improved. The structure did not.

By Obama’s second term, positive sentiment had fallen back into the 20 to 30 percent range.

Then Donald Trump recognized Jerusalem as Israel’s capital and trust collapsed into single digits.

In some surveys, roughly 90 percent rejected American mediation. The illusion of neutrality disappeared. America was no longer seen as merely tilted toward Israel, but openly aligned with Israeli claims to Jerusalem.

Palestinian Arabs burn American flag in 1998

Joe Biden lowered the temperature but did not restore trust. The numbers recovered slightly, climbing back into the teens and twenties.

“Regardless of how great the power of Israel, America, and the world may be, in the end they will disappear, while we are remaining.” – Fatah Central Committee member Abbas Zaki, April 2021

Then came the October 7 attacks and the war that followed. With Washington backing Israel militarily and diplomatically, Palestinian hostility surged again toward its floor: single-digit trust, overwhelming distrust.

The pattern is unmistakable.

When America pressures Israel, Palestinian approval rises. When America stands with Israel, it collapses.

For twenty-five years, Palestinians have periodically wanted America involved. They have never wanted America embraced.

Not under George W. Bush. Not under Obama. Not under Trump. Not under Biden.

The names changed. The percentages moved. The structure held.

America, in Palestinian political opinion, has never been a friend. Only a force—useful when applying pressure, hostile when withholding it.

After a quarter century of polling, that may be the clearest finding of all.

An American Jewish Blueprint

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When Reality Changes

The first great strategic correction in Jewish history came in the hills of Judea.

In the early days of the Hasmonean revolt 2,100 years ago, Jews hiding from Seleucid persecution were attacked on Shabbat but they refused to fight on the holy day. Their piety became their vulnerability. The enemy understood the pattern and exploited it. Jews died because they would not defend themselves on the Sabbath.

Then came one of the most consequential rulings in Jewish history: if attacked on Shabbat, Jews would fight.

That was more than a legal adjustment. It was a civilizational doctrine. Reality had changed and Jewish survival required adaptation.

Hanukkah is remembered through oil and light, but before the miracle of the oil came the correction in strategy. The Jews who survived understood something fundamental: the law existed to preserve Jewish life, and Jewish life could not be preserved through passive fidelity to assumptions that enemies had learned to weaponize.

That is the enduring Hanukkah doctrine. When reality changes, Jewish strategy must change with it.

The Three Jewish Illusions

Jewish history has often been shaped by three recurring illusions.

The first is the illusion of piety without defense.

That was the lesson of Hanukkah itself. Holiness without strategic realism became a mechanism for slaughter. What began as faith became fatal passivity until Jewish leadership corrected course.

The second is the illusion of integration without power.

This was the great mistake of medieval Jewry and later German Jewry.

In medieval Europe, Jews often flourished under royal protection, economic necessity, and communal tolerance. These arrangements created stability until rulers changed, social pressures mounted, or religious hostility sharpened. Then the protections vanished.

The lesson was brutal: usefulness is not security.

German Jews carried that illusion to its highest expression. They were among the most integrated Jews in history. Patriotic, educated, prosperous, woven deeply into German civic life. They believed they had secured permanence through contribution.

Then came The Holocaust.

No Jewish community had climbed higher inside a host society. None fell faster.

Integration is real. It matters. It enriches Jewish life. It is insufficient.

The third illusion is hope without strategy.

The Bar Kokhba Revolt embodied this danger. Jewish sovereignty briefly returned, messianic expectations surged, and military ambition outran political reality. Rome crushed the revolt and shattered Judea.

Hope is essential to Jewish life. Hope detached from sustainable power becomes catastrophe.

The Jewish Paradox of Power

Jewish history presents a permanent paradox. Jews are vulnerable when powerless and Jews are vulnerable when powerful.

The accusation of Jewish power is one of antisemitism’s oldest reflexes. Jews have been accused of controlling kingdoms when dependent on kings, accused of controlling economies while confined to ghettos, accused of controlling politics while excluded from political life.

Powerlessness never prevented the accusation. Weakness has never protected Jews.

So the answer cannot be withdrawal from power. The answer is understanding what kind of power matters.

German Jews had social prominence but lacked defensive power. They had visibility, achievement, influence, prestige but did not control the institutions that would determine whether rights remained rights when political conditions changed.

That distinction matters now.

American Jews have extraordinary social prominence. In business, law, medicine, media, academia, and politics, Jewish achievement is immense.

But social prominence is not defensive power.

Success creates comfort. Comfort creates assumptions. Assumptions create blindness.

That is where Jewish history becomes dangerous.

The task is not to seek dominance. It is to build durability.

The American Jewish Doctrine

What does that mean in practical terms? How should American Jews position themselves in the current environment?

First, political power.

Diaspora Jews have often treated politics as secondary, entering political life through universal causes and only later recognizing Jewish interests. History argues for the reverse.

Jewish interests are legitimate political interests. Communal safety is political before it is physical. Before mobs move, laws shift. Before violence erupts, institutions bend. Before exclusion becomes visible, narratives are rewritten.

Political power means relationships with governors, mayors, district attorneys, legislators, police commissioners, school boards, university administrations.

It means voting coherently when Jewish interests are implicated.

Not because politics is everything but because politics determines what protections remain when sentiment changes.

Second, rights.

Modern Jewish communal life often leans heavily on allyship. Allies matter. Coalitions matter.

But allyship is rented. Rights are owned.

Diaspora Jews need to become more comfortable asserting rights directly.

  • The right to visible Jewish life.
  • The right to religious practice.
  • The right to define antisemitism.
  • The right to communal defense.
  • The right to political particularism.

Rights do not depend on approval. That is why they matter.

Third, communal resilience.

Jewish prosperity in America has created a dangerous temptation: assuming that integration reduces the need for internal communal strength. History teaches the opposite.

Strong Jewish life requires thick Jewish institutions.

  • Jewish schools.
  • Jewish civic organizations.
  • Jewish legal defense organizations.
  • Jewish security systems.
  • Jewish philanthropy directed inward.
  • Jewish media institutions.

Strong institutions convert prosperity into durability.

Capital moves. Institutions endure.

The First Signs of Danger

Jewish history teaches that violence rarely begins with violence. It begins with language.

Before pogroms, Jews become symbols.

Before expulsions, Jews become abstractions.

Before extermination, Jews become explanations. Parasites. Foreigners. Exploiters. Poisoners. Colonizers.

The vocabulary evolves. The function remains.

Language creates permission.

That is why Jews must take ideological shifts seriously before they become physical threats.

Universities matter.

Activist ecosystems matter.

Social media matters.

Political rhetoric matters.

Religious radicalization matters.

Institutional capture matters.

By the time violence arrives, the moral groundwork has often already been laid. Jewish history punishes those who dismiss rhetoric as harmless.

The Sovereign Difference

There is one structural difference in modern Jewish history that changes everything.

Israel exists.

For nearly two thousand years, Jewish history was entirely dependent on host societies. That changed in 1948.

For the first time since antiquity, Jews had sovereign power, an army, intelligence services, borders, and a place where Jewish defense was not dependent on the goodwill of others.

That transformed Jewish vulnerability. Yet diaspora Jews remain diaspora Jews. Their fate is still deeply tied to the health of their host societies. Or perhaps more complicated, become local stand-ins to attack policies for which they have no control.

Jewish history now has a sovereign center which points in two directions: an option for refuge for diaspora Jews and also an excuse for pogroms for local antisemites.

The Hanukkah Question

The question facing American Jews is not whether to adopt a wartime mindset. America in 2026 is not Germany in 1932.

Jewish life in America remains among the freest and most prosperous in Jewish history. The challenge is different.

It is to abandon passive history. To stop assuming that flourishing means permanence.

To recognize that strategic conditions can shift. To adapt before threats become kinetic.

That is the Hanukkah doctrine.

The Jews in those caves died believing they were preserving the law. The Jews who survived understood something harder. The law had to preserve the Jews.

That remains the enduring Jewish challenge.

Not panic. Preparedness.

Not militancy. Strategic realism.

Not permanent war. Permanent vigilance.

Jewish history has rarely punished the Jews for being too alert. It has punished them, again and again, for waiting too long.

When the Status Quo Becomes the Threat

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For decades the argument over the Jewish Temple Mount has been framed in one direction only: Jewish prayer must be restricted because Jewish prayer may trigger Muslim violence. The legal scaffolding for that argument is old and sturdy. The British Mandate for Palestine built it directly into Article 13, promising free exercise of worship while “ensuring the requirements of public order and decorum.” Later arrangements, including Oslo, preserved the same operating logic in practical form, with Israel retaining security authority even while leaving day-to-day religious administration to the Jerusalem Islamic Waqf.

That logic has governed the Mount for a century.

Israeli police block a Jew from ascending steps to the Temple Mount at the Cotton Gate in November 2025 (photo: First One Through)

But what happens when the status quo itself becomes the source of disorder?

This is the question no one wants to ask.

Every few weeks, Palestinian media like WAFA warns that “the Al Aqsa Mosque is in danger” from “radical settlers.” The phrase has become ritualized, almost liturgical in Palestinian political culture. A Jew walking quietly on the Mount becomes a provocation. A Jew moving his lips in silent prayer becomes an assault. A Jew bowing his head becomes a threat to Islam itself.

That rhetoric has had a practical effect. It has transformed Jewish prayer into a public order problem.

But there is another side to this equation.

What if the continued suppression of Jewish prayer is itself becoming a generator of instability? What if the status quo, designed to contain conflict, has begun producing it?

A legal order built to preserve peace cannot become a machine for preserving grievance.

Under the British Mandate, the answer is surprisingly clear. Article 13 protects “existing rights,” but only while ensuring public order. That means the status quo is protected only insofar as it serves order. If preserving inherited arrangements creates recurring confrontation, the law and history allows recalibration.

That was the hidden flexibility in the Mandate and ongoing governing principle. Status quo is presumptive; order is mandatory.

Oslo is even more direct, though in a different way. Oslo does not sanctify the Temple Mount arrangement. It simply leaves it in place while preserving Israeli security. That means if Israeli authorities conclude that the present arrangement itself is a long term security risk, they possess the legal architecture to modify access, prayer rules, and crowd management.

The Old City of Jerusalem including the Jewish Temple Mount/ Al Aqsa Compound. Thousands of Jews can be sound in the Western Wall Plaza, unable to ascend onto the Temple Mount.

The irony is brutal.

For decades the legal doctrine has been used to suppress Jewish prayer because Muslim violence was threatened. But if that suppression itself produces radicalization, frustration, and growing confrontation, the same legal doctrine could justify expanding Jewish prayer in order to restore order.

The law cuts both ways.

“The status quo” sounds ancient and immovable. In truth it is neither. It is a management system. And management systems are judged by outcomes.

If a system preserves peace, it earns its legitimacy. If a system preserves resentment and recurrent crisis, its legal rationale weakens.

The day may soon be arriving that structured, regulated Jewish prayer may become the stabilizing mechanism rather than the destabilizing one.

A designated time. A designated place. A formalized right.

The central legal truth of the Temple Mount has always been misunderstood. The governing principle was never the status quo itself. The governing principle was order.

The Genocidal Chant of “Globalize the Intifada”

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There is a difference between being hated and being hunted. Most people understand that instinctively.

A slur is hatred made verbal. The N-word for Blacks, like “k*ke,” for Jews, carries generations of contempt. It degrades and dehumanizes. When someone says it, there is no confusion about what is being communicated. The message is brutally simple: you are despised.

Ugly as that is, it is at least honest.

But history teaches that some language goes beyond contempt. Some language carries the memory of violence and the method of violence.

For Black Americans, the image of a noose is not abstract. It is inseparable from lynching, terror, and public spectacle. A crowd marching with nooses would never be defended as harmless symbolism or political expression. Black Americans would hear it exactly as history taught them to hear it: as a threat.

That is where Jews place the phrase “globalize the intifada.”

The First Intifada was marked by riots, Molotov cocktails, stabbings, and attacks directed at Israeli Jews. The Second Intifada escalated into systematic suicide bombings: buses blown apart, cafés destroyed, restaurants turned into funeral scenes. Jewish civilians were the battlefield.

Arabs bombing Israeli buses during Second Intifada

Then came what Israelis grimly called the “car intifada” of 2014–2016: vehicles driven into crowds at bus stops and train stations. After that, the “stabbing intifada”: knives pulled in streets, supermarkets, and neighborhoods, ordinary objects turned into weapons for killing Jews.

Palestinian cartoon directing Arabs to run over Israelis in 2015

These were not abstractions. These were methods.

That matters because when someone chants “globalize the intifada,” Jews do not hear a vague political slogan. They hear the globalization of those methods.

Globalize the bus bombing. Globalize the car ramming. Globalize the stabbing. Globalize the killing of Jews.

That is why the phrase lands differently than a slur. A slur says: I hate you. “Globalize the intifada” says: the violence used against your people in Israel should be used against your people everywhere.

And this is no longer merely a Jewish interpretation. Keir Starmer, the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom said this week that those chanting “globalise the intifada” should face prosecution, explicitly describing it as rhetoric calling for terrorism against Jews. That recognition matters because it affirms what Jews have been saying for years: history gives words their meaning, and violent history gives them their menace.  

“If you stand alongside people who say globalise the intifada, you are calling for terrorism against Jews – and people who use that phrase should be prosecuted. It is racism, extreme racism and it has left a minority community in this country scared, intimidated, wondering if they belong.” – Sir Kier Starmer

Society already understands this principle elsewhere. A noose is not “just rope.” A burning cross is not “just wood.” History made them symbols of violence.

History made “intifada” one too.

And asking Jews to pretend otherwise is no different than asking Black Americans to pretend a noose is just a piece of rope.

Which Arab Murders Count?

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Some murders become international incidents. Others become statistics.

That is what makes the numbers in Israel and the West Bank so revealing.

As of early May 2026, roughly 98 Israeli Arabs have been murdered this year, overwhelmingly by fellow Arabs in gang violence, organized crime, and clan feuds. In that same period, about 16 Stateless Arabs from Palestine (SAPs) in the West Bank were killed by West Bank Jews.

The deaths are a tragedy. In each location.

Among the dead in Israel were a young Arab man and his fiancée in Yarka, shot dead together just weeks before their wedding. They were building a home, planning a life, and in a moment both were gone.

Their murders did not trigger an emergency session at the United Nations Human Rights Council. No international campaign formed around their names. No protests filled campuses demanding justice.

But the ratio matters.

For every SAP killed by a West Bank Jew this year, more than six Israeli Arabs have been killed by fellow Arabs.

Yet only one category reliably commands international attention.

When Jews kill Arabs, the broader human rights ecosystem reacts swiftly. The UN warns of “ethnic cleansing.” Condemnations follow. Activists mobilize.

Francesca Albanese, UN special rapporteur on human rights in the Palestinian territories, attends a side event during the Human Rights Council at the United Nations in Geneva on March 26, 2024.
Photo: Reuters / Denis Balibouse

When Arabs kill Arabs, the deaths rarely travel beyond the local crime blotter.

If Arab life matters, it should matter regardless of who pulls the trigger.

Israelis protest in Haifa, Israel, against the crime wave impacting their community, on August 31, 2025. An estimated 252 Israeli Arabs were killed by fellow Arabs in 2025. (photo: Kareem Khadder/CNN)

A human rights system that treats one dead Arab as an international crisis and six dead Arabs as a local inconvenience is not organized around human dignity.

It is organized around narrative.

Somewhere in Yarka, two families are mourning a wedding that will never happen.

And the world moved on because no Jew could be blamed.

Orienting the Menorah

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The menorah in the Mishkan was about the height of a person at that time. According to the rabbinic tradition in Babylonian Talmud, the menorah stood eighteen tefachim high, somewhere between four and a half and five and a half feet depending on the measure.

That is a strange choice. The Torah could have commanded a towering monument, a giant golden structure rising upward into sacred space. That is what the ancient world did. Temples were built to dwarf the worshipper. Gods were elevated into inaccessible heights, their homes designed to overwhelm and diminish those who approached. Yet when the Torah returns to the menorah in Leviticus in Parshat Emor, it commands to keep its lamps burning continually – at human scale.

The God of Israel does not seek awe; He seeks encounter. The menorah stood at eye level because holiness in Judaism is not built on distance but relationship.

Its form deepens the message. The menorah is shaped like a tree. Hammered from one piece of gold and adorned with almond blossoms, buds, and flowers, it evokes organic life, growth, and rootedness. Rashi and Nachmanides understood it as a symbol of divine wisdom and life itself. The imagery reaches backward to Eden and the Tree of Life standing at the center of creation. The menorah is that tree brought into history, planted in the center of Israel’s sacred life.

And it is more than a tree. It is time in the shape of a tree. Seven branches, seven flames, seven points of light. Like the seven days of creation, the menorah gathers into one object the architecture of existence itself. In Judaism, seven is the structure of the world. Creation unfolds in seven days. The land rests in the seventh year. Freedom resets in the seventh cycle of the jubilee. Sacred time is built in sevens, and the menorah gathers that pattern into gold.

Yet the number seven is only part of the symbolism. The structure itself carries the deeper lesson. The menorah has one central shaft, with three branches extending from one side and three from the other. Everything depends on the center. That center can be read as Shabbat itself, the seventh day that gives shape to the other six.

This is one of Judaism’s deepest interventions into human experience. Most people think of Shabbat as the end of the week, the point of collapse after six days of work. But the Torah’s vision runs in the opposite direction. Shabbat is not simply the conclusion of labor. It is the center of time. The six days are not meaningful because they arrive at rest; they are meaningful because they emerge from sanctity. The week is not six days of secular striving interrupted by a religious pause. It is six days of labor structured around a holy center.

Modern life has reversed that structure entirely. Modern man builds his life around work and treats rest as recovery. Judaism builds life around sanctity and treats work as extension. One organizes existence around productivity and squeezes meaning into the margins. The other organizes existence around holiness and allows labor to become part of that larger order. One produces burnout. The other produces orientation. The menorah, in that sense, is profoundly anti-modern. Its center is not productivity. Its center is sacred time.

The menorah’s design teaches the structure of the soul. Find the center first. Build outward second. The center is what gives coherence to everything else.

That is why the menorah stands at human height. Divine presence enters human dimensions. It stands face to face, and orients each of us to the life to lead.