War, Self-Iconing, and the Eclipse of Discernment in the Days of Lent and Ramadan

We are living through days of fasting.

Christians have entered Great Lent, the slow ascent toward Pascha, toward the trembling proclamation that life persists where death appeared sovereign. Muslims have entered Ramadan, the month in which hunger and thirst reorder the human body, reminding it that existence is sustained not by possession but by mercy. Jews, just these days, will complete Purim, the feast born in ancient Persia, where annihilation was decreed and unexpectedly reversed through courage, concealment, and timing.

Three traditions, distinct yet intertwined, converge in a single historical moment overshadowed by war.

The war in Ukraine has entered its fifth year. What once shocked the world has become normalized, absorbed into the background of global consciousness. The war in the Middle East expands and contracts, now revealing more openly the deeper confrontation between Israel and Iran – Persia, one of the great civilizational matrices of human history. At the same time, Israel has established unprecedented contacts with Arab Gulf states, former adversaries now bound by shared vulnerability and converging strategic necessity.

These developments are not merely political realignments. They are manifestations of deeper moral and civilizational tensions that have shaped humanity for millennia.

Persian religious consciousness, articulated in the teachings attributed to Zarathustra, identified two fundamental orientations: asha, truth, alignment with reality, and druzh, falsehood, distortion, the corrosion of trust. In modern Persian, dorugh still carries this ancient weight: not simply a lie, but a fracture in the fabric of the real.

This distinction was never purely theoretical. It demanded that human beings confront themselves. To align with truth was not to possess it, but to submit to its discipline.

The Biblical tradition echoes this same demand. The commandments of the Torah do not merely regulate conduct; they educate perception. They teach the arduous work of distinguishing between what sustains life and what destroys it, between justice and violence, between necessary defense and destructive excess. Yet even this vast framework converges, as Jesus of Nazareth affirmed, into a single commandment: love of God and neighbor (Mark 12:31;........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)