“Ha-ba lehargecha hashkem lehargo” (אם בא להורגך השכם להורגו) is a Talmudic maxim from Sanhedrin 72a instructing that if someone actively seeks to take your life, you are permitted—and often obligated—to kill them first in self-defense.

For forty seven years Iran’s leaders have declared their intention to erase Israel, bring death to America, and export their revolution through militias, missiles, and martyrdom. Believe them!

War is ugly. Jews, of all people, know this better than most. Our prayers plead for peace three times a day.

When the President of the United States—whether one admires him or despises him—stands before the intelligence briefings and hears the phrase “imminent threat,” he is standing, whether he knows it or not, in the shadow of that Talmudic principle.

The phrase “imminent threat” is bureaucratic and dull. But Jews raised on Talmud know that danger is not decided by paperwork. The rabbis used a different word: rodef — the pursuer. If someone runs at you to kill, the law expects you to stop him before he succeeds. That blunt rule matters when the pursuer is not a single man with a knife but a regime building weapons and proxies with open hostility toward your country.

The medieval giant Maimonides—the Rambam—codifies the law of the rodef with brutal clarity. If a pursuer is chasing an innocent person to kill him, anyone witnessing it is obligated to stop the........

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