Yair Garbuz, one of Israel’s most influential painters and a recipient of the Emet Prize for his contribution to Israeli culture, died this week at 80. One of his paintings, in the Israel Museum, is called “Europe will not Teach Us.” He painted it in 2001, and it speaks to the present moment with unusual force.

The painting shows a European Catholic ceremony, perhaps a first communion, perhaps a wedding. White dresses, clergy in black, a small figure in cardinal red, the dignitaries of an old institution arranged for a sacrament. At the center, several figures are on fire. The flames are not coming from outside; they emerge from within the ceremony. To the right, occupying nearly a third of the panel, a dark wooden sculpture stands on a pedestal beside a woman in red, turned toward it.

The title is a sentence familiar to Israelis. It is the kind of thing said at dinner tables when European criticism is in the news, a reflex sentence, almost too obvious to examine; Europe will not teach us. The Continent that produced the Inquisition, the Crusades, two world wars and a Holocaust is in no position to lecture us about morality. The sentence ends discussions before they begin. It feels less like an opinion........

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