On the seventh morning of this past holiday of Passover in Israel I walked gingerly to synagogue, still groggy from a 3:00 am siren, wondering what had come of President Trump’s ultimatum to Iran issued before I turned off my phone for the final day of the holiday. When I arrived, I saw a friend sitting outside with a weary look – common among parents of five young kids who have been jumping off the walls for nearly six weeks at home during a war. Her youngest lay at her feet on his belly whacking a stick into a muddy puddle leftover from the previous day’s rainstorm. “How are you?” I asked, “actually now I’m great!” she smiled, “did you hear the news? There’s been a ceasefire. They opened the Straits of Hormuz.” 

I hadn’t heard, but as I entered the synagogue, the congregation had just risen to hear the Song of the Sea, the chapter of Exodus depicting the splitting of the Red Sea, which is read on the final day of Passover each year when our tradition believes the event took place. Of course, I thought, Trump’s warning had to be issued on the eve of this miraculous commemoration, of course it involved another body of water being opened up to free passage. Of course, if the ceasefire holds, this would mean that the war had run for a course of 40 days more or less, a time period associated with transformation in the Bible. The Hebrew word for Egypt is “Mitzrayim,” which in Jewish thought is often read as “meitzarim,” or “narrow straits.” Could it just be a coincidence that a Strait is at the center of the current conflict? Even my friend’s toddler with his grubby stick started to take on cosmic significance – a mini Moses raising his staff before the splitting of the sea. 

Personally, I have never been one for modern miracle stories, for Bible codes or hidden predictions embedded in numerical patterns in the Torah. I teach literature, so naturally I love stories and myths. But I understand them as just that, human attempts to find patterns in the world in which we live and imbue it with meaning and significance. Yet, at some point since I moved to Israel, my mindset has begun to shift. There is something about being in a land with so much Biblical significance that makes a person start to feel like she is living in the Bible herself. 

Take the start of this recent conflagration with Iran, on the morning of the Shabbat before Purim commonly known as “Shabbat Zachor,” “the Sabbath of Remembering.”  On this Shabbat we are required to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17). Amalek has been having a bit of a moment lately in the American anti-semite camp. Despite the fact that the injunction to remember Amalek is mentioned in the same Bible that both Jews and Christians cherish, Tucker Carlson and others have been latching onto it as yet another example of Israeli and Jewish treachery. This despite the straightforward nature of the commandment – to destroy an evil nation that, if given the........

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