Editorial

The rhetoric and reporting around whether Israel, with or without U.S. involvement, will take military action against Iran this year, is ratcheting up. But that doesn’t make the conclusions any more clear. In fact, based on past history, when Israel takes military action it does so swiftly, suddenly and with no previous drumbeating in the press, as in the successful attacks on the nuclear reactor facilities in Iraq in 1981, and in Syria in 2009.

While many in the mainstream media are suggesting that the Muslim Brotherhood, which controls the majority of the new Egyptian Parliament, is being tempered toward moderation by its new responsibilities, King Abdullah of Jordan doesn’t seem to be buying it.

The job of rabbi has clearly evolved over the centuries, the idea of a “pulpit rabbi” being a thoroughly modern invention. There were no rabbis, as we think of them, in Judaism’s formative biblical times, and the earliest rabbis were teachers and masters of jurisprudence, not clergymen. To this day, it is still not universally accepted in the synagogue world that a rabbi must deliver a weekly sermon, as would a Christian preacher.

We have little expectation that the preliminary talks being held in Jordan between the Palestinian Authority and Israel will lead to any substantive progress, primarily because neither side seems particularly interested in advancing the process now. Rather, their motives are to please Washington and Amman and not appear to be the party standing in the way of negotiations. Not exactly a formula for dramatic breakthroughs.