Desert Camp

If the Israeli media were minded to try something less hackneyed, they could open a Maseches Sotah. Among the eerily prescient descriptions of the pre-messianic Ikvesa D’Meshicha period — which a tradition from the Chofetz Chaim says is upon us — are two words that could be a headline today. “V’hagalil yechareiv  — and the Galil will be destroyed,” says the Mishnah.

Looking at the burning hills and abandoned, blasted towns of Israel’s north, it’s hard not to think of those words. Strip away the hollow declarations of Israeli military achievements, and the harsh truth emerges: a terror group has made a vast swath of the country uninhabitable. With what X-ray vision did Chazal utter these words so many years ago?

The norm-defying, metaphysical nature of Israeli existence has been a major theme of this column since Simchas Torah. It’s given voice — and sometimes form — to what many people know to be true. As Ben-Gurion’s famous quote about miracles being Israel’s realism indicates, there’s even a secular version of that emunah, because there’s no other way to explain Israel’s high-wire existence.

Watching the split-screen reportage of Israel’s burning north alongside the attack on the yeshivah world in the Supreme Court because of the chareidi draft, I found myself reverting to that theme again.