The Enemy as Glue

The gravest danger in this war may not be defeat. It may be relief.

Not relief at destruction. Not relief at death. Not relief at escalation. Relief that Israel, after years of inner fracture, exhaustion, and self-doubt, can become legible to itself again.

An enemy like Iran does not confuse the Israeli mind. A missile does not negotiate. A shelter does not require interpretation. Under such pressure, the world regains a brutal simplicity. There is a threat. There is a people. There is defense. There is necessity. After years in which Israel had become opaque to itself, split between rival visions of law, state, religion, force, restraint, and memory, war restores a terrible kind of coherence.

That coherence is not noble. It is narcotic.

A nation under attack does not seek only safety. It also seeks orientation. It seeks release from ambiguity. It seeks a world in which survival briefly outruns interpretation. In that sense, war can offer more than mobilization. It can offer clarity. For a people as historically burdened, self-conscious, and internally divided as the Jews in sovereign form, clarity can feel almost like mercy.

That is where the danger begins.

The danger does not begin with military necessity itself. Israel has no obligation to romanticize vulnerability. It has no duty to perform confusion before enemies who are not confused about their intentions. The danger begins one layer deeper, when necessity starts to provide emotional and civilizational relief. When war ceases to be only a painful obligation and begins to function as an answer. When external threat reorganizes a fractured people so effectively that the threat itself acquires a perverse psychic usefulness.

This is not a cynical point. It is a tragic one.

For years, Israel has lived inside a crisis of self-recognition. The disputes over the judiciary were never only about courts. They exposed incompatible ideas of the state, of Jewish identity, of democracy, of authority, of the limits of religion, and of the meaning of sovereignty itself. October 7 shattered more than physical security. It broke confidence in competence, vigilance, leadership, and collective continuity. The war that followed did not restore internal certainty. It deepened moral and political ambiguity. Israel did not merely suffer attack. It began to lose a stable image of what, in historical and ethical terms, it believed itself to be.

A war with Iran cuts through that fog.

Suddenly the language of defense regains dignity without footnotes. Suddenly the state can appear once more as protector rather than as the scene of endless internal accusation. Suddenly Jewish history, dense with contradiction, seems to gather itself into an older and harsher grammar: survival, danger, continuity, fate.

That grammar is powerful because it is older than the modern state.

This is where Rav Kook becomes relevant again, not as an icon for one camp, not as a slogan for settlers, not as a villain for secular polemicists, but as a witness to a deeper problem. He belongs to the zone in Jewish thought where sovereignty was never merely administrative, never merely strategic, never merely the technical possession of power. In his world, national revival carried spiritual density. Return was not only movement. Statehood was not only structure. History itself carried vertical weight.

That is precisely why he matters now.

The issue is not whether Rav Kook would have endorsed this cabinet, that general, or some present military doctrine. Those are smaller questions. The larger question is whether Jewish sovereignty, once placed under mortal pressure, begins to hunger for a significance greater than politics can bear. Whether the state starts to feel not merely necessary, but elevated. Whether war allows a battered collective to experience itself once more as the vessel of an older calling.

That experience is intoxicating even when nobody names it as such.

It allows the nation to breathe inside a clearer picture of itself. It softens the burden of ambiguity. It suspends, for a moment, the endless argument over what Israel has become by restoring a simpler answer to what Israel is for. A divided public becomes a people again. An exhausted state becomes an instrument again. History stops accusing and starts aligning. The self no longer appears cracked, compromised, and difficult to narrate. It appears concentrated.

A people can become attached to that concentration.

Not because it loves war. Because it fears dissolution more.

This is the thought few want to say aloud: war may offer Israel not only danger, sacrifice, and pain, but also temporary deliverance from inner unreadability. It may relieve the state from confronting what peace was beginning to force upon it: the depth of its internal fracture, the instability of its civic grammar, the unresolved conflict between Jewish memory and democratic restraint, between religious inheritance and modern sovereignty, between existential fear and the seductions of power.

War does not solve any of this. It postpones it under conditions so intense that postponement can feel like resolution.

If that is true, then the gravest danger is not only military overreach or diplomatic isolation. The gravest danger is that Israel may begin to need war as an instrument of self-clarification. Not consciously. Not ideologically. At a deeper level than doctrine. As a civilizational reflex in which external threat restores internal coherence more effectively than peace ever could.

That possibility should frighten anyone who cares about Israel.

A state that derives too much psychic order from existential danger becomes vulnerable to a corruption no military triumph can cure. It begins to confuse emergency with authenticity. It begins to mistake the pressure of threat for the truth of identity. It begins to hear, inside danger, the reassuring sound of historical alignment. One people. One necessity. One line of defense. One meaning.

This is where the older Kookian question returns in a harder form. Can Jewish sovereignty sustain depth without turning depth into destiny? Can it carry memory without letting memory become a political accelerant? Can it survive real enemies without secretly depending on enmity for its own self-recognition? Can it remain a state, even under fire, without beginning to desire the spiritual aura of something more than a state?

A mature nation must be able to answer yes.

It must be able to fight without becoming addicted to the clarity that fighting brings. It must be able to defend itself without falling in love with the simplifications that defense permits. It must be able to face an enemy like Iran with full seriousness while refusing the hidden comfort of becoming easy to itself again.

That may be one of the deepest Jewish tests of this hour.

The question is no longer only whether Israel can survive this war. Israel can fight, endure, and survive. The deeper question is whether it can survive the meaning the war tempts it to borrow from itself. Whether it can return from clarity without worshipping it. Whether it can remain loyal to survival without turning survival into revelation.

Iran can force Israel into war.

It must not be allowed to teach Israel that war is the only condition in which it truly knows who it is.

Yochanan Schimmelpfennig