A liberal was once defined as someone who would sleep in the crack of a bed to save a marriage. I always wanted to unpack this little ditty from a Talmudic perspective. What would be the result of such an intervention?

Does it mean, he makes a cold peace by keeping the parties close, but not too close, providing the buffer that makes co-existence possible?

Or does it mean that the intervening party is about to get ___________ (fill in a synonym for violated in an unseemly fashion. Propriety doesn’t allow me to fill in the blank, but you get the point.)

Once again, Obama made the classic historical error. His speech implied that the Jewish right to homeland is intrinsically tied to the horrors of World War II Europe. The Arab street response is cogent. “Give the Jews East Germany then.” If Obama wishes to argue for the Jewish State’s legitimacy, he is going to have to go back further than the 1940’s. He has to be willing to argue that for over two thousand years of exile, Israel was the focal point of Jewish longing.

The founders of Israel knew this and placed two thousand years of exile front and center in the national anthem as the poet declared התקוה בת שנות אלפיים “The hope borne of two thousand years”. This was the problem of Spielberg’s film Munich. He, too, argued that the Holocaust compelled the world to give the Jews a state of their own. Maybe so, but the logical conclusion of Spielberg’s argument is not necessarily a Jewish Island amidst a sea of Arabs.

In the academy, viewing Israel as an outlaw state that has no right to exist is not considered a radical position. The every fifteen minute invokers of the Holocaust have legitimated it–even among many Jews. The sins of Europe do not justify Jewish “colonialism” in the Middle East has become an academic truism in anti-Israel circles.

The modern world of realpolitik is uncomfortable with ancient memory, and, so it seems is President Obama. But if he wants to some day get out of that bed he has just invited himself into, he better get intimate with some ancient history, or better yet–Christian that he is–let him get out his Bible.