May 15, I moderated a panel at the Jerusalem conference on the concept of Tikkun Olam, repairing the world. The organizers of the panel posed the question this way: "Repairing the World--Mission or Pretension [or, in another translation, Impudence]?" Here's what I said:

The Jewish people are a house of argument. We are also a house of justice, not because we have achieved justice, and not because we are the house of justice--to claim so much would be (in the official description of this panel) "impudent"--but because we measure our success by our commitment to justice.

We do not measure our success by the munificence of our palaces or the sleekness of our electronic devices, or our gross domestic products, or the sacrifices that our states demand of our citizens,* but by our care for a single humanity.

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I've been wondering all day whether what's going on between the US and Israel on the one hand, and Iran on the other, is a game of chicken--the drag-strip game where two drivers race toward each other and the first one to turn away loses--or something worse.

This wondering comes from Jerusalem, where I'm attending Shimon Peres' President's Conference on the occasion of the 60th anniversary of the State of Israel. There's more to say about the goings-on, and the contribution I'm going to make tomorrow, but I'll do that later, when I have time.

For now, I'm preoccupied with Iran. The reason is that, for two days now, so many speakers have been preoccupied with Iran, and talking rather casually about the prospect of a preventive strike.

The sense of threat here is vivid, it is deeply felt, it is completely comprehensible, and it rises occasionally, or more than occasionally, to a well-nigh hysterical pitch--so much so that the Amerian strategist Edward Luttwak arose Monday night at a banquet at Peres' house to warn assembled luminaries against fearing annihilation at the hands of an Ahmadinejad who, after all, was not Hitler but Mussolini, and an inept one at that. It is not lost on any Israeli that Ahmadinejad, in his usual delicate manner, last week called Israel a "stinking corpse."

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