On Providence

לא תבוא עלינו רעה

The cattle didn’t like how I mocked the idea that the 2nd round of the Iran War demonstrated special divine providence. Moo, they said, moo, moo, moo. But they didn’t just moo, they also offered, not arguments exactly, but words arranged somewhat in the shape of one. There are 93 million Iranians and only 10 million Israelis. Is it not clear that Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, while Iran impotently fired ballistic missiles more or less randomly, the vast majority being shot down without causing damage, shows that God intervened in history on Israel’s side?

Moo. You should have stuck with moo.

Iran has a much larger population than Israel. If Iran was in a land war with Israel, with armies facing off against each other, that factor would likely be determinative. If Israel was somehow to emerge from the battlefield nevertheless victorious, there would be something to explain. As Operation Barbarossa might indicate, the answer would not necessarily be special divine favour, but it would be at least one of the candidates. There would be something to discuss. Here, though, there is nothing to discuss because there is no land war. In a war fought by air, population is relevant only as a proxy for the state’s ability to raise resources, but you don’t need to use a proxy because you can just look at it directly.

There are two ways of measuring GDP, nominal and purchasing power adjusted (PPP). When it comes to a war of this sort, in which the tools of battle have to be bought on the global market, nominal GDP is the relevant figure. Iran’s is $450 billion and Israel’s is $550 billion. So, right off the bat, Israel has the larger economy and is thus at an advantage.

However, this drastically understates Israel’s advantage, because the contest is substantially a contest of brains. Who can design the best tech? Who can figure out the enemy’s strategy? Who can infiltrate the other’s security apparatus? To really contribute to this, you probably need to have an IQ of 130 or above. Iran has an average IQ of 84, so using a standard bell curve model, we would expect there to be about 99,000 130+ Iranians for the state to work with. If we do the same sum for Israel, using an average IQ of 95, we get about 98,000, but clearly this is wrong. Israel contains multiple different populations with their own curve. If we estimate that 30% of the population is Ashkenazi and they have an average of 112, then we get 345,000 people above 130, more than 3.5 times Iran, and with a smaller overall population, leaving more of them surplus to work in the military.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because Iran has been a victim of a five-decade brain drain since the “Islamic” revolution. A conservative estimate is that about half of the smartest fraction have left, so Israel’s real IQ advantage is probably closer to 6.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because despite what a hasbara cretin may have told you about symbolic votes in the UN or whatever, while Israel has received more than 150 billion dollars from the US over the years, Iran is subject to sanctions from the United States, the European Union, the United Kingdom, the United Nations Security Council, Canada, Australia, Japan, and the G7 (through the FATF). Thus, Iran relied until this war on equipment they inherited from the Shah, which in its age was pretty nifty, but now is only a few steps less obsolete than muskets, and got blown up.

However, this still drastically understates Israel’s advantage because, when Israel went to war, it did so not only with all of the above advantages, but alongside the most powerful military in the history of the world.

So, given all that, how did the war go? OK. There were some definite tactical successes for Israel, but then it kind of petered out as we reached the limits of what you can do from the sky. Strategically, it’s still kind of up in the air, but Iran came out of it a lot stronger than one would have thought in the first few days, so maybe they are the objects of divine favour. That’s ridiculous, of course, because they are grave worshippers who put the Koran on their head like clowns. Probably, it just comes down to a combination of defender’s advantage, the ruthlessness of the IRGC, and the ineptitude of Israel’s and Trump’s diplomacy. Reflect on the former point a little, though, because we are coming back to it.

Israel has had many military successes over the years. The 1948 war went pretty well. 1967 went really well. The most recent war against Hizballah went pretty well too, even if we cucked out before the end because Bibi cut a deal concerning his outstanding warrants. As I’ve written before, in as much as it’s possible to find a common factor in Israel’s successes, it’s when the Left-Wing secular establishment/deep state gets to run things themselves without interference.

Israel’s military golden age was achieved at precisely the time that the hilonim ran things with no-one else getting a say. If the baboons got too uppity, the Left just literally murdered them. Ever since Begin cheated in the elections by directly appealing to people incompetent to vote, it’s gotten gradually worse. For a religious Jew, obviously, there is a certain mystery involved in all this. You can have your answers, but you’d be better off having mine. However, regardless of your personal brand of cope, it doesn’t change the facts. With the Left you win, with the Right you lose, and not in a beautiful loser way either, you just commit a bunch of atrocities for nothing.

To attribute your successes and triumphs to God rather than your strength and the might of your hand is an act of piety. The Torah demands it of you. However, to ascribe other people’s success and triumphs to your special favour in the eyes of God isn’t modesty at all. It’s thinly disguised pride. Sure I didn’t fly the plane, or pay for the plane, or provide the intelligence for the plane, or, in fact, do anything at all, but it is not the wicked leftists who did all these things that should take the credit. No, they should be driven from the country to make it stronger. Instead it is I who am responsible, for I, err, davened.

This can be seen most clearly when Charedim do it. Here, for example, is the Rosh Yeshiva of Ateres Shlomo, a man who has made it his life’s mission to demonstrate in squirm-inducing detail that, probably, the Rambam was actually right about the consequences of taking money for learning Torah, declaring that it was really the Charedim who freed the hostages.

None of the Charedim who read this blog will even try to defend this because it’s so laughable and revolting. He’s high off his own supply, and no-one else is getting high off it. However, while it’s self-evidently absurd to claim that Charedim are making incalculable contributions to the war, it’s also, after only a very little reflection, self-evident that it’s no less absurd to claim that anyone religious had anything much to do with the successes against Iran. The decent thing for a man of the Right to do would be to pop into his car, go wherever it is the posh hilonim live, find a random one and say ‘thankyou’ and, maybe even apologise for trying so hard to turn the mediocre country they built into a third-world criminal slum. It’s certainly true that Religious Zionists made outsized contributions to the Gaza war and they can attribute their successes there, such as they are, to God all they want, but the bits that went well … sorry, you didn’t build that, you just got in the way.¹

That’s the ranting portion of the article over. Jk/ there is no other part of the article. However, I’ve also been thinking about something else recently. I’ve argued before that the concept of antisemitism as understood by most Jews directly contradicts the Jewish idea of providence. If the gentiles hate you, you are supposed to see it as a sign of divine displeasure, but, instead, you see it as the result of some mystery virus that infects them for no reason at all, and definitely, never ever, because of any flaws on your own part. That’s antisemitic! This is so obvious, that you have to wonder why I had to point it out, but there’s something more obvious.

Every Jew reads at least twice a day that if the children of Israel will do what they are told, then there will be rain, and if they don’t there won’t. Apart from the fact that it was promised to the Patriarchs (which only pushes the question back), it is the only time the Torah explains why the children of Israel were given this land and not some other. It is here, as opposed to a place where water comes via river or canal, that you will be acutely conscious of your reliance on the divine will. Well, that’s funny because two things happened recently. First of all, following October 7th, there was a massive religious revival in Israel, which you can read about here, here, here, here, here, here and a whole bunch of other places. Then there was a drought.

The rainy season 2024-25 was very bad, the worst in over 100 years in the western Galilee. The first half of the 2025-26 rainy season was also shaping up to be pretty bad, but then the second half was good and, overall, it came out pretty average, not enough to repair the environmental damage of the previous year, but enough to avert total catastrophe:

Percentage of average annual rainfall

So, the year-and-a-half–drought was kind of a warning shot, but a warning shot for what? Didn’t we do all the things God wants us to do; shouldn’t we be getting some kind of reward?

I can think of two explanations. The first is to look at the nature of the religious revival, which occurred overwhelmingly through either (a) Chabad, (b) Breslev or (c) miscellaneous Sephardi miracle-worker social influencers or, to sum up in a word, Zoharism. Zoharism has different varieties, but the features common to all branches are that (a) regular monotheism is crusty and stale (b) Jewish ritual is really an elaborate system of theurgy (c) God has gendered aspects and when you do your rituals they, erm, well, maybe children read this blog so we can’t be too graphic. While not strictly essential to Zoharism, most contemporary variants also have (d) righteous holy men, identifiable principally by looking weird, who act as conduits of divine blessing because they are, well not exactly God, but, you know, not not God either. Most of these holy men are venal in an astoundingly crude kind of way, and rather a lot of them are literally criminals. Indeed, we might add that (e) outright, open contempt for the idea that bribery and fraud are actually wrong is another prevalent feature of Israeli Zoharism. Finally, we also have to mention the mysterious element of (f) Kookism, which is the belief that the collective soul of the Jewish people is even more not not God than the tzaddikim, which means that whatever the Jewish people do is ipso facto correct.

In short, Zoharism is precisely, in every single detail, the religion propagandized against throughout the prophets from beginning to end. So maybe that’s just it. Maybe they meant what they said? ‘I hate, I despise your festivals’. Of course, the Zoharists have their explanations. Everything means the opposite of what it says. When it says don’t worship Asherah it means this; when it says God created the heavens and the earth, it means this; when it says the ‘Hashem is one’ it means this. But maybe not. What if it does actually mean what it says?’. ‘When you stretch out your palms, I will hide my eyes from you, when you increase prayer, I will not listen. Your hands are full of blood’.²

But I’m kind of sounding like some sort of ISIS maniac now, so let’s flip the script and suggest option number 2. A lot of people say we did a genocide in Gaza. I think this is silly hyperbole. It was grim, there were war crimes, but no genocide. Perhaps we would have done one if people weren’t watching (Turkish style, not German), but people were watching, so it’s moot. However, what is for sure is that a lot of people over here kept shouting about how we should do a genocide, and genocide is good, and you’re Erev Rav if you don’t want to do a genocide, and this is the age of the internet, so the goyim are waking up.³

You know my opinions. I am a contemptible bugman and, as such, I think we as a species did a good thing in inventing the civilian-combatant distinction and that taming war is a real, and fragile, achievement we should hang on to, not least because we know what happens when we don’t. Say I’m wrong, though, and there’s nothing intrinsically wrong with killing tens of thousands of children. It’s still the case that everyone thinks it’s wrong and is sickened when you loudly declare your desire to do it. The Talmud tells us that a scholar who walks around with a stain on his shirt deserves death because he brings the Torah into disrepute. Has the Torah ever been brought more into disrepute than it is today by one baboon ‘Rabbi’ after another loudly shouting ‘Hey Al Jazeera come and clip me saying insane, clownish, murderous nonsense and show it to a billion people’ over and over again for two years?⁴

Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe the real reason God was angry is because we didn’t kill enough people, or maybe because we didn’t do enough theurgy, or we didn’t give enough money to convicted felons to perform penances on our behalf. Let’s look at some representative examples of Israeli religious figures grappling with the question of why their apparently great successes in promoting religious observance and faith met with what is apparently the Torah’s paradigmatic sign of divine displeasure.

Oh, you can’t because they don’t exist. It never occurred to any of these people to grapple with the question, because it never occurred to any of them to do anything other than look at current events so as to congratulate themselves on the achievements of others, to cite virtues and accomplishments they neither have nor even aspire to have to prove that they are specially loved by the Creator of the Universe. And that’s my real point. To be honest, ISIS or not, I actually believe in my explanations, but you don’t have to. The take home message is simply this: it’s all just bollocks. You don’t have to take it seriously at all. They don’t bother to formulate their ideas in such a way that they could persuade anyone interested in thinking them through, so you don’t have to treat them as if they do. The only proper response is mockery, contempt, disgust.

שִׁמְעוּ־נָא זֹאת רָאשֵׁי בֵּית יַעֲקֹב וּקְצִינֵי בֵּית יִשְׂרָאֵל הַמְתַעֲבִים מִשְׁפָּט וְאֵת כׇּל־הַיְשָׁרָה יְעַקֵּשׁוּ׃

בֹּנֶה צִיּוֹן בְּדָמִים וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם בְּעַוְלָה׃

רָאשֶׁיהָ  בְּשֹׁחַד יִשְׁפֹּטוּ וְכֹהֲנֶיהָ בִּמְחִיר יוֹרוּ וּנְבִיאֶיהָ בְּכֶסֶף יִקְסֹמוּ וְעַל־יְהֹוָה יִשָּׁעֵנוּ לֵאמֹר הֲלוֹא יְהֹוָה בְּקִרְבֵּנוּ לֹא־תָבוֹא עָלֵינוּ רָעָה׃

לָכֵן בִּגְלַלְכֶם צִיּוֹן שָׂדֶה תֵחָרֵשׁ וִירוּשָׁלַ͏ִם עִיִּין תִּהְיֶה וְהַר הַבַּיִת לְבָמוֹת יָעַר׃

That’s it. Now have a coffee or something. I probably should.

1. For most people, politics is just extended narcissism. I work out, therefore the country should be run by people who work out; I am a psychotic freak, therefore the country should be run by psychotic freaks etc. Therefore, though it shouldn’t be necessary, I should re-state that I am not under the impression that I am a founding-stock secular Ashkenazi, that I identify somehow as a founding-stock secular Ashkenazi, or that I aspire one day to becoming a founding-stock secular Ashkenazi by some kind of process of acculturation. They should run the country, and I should do my best to obey.

2. Of course, you may ask, why did the drought then stop? I attribute it to many signs of a grassroots awakening against the filth, which started in earnest about 6 months ago. Even normie Shasnik rabbis are getting in on the act to stay ahead of the curve (and, unironically, good for them).

3. Shaulov is a total am ha’aretz, almost at Kahanist levels. Don’t take my word for it, ask Amnon Yitzhak.

4. Again, we have to ask, if so, why did the drought stop? The simplest answer is the Gaza ceasefire, which took a good proportion of attention away from us (as Palestinoids have been complaining about), until we opened it up again with the Iran war, and the rash of subsequent murders by Breslov terrorists in the West Bank.