So here we are edging ever closer to the end of the Iranian nuclear road. Even five years ago some of us knew that given the White House’s current occupant we’d eventually reach this point. And now — whether due to an inherent incapacity to confront evil or because his dim view of American exceptionality translates into an emotional coldness towardIsrael or as the result of simple weak-kneed incompetence — Mr. Obama seems to be preparing to capitulate and giveIran the little time it still needs to get the bomb.

He fought tooth-and-nail to prevent the sanctions now in place from being imposed on Iran and now is fighting equally strenuously to block the imposition of even harsher ones even as he accedes to Iran’s plea for negotiations that may well run out the ticking time clock for stopping Iran’s nuclear aspirations in their tracks. Apparently the assurances all along that “if you like your state you can keep your state” weren’t true either.

In just a few weeks we’ll read of how HaKadosh Baruch Hu arranged matters so that Yaakov’s sons complicit in the sale of Yosef were given a chance to do things over and this time get them right: to defend and protect Rochel Imeinu’s second child in expiation of what they had done to her firstborn so many years earlier. By framing Binyamin as the thief of his royal goblet and then demanding he remain in Mitzrayim as his slave Yosef creates a stark choice for his brothers: to see Binyamin like Yosef before him as the source of their troubles or to substitute brotherly loyalty for betrayal. Yehudah steps forth and selflessly offers himself for servitude in place of Binyamin leading Yosef to reveal himself and bring down the curtain on this saga much as Hashem Himself will do to end the saga that is human history for which the story of Yosef and his brothers serves as such an unerring metaphor.

Far be it from me to attempt to discern the Divine plan underlying contemporary world events; I’ve got my hands full merely trying to do so in regard to some of what transpires in my own personal life. But perhaps it’s not out of bounds to merely point out the uncanny way in which the trials of 70 years ago are being replayed before our eyes which surely others have noticed too.

Back in those darkest of days with European Jewry on the verge of annihilation the American Jewish community was put to the test of serving as their brothers’ keepers; some rose valiantly to the challenge while others under the spell of the Democratic demigod then in the White House failed miserably. The Secretary of the Treasury a Jew far from Torah was prevailed upon to use his position close to the levers of power to help his beleaguered brethren; he came through although perhaps not to the full extent that he could have.

Fast forward 70 years. The president is not slipping out the White House’s back entrance as Roosevelt did when the rabbis marched onWashington. To the contrary Jewish groups are being summoned to1600 Pennsylvania Avenuein an attempt to cajole them or worse into supporting the administration’s coming acquiescence in scaling back the sanctions that remain the last best hope for averting an Iranian bomb. And at least some of them are refusing to be ordered about in that way.

Another Jew holds the Treasury portfolio this one no stranger to Torah. Yet we are treated to a surreal contrast: he is dispatched to persuade senators to support the “proportionate” easing of sanctions in return for positive Iranian steps while the non-Jewish head of the Senate’s foreign relations committee doesn’t “understand how [it is good foreign policy] to unilaterally suspend when the other side continues to move forward.”

A replay a fleeting final chance to get right what went so tragically wrong in another time and place?

PRINCIPLES OVER PUTTY It takes a lot to get Jonathan Sarna into a pessimistic mood. So upbeat is he that after the recent Pew survey showed the Conservative movement to be in precipitous decline the Brandeis University historian of American Jewry and go-to guy for religion reporters everywhere held a conference call with Conservative clergyfolk reassuring them that “just as Jonah called the people of Ninveh to action and they averted the evil decree so can we…. Never imagine that the future is preordained — we shape the future.”

But when it comes to the Orthodox who in recent decades have actually had much to be optimistic about Professor Sarna’s mood turns decidedly sour. He periodically publishes op-eds cautioning them not to get triumphalist — a major sin according to his book — and just the other week he was at it again.

A group of centrist Orthodox rabbis had issued an open letter stating plainly that proponents of “Open Orthodoxy” the new term for far-left-fringe Orthodoxy “have plunged ahead again and again across the border that divides Orthodoxy from neo-Conservatism ” by “unilaterally violating normative Orthodox laws customs and traditions.” In response Dr. Sarna reached for what he knows best and rolled out the “T word”:

“The Orthodox community feels increasingly secure … in more right-wing corners of the movement which are growing the fastest triumphalism reigns supreme. This mood is a natural breeding ground for those seeking to create a purer holier and more exclusive Orthodox community….”

Putting on his historian’s cap Sarna opined that in the past out of a desire

“to compete with liberal Jewish movements Orthodoxy stretched its big tent to embrace Modern Orthodoxy Chabad the ‘yeshivish’ Orthodox and the Hasidic enclaves like Satmar…. The calamitous decline suffered by the Conservative movement when the Reconstructionists on the left and the traditionalists on the right angrily abandoned that movement’s big tent served as an object lesson as to why it was so important for inclusivity to be preserved.”

I’d love to get hold of the minutes of those intra-Orthodox meetings where lessons were drawn from the Conservative movement’s woes where anyone voiced a desire to “compete with liberal Jewish movements” or decisions were made to “stretch the big Orthodox tent” to accommodate various groups. But beyond the simply risible nature of these imaginings the professor’s biggest mistake is in applying what he knows of the heterodox movements to authentic Judaism.

Those former groups are indeed three-ring circuses encompassing many and varied acts adding new “mitzvoth” and jettisoning many more old ones and thus they indeed require a capacious “Big Top” for them to fit under. What the professor can’t seem to get his mind around is the phenomenon of a Judaism that has immutable nonnegotiable principles — 13 of them to be exact. Coming from a religious world that traffics in theological silly putty Sarna is confounded by an Orthodox community whose core religious beliefs are neither silly nor putty.

The tent in which all the aforementioned Orthodox sectors find their homes has neither stretched nor contracted. Its size and the qualifications to reside within it always have been and will remain the same. As to who will actually take up residence therein I agree almost entirely with Chovevei Torah’s dean Asher Lopatin that “no one has the authority” to “write someone out of Orthodoxy.” Almost no one has that ability — but Rabbi Lopatin and colleagues do based on what they say and do. And some would say they already have.