It is a phrase I heard many years ago – from an Orthodox rabbi with a long, graying beard and a twinkle of optimism in his eyes – and it’s been increasingly on my mind amid the Russian army’s murderous assault on besieged civilians in Ukraine.

Pintele yid. The words are Yiddish. And, as the rabbi explained, they encapsulate the traditional belief that inside any Jewish person, however distant or alienated from his faith, there’s always a tiny flicker of Jewishness waiting to be rekindled at the most unexpected moment.

It’s a bit like a pilot light in a gas heater that ignites a flame.

Now, the violence in Ukraine seems to have revealed a pilot light in millions of people of all faiths worldwide. A pintele of simple human connection, compassion, and caring has sparked a widespread desire to relieve Ukrainians’ suffering.

The outpouring of concern is not, in itself, new. We’ve seen it in response to a range of natural and man-made tragedies in the past – tsunamis, earthquakes, famines and, yes, wars as well.

But this international wave of solicitude seems different in important ways, not least because of its context. Our young millennium has so far been marked by a trend toward narrow nationalism, culture wars, and a certain disdain for humanitarian concerns as mere “virtue-signaling” or “wokeness.”

Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters

A refugee rests inside the theater hall of Dom Ukrainski W Przemyslu (Ukrainian House), transformed into temporary accommodation for people fleeing the Russian invasion of Ukraine, in Przemyśl, Poland, March 18, 2022.

The breadth of the popular response has been remarkable. I’m not alone, I suspect, in having been struck by the number of friends who have previously shown little involvement, or even interest, in world affairs but who’ve now become personally invested in what’s going on in Ukraine. And they want to help however they can.

In Britain – an island nation where a growing suspicion of immigrants helped decide the 2016 Brexit referendum vote to leave the European Union – the response has been dramatic. Even MPs from Prime Minister Boris Johnson’s governing Conservative Party have been vocal in urging a much more generous and less bureaucratic policy toward Ukrainian refugees.

When the government opened a website to match potential arrivals with British families willing to give them a home, it was inundated with offers: more than 100,000 on the first day alone.

The response has been even more extraordinary in the poorer countries of Eastern Europe – Poland, Hungary, Romania, Moldova – where more than 3 million frightened women, children, and elderly have already fled.

Poland reacted with alarm seven years ago to Europe’s last refugee influx, from the war in Syria. This time its government is facilitating the arrival of those fleeing the war next door, helped by hundreds of thousands of ordinary Polish citizens who are caring for the refugees at the border and welcoming them into their homes.

There are other significant differences between the Ukraine invasion and crises past. One is technological, as social media sites at last show signs of fulfilling early hopes that they might bring people closer together.

In recent years they have had the opposite effect, cushioning users inside political silos, their walls reinforced by politically skewed news feeds.

Zsolt Czegledi/MTI/AP

Spokesperson for the Hungarian government Alexandra Szentkirályi carries a box loaded with donations for refugees from Ukraine during her visit at the local donation warehouse in Barabás, Hungary, March 6, 2022.

Yet from the first days of the Ukraine invasion, smartphones and social media technology have spread real-life images of Russia’s attacks on civilian areas almost instantly, giving the victims’ plight a worldwide 24/7 immediacy seen in no previous war.

The result: The only way to ignore it is to shut one’s eyes. And few people seem ready or willing to look away and do nothing.

The West’s unity in imposing unprecedentedly tough economic sanctions on Russia was largely the fruit of its political leadership, of course. But, in European countries at least, it was ordinary citizens who led the way and set the terms of debate, by demonstrating in their hundreds of thousands against Vladimir Putin’s attack and in solidarity with Ukraine.

Not just in Europe, but in America and beyond, Ukrainian churches have also suddenly found themselves welcoming visitors of all faiths to offer their prayers and support.

And for some, technology has shaped their ongoing response to the suffering.

The home-rental site Airbnb has been swamped by users who have been using the site to make donations to ordinary Ukrainians by signing up to “rent” homes in war zones that they have no intention of actually visiting.

A pair of young Harvard undergraduates, meanwhile, has rushed to set up an Airbnb-like site of their own – called Ukraine Take Shelter – to allow people to link up with Ukrainian refugees forced out by the invasion who are seeking a new home.

My rabbi friend, no doubt, would say that all of this has been as unsurprising as it is inspiring: a case of the divine pilot light igniting a widening flame of humanity.

And I have a feeling that – with the violence in Ukraine nowhere near over, and enormous help still certain to be needed even when it is – he would add a further challenge, and a further hope: that the world can keep that light burning.

Editor’s note: The description of the Ukraine Take Shelter app has been clarified.

In the tense weeks following the 2020 presidential election, longtime conservative activist Virginia Thomas, who goes by Ginni and is the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, peppered White House chief of staff Mark Meadows with messages urging him to keep fighting to overturn Joe Biden’s victory.

Some of the messages, first reported by The Washington Post and CBS News, referenced fringe conspiracy theories and false charges of fraud as Ms. Thomas railed at what she called “the greatest Heist of our History.”

In one message to Mr. Meadows shortly after the vote, Ms. Thomas quoted language then circulating on far-right websites that the “Biden crime family” and “ballot fraud co-conspirators,” including “fake stream media reporters,” were already being arrested and would be kept on barges off the military prison at Guantánamo Bay to face military tribunals for sedition.

“I hope this is true,” Ms. Thomas told the White House chief of staff.

In another message, Ms. Thomas referred to a false belief of QAnon conspiracists that President Donald Trump had watermarked mail-in ballots to track and expose voter fraud.

“Watermarked ballots ... have been part of a huge Trump & military white hat sting operation in 12 key battleground states,” she wrote.

None of the messages directly referred to her husband. But some legal experts say they raise questions of whether Justice Thomas should recuse himself from any cases dealing with the 2020 election or its aftermath.

Three questions about these communications:

Where did they come from?

The 29 texts obtained by Bob Woodward of the Post and Robert Costa of CBS News are a fraction of the 2,320 messages provided by Mr. Meadows to the House committee investigating the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.

Twenty-one of them were sent by Ms. Thomas to the White House chief of staff, and eight were his replies. They were written between Nov. 4 and 24, with the exception of one sent on Jan. 10, following the insurrection by Trump protesters at the Capitol. 

The final missive expressed anger at Vice President Mike Pence for refusing Mr. Trump’s request to block congressional certification of Mr. Biden’s victory. (Mr. Pence – and many legal experts – believed he had no constitutional authority to take such an action.)

“We are living through what feels like the end of America,” Ms. Thomas wrote. “Most of us are disgusted with the VP and are in listening mode to see where to fight with our teams.”

Mr. Meadows is no longer cooperating with the committee, and has filed suit to determine the validity of assertions of executive privilege to block further access to his Jan. 6 records. 

Do they matter?

Democrats say the Thomas pipeline reveals her easy access to the highest levels of the American government at a time when Mr. Trump and his allies were hoping to get the election outcome overturned by Supreme Court justices, including her husband.

They also reveal that Ms. Thomas, a longtime, vocal, right-wing presence in Washington, had fully embraced Mr. Trump’s election falsehoods, to the point of repeating fantastical conspiracy theories. She repeatedly urged the White House to embrace Sidney Powell, the lawyer whose so-called Kraken suits alleging voter fraud were all turned back by the courts, and who has been formally sanctioned by a Michigan federal judge for “abuse of the judicial process” by filing baseless lawsuits.

“Sidney Powell & improved coordination now will help the cavalry come and Fraud exposed and America saved,” wrote Ms. Thomas on Nov. 13, in a text she said had also been shared with “Jared,” presumably Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law.

No solid evidence has emerged of any widespread fraud in the 2020 election. Trump lawsuits alleging the contrary were dismissed at state and federal levels. Officials of both parties from across the nation attested the vote was free and fair, and Trump Attorney General William Barr found no evidence of widespread fraud.

That said, the communication between Mr. Meadows and Ms. Thomas might come as no surprise, given the documented access she and her husband have had to Washington’s conservative circles of power. And it may be notable that the communication largely ran one way, with Mr. Meadows replying only intermittently.

“Nothing about the text messages presents any legal issues,” George Terwilliger III, Mr. Meadows’ lawyer, told the Post.

Should Justice Thomas recuse himself?

Some legal analysts say the publication of the messages shows that Justice Thomas should now recuse himself from any cases that deal with the efforts of Mr. Trump and his allies to overturn election results – or with the effort of congressional investigators to understand those efforts.

There’s one such case now looming on the judicial horizon: John Eastman, a conservative law professor who drew up memos for the Trump team on possible ways to block Mr. Biden’s victory, has filed a suit arguing that attorney-client privilege shields his records from the House Jan. 6 committee. The case could well reach the Supreme Court on appeal.

Justice Thomas has already ruled in one similar case. Earlier this year he was the lone dissenting vote in an 8-1 ruling that refused a request from Mr. Trump to block the release of White House records about the Jan. 6 insurrection. 

Supreme Court justices are not bound by the judicial code of conduct, which applies to all other federal judges, and requires recusal in any situation in which a fair-minded person might doubt a judge’s impartiality.

But they are subject to a federal law that among other things requires recusal if their impartiality “might reasonably be questioned,”  noted University of Texas Law School professor Steve Vladeck on Twitter.

“The problem, of course, is the absence of an enforcement mechanism,” tweeted Professor Vladeck. That reinforces the need for the Supreme Court to be subject to a more meaningful and enforceable set of ethics rules, he said.

At a GOP retreat in Florida on Friday, House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy said he didn’t think recusal was necessary in this case. Justice Thomas should make that call, he said.

“It’s his decision based upon law,” said Representative McCarthy.

Aaron E. Martinez/American-Statesman/USA TODAY NETWORK/Reuters

Heavy traffic forms on U.S. Route 290 near the First Baptist Church in Dripping Springs, Texas, on Dec. 2, 2021. Much of the region's rapid growth is occurring in less-regulated unincorporated areas. Residents there don’t pay city taxes to places like Dripping Springs, but many do use city roads, sewer systems, and other infrastructure.

Deep in the heart of Texas, the traffic is backed up for almost a mile.

It’s a jarring sight for long-time residents of the Hill Country, a rural oasis of scrubby green hills, crystalline water, and bright white limestone west of Austin and San Antonio. But it’s not the only sign that change is afoot in this once rustic and hardscrabble region of the Lone Star State.

Eighteen-wheelers roll over the narrow country roads, and housing developments dot the limestone hills. Home values are climbing as low-wage workers struggle for housing. Meanwhile, sewage systems are hitting capacity, and drinking water supplies may not last through the next long drought.

In one of the fastest growing states in the country, this is the fastest growing region. The population has grown by nearly 50% in the past two decades, according to the Texas Hill Country Conservation Network (THCCN), with much of those gains in unincorporated – and largely unregulated – areas.

There have been positives. A larger tax base is funding high-quality schools; small businesses, particularly in tourism and hospitality, are flourishing. Development is inevitable, and not inherently bad, locals say, it just needs to be planned carefully.

But careful, regulated growth isn’t something Texas has typically prioritized. And with growth and development here only expected to continue in coming decades, the clock is ticking to lock in safeguards for what has made the Hill Country so attractive to newcomers.

“Everybody is, you know, loving it to death almost,” says David Baker, executive director of the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association.

“That’s the challenge: how to balance growth with conservation,” he adds. “How do we make sure that we don’t destroy the thing that attracted us here in the first place?”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

David Baker, executive director of the Wimberley Valley Watershed Association, at Jacob's Well, a natural spring in the Texas Hill Country, on Feb. 9, 2022. Rapid growth and development is straining the rural region's limited water resources.

Rapid growth – especially beyond the city limits

There was a time when Dripping Springs – known as “the Gateway to the Hill Country” – didn’t have a single traffic light. Today it has five, and a bona fide rush hour.

The sign at the city limits informs visitors of the population just shy of 1,800, but the sign has been out of date for over a decade. The population has more than doubled since then, and 10 times that number live outside the city limits in its so-called “extraterritorial jurisdiction” or ETJ.

“In the last five years the traffic has been out of control,” says Bill Foulds, the Dripping Springs mayor.

Like most Hill Country towns, recent population growth has not been in Dripping Springs itself, but in its ETJ and unincorporated areas of the county. Residents there don’t pay city taxes, but many do use city roads, sewer systems, and other infrastructure.

Dripping Springs’ population still isn’t big enough to justify a police or fire department. Mayor Foulds desperately wants to improve the city’s central intersection, but there’s only so much they can afford.

In the counties directly west of Austin and San Antonio, the population in unincorporated areas has more than doubled in the past 30 years, according to a recent report from THCCN, a coalition focused on preserving the region’s culture and natural resources. In addition to city infrastructure, those residents also benefit from access to local schools.

“We take it to heart that we cause some of the traffic problems here,” says Thomas Price, superintendent of the Boerne Independent School District.

Indeed, weekday mornings and midafternoons in the city herald a choke of cars dropping off and picking up students. Over 10,000 children attend the district’s 12 schools, and 400 have joined this year alone.

Enrollment is expected to double in the next 10 years, and the district wants to get ahead of the inevitable traffic challenge. 

One example: They’re hoping to put an elementary school in a new subdivision, near two other subdivisions, so more kids are walking, biking, or riding buses. 

Dr. Price grew up in Houston, watching the city sprawl out 30 miles in every direction with little forethought. He doesn’t want Boerne to end up in that situation, he says, “trying to figure it out afterwards.”

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

A new housing subdivision is advertised in the Texas Hill Country, on Feb. 9, 2022. The rural region west of Austin and north of San Antonio has been experiencing huge population growth. Residents are trying to ensure it develops in a way that doesn't irreparably damage local culture and natural resources.

A “miracle,” but is it affordable?

If “the Texas Miracle” could be captured in one image, it might be the main street of a town like Dripping Springs or Boerne.

While cars pack the streets, people crowd the sidewalks. Antique shops, boutique clothing stores, and small restaurants stand next to chain stores like Walgreens, Home Depot, and H-E-B grocery stores.

A combination of low taxes and business-friendly policies have fueled this “miracle” of growth and prosperity, state leaders say, and helped Texas weather the Great Recession and the pandemic better than most states, economically. (When it comes to the COVID-19 death rate, Texas ranks roughly in the middle.)

The degree to which that is true – and not just the result of, for example, a thriving oil industry – has been debated for years. But in the Hill Country, while the economic benefits of growth have been welcomed, some market forces have been raising concerns.

The Hill Country region saw an unprecedented volume of land sales, and increases in land prices, beginning in the second half of 2020, reported the Texas Real Estate Center at Texas A&M University. And as land values have surged, so have home prices and rent.

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Zillow

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Jacob Turcotte/Staff

In Boerne, Ty Wolosin has seen it firsthand. Both a city council member and owner of a brewpub in the heart of the town’s Main Street, he has staff making $17 an hour. “It’s still hard [for them] to afford to live in Boerne,” he says.

Meanwhile, the school district is struggling to hire hourly-wage workers like custodians and bus drivers, most of whom have to commute from more affordable San Antonio suburbs. At one of the high schools, just five of 14 custodial positions are filled, says Dr. Price.

“There’s not a lot of affordable housing,” he adds. “If we want to be a viable community ... that’s got to be a focus.”

Growth itself could be an answer to affordability issues, some argue.

“It will attract more services and things that will keep our economy diversified and attract opportunity for everyone,” says Jason Giulietti, president of the Greater San Marcos Partnership, a nonprofit that works with a variety of stakeholders – from business leaders to environmental groups – in Hays and Caldwell counties to attract suitable businesses to the region.

“Growth is going to happen,” he says. “We think by being involved and active in it, it lets you control that narrative a bit more.”

Keeping local character alive

In a region where locals used to drive to Austin or San Antonio to buy groceries, development has brought more convenience, but also more homogeneity.

“We’re seeing a sort of encroachment on local community character, local economies,” says Cliff Kaplan, program director at the Hill Country Alliance. “Most towns would like to see that look and feel maintained throughout their new development.”

Bandera has been particularly focused on this. Thirty minutes west of Boerne, the town known as “the Cowboy Capital of the World” has not yet seen the growth of some Hill Country cities.

There isn’t an H-E-B, and the largest store is the Tractor Supply Co. on the edge of town. Downtown, one- or two-story shops line the street with awnings covering the narrow sidewalks. Hitching rails for horses are still found, and used, outside businesses. As a whole, the town’s layout is virtually unchanged from the 1800s.

Rebeca Gibson, a city council member, is hoping it will stay that way regardless of the development she knows will arrive in the coming decades.

Henry Gass/The Christian Science Monitor

Homes being built in the Ranches at Creek Side housing development outside Boerne, Texas, on Feb. 9, 2022. The homes sit on karst limestone bedrock, raising worries about disrupting recharge of the subterranean aquifer that is an important source of drinking water for the Texas Hill Country.

An effort by the city council to revamp local zoning codes is “very, very technical,” says Ms. Gibson. But “it’s a great example of how our city is working towards achieving more responsible development.”

A fragile water supply, under strain

Bandera is now hoping to get ahead of the next big challenge: water.

The town can look like a sepia-toned photograph of the old West, but there’s nothing nostalgic about the liquid waste known as effluent – from the local wastewater treatment plant and sometimes from surface runoff – draining daily into the Medina River that flows through town.

A new wastewater treatment plant is in the works (further from the river), along with some other potential disposal methods.

“I’m just grateful that we have the opportunity to change it,” says Ms. Gibson.

Indeed, of all the development-related issues here, water might be the most challenging – and one where many cities, unlike Bandera, are playing catch-up.

First, there isn’t much of it. The primary source of drinking water has long been a network of underground aquifers flowing through the karst limestone under the hills and feeding a thousand miles of pristine streams. And these aquifers are among the most stressed in the state.

Second, the water that is there is exceptionally clean, and exceptionally easy to contaminate. Karst is the geological equivalent of Swiss cheese, full of holes that allow rainwater – and contaminants – to easily infiltrate the water supply. A diverse and fragile ecosystem has developed around this pristine but fragile hydrology, and development poses a variety of threats.

Developing open land could pave over areas where water can filter down into the aquifer, and it could whisk contaminant-laden effluent directly into streams and rivers. More people in the Hill Country means not just more pavement, but also more sewage and more demand for drinking water.

“Governmental entities charged with stewarding our water resources are faced with an almost impossible task,” says Mr. Kaplan from the Hill Country Alliance.

In Dripping Springs, the wastewater system has hit its maximum capacity. The city has implemented a moratorium on development, and for six years it has been trying to get a new wastewater discharge permit from the state to increase capacity. The permit has been tied up in legal battles, however, as environmental groups fear the permit would lead to the pollution of local waterways.

David Baker’s dilemma

When it comes to water in Boerne, quantity is as big a concern as quality for Micah Voulgaris. As general manager of the Cow Creek Groundwater Conservation District, the local groundwater regulator, it’s a looming crisis he can’t ignore.

“The drought of record is the seven-year drought in the 1950s,” he says, settling into a leather chair in a meeting room at his office. “It’s not an ‘if,’ it’s a ‘when’ on a drought worse than in the ’50s.”

Meanwhile, the interstate through Boerne is slated for expansion, and the city continues to grow. The district hasn’t been drilling as many wells as they did when he started there in the early 2000s. Instead they’ve been restricting the number of wells landowners can have. But it all adds up.

“You’re constantly adding onto that total use,” he says. “Water levels are going to decline the more people you have using it.”

Leaning back in the chair, he sounds tired. But he tries to strike a more positive note.

“People aren’t going to just stop moving here,” he says. “We just have to figure out: Is what we’re doing going to be enough along the way?”

David Baker was on his way to New Mexico in 1988 when he stopped in Wimberley for the first time. He saw Jacob’s Well, a natural spring that sinks over 100 feet into the Hill Country aquifer system, and never left. The spring shares a name with his son – 9 months old when they found it – and it was privately owned then, so he bought a portion and opened a bed and breakfast named Dancing Waters. His daughter was born at the B&B.

In 2000, for the first time in its history, the spring stopped flowing, and it’s stopped flowing twice more since then. Mr. Baker donated a conservation easement on his land and sold the well to WVWA, with the county eventually acquiring the property. He's devoted the past quarter-century of his life to preserving Jacob’s Well and other Hill Country natural resources. He’s now such a conservation icon here that a species of amphipod discovered in the spring last year is named after him (Stygobromus bakeri).

He’s been telling his story for decades, and it’s one he repeats to two elderly women he runs into on their way to the well on a warm morning last month.

The women aren’t just visitors. One of them – from Denton, a city north of Dallas – tells him she’s looking to move here. It feels great to get out of the city, she says. She’s just hoping land prices here fall back into her budget.

Mr. Baker thanks them and wishes them a good visit.

“Sometimes I’m like, ‘Oh man, it’d be nice to just not have all these people here,’” he says. But it’s a dilemma.

The more people who visit Jacob’s Well – and the Hill Country – the more people will, like him, want to move there. But the more people who visit, the more people will, like him, want to protect places like the well.

That’s the hope, at least.

“Deep down inside, we all know we need water to survive,” he says.

“It’s a miracle that millions of gallons of water is coming out of the ground that we can still drink,” he adds. “It’s up to us to notice that and appreciate it.”

Editor’s note: This story has been updated to clarify both steps David Baker has taken with his Jacob’s Well property and the timeline of his efforts.

Reuters

People visit the U.S. Supreme Court building in Washington, March 15.

Every time a demographic barrier has been broken by a nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court – in ethnicity, race, religion, or gender – praise has collided with doubts. Would a more diverse bench of justices bring better justice and a more perfect expression of American democracy?

During this week’s questioning of nominee Ketanji Brown Jackson by the Senate Judiciary Committee, those doubts seemed far fewer than for nominees in the past who broke demographic barriers. This is a step closer to the ideal set forth by the main author of the Constitution. “The genius of liberty,” James Madison wrote, “seems to demand on one side, not only that all power should be derived from the people, but that ... the trust should be placed not in a few, but in a number of hands.”

Are the principles of self-governance inherent in the Constitution a natural and eternal unifier of a society riven on issues like race? Are the Constitution and its enforcer, the high court, above identities like race, gender, or religion? Viewed case by case, perhaps not. But over the longer arc of history, the court’s decisions show that American society is lifting up its thinking. In 1896 the court upheld segregation in Plessy v. Ferguson. Fifty-eight years later, its Brown v. Board of Education, it corrected that decision.

One uniquely American tool for bending law toward the country’s founding principles is dissent – and it has been used perhaps most skillfully by the court’s “firsts.” In his 1928 dissent of Olmsted v. United States, Justice Louis Brandeis argued against unlawful wire tapping. The nation’s first Jewish Supreme Court Justice set an enduring standard for privacy when he wrote about the “right to be left alone.” Justices Thurgood Marshall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and Antonin Scalia – the first Black man, first Jewish woman, and first Italian American – cast long shadows of influence through their dissents – dissents informed by the diversity of thought shaped by their life experiences.

“We must dissent because America can do better,” Justice Marshall observed, “because America has no choice but to do better.”

If Judge Jackson is confirmed, she will not only be a role model as a Black person and a woman, but will also be a reminder of the need for justice to be universal in its application to all. A diverse court helps achieve that. Each time the range of individual perspectives on the court has widened, the principles entrusted to its care have been renewed.