War, Above and Below
Matot-Masei 5784-2024, in memory of my father
An English version of my annual dvar Torah in memory of my father and teacher Sanford “Whitey” Watzman, who left us ten years ago on 2 Av. The original appears in “Shabbat Shalom,” the weekly portion pamphlet published by the religious peace movement Oz Veshalom-Netivot Shalom.
The original Hebrew version can be downloaded here.
The Tanach (Hebrew Bible) confronts us with many morally difficult passages, in particular those involving morality in wartime. The ethics of fighting wars as they appear in these sources is diametrically opposed to anything we can possibly accept or excuse today. One of the most difficult is the war against Midian (Numbers 31). This war of revenge against Midian, commanded by God, seems to be purely evil. It is a war in which the Children of Israel kill men, women, and children, and take great spoils.
It’s not just the Tanach. Hardly any of the Sages and commentators on the Torah over the generations, until just very recently, voice any objection.
For the Jewish people, questions of war ethics were entirely theoretical until the dawn of the Jewish national movement over the last 150 years. Since the establishment of the Jewish underground movements, and all the more so after the establishment of the Israel Defense Forces as the army of the independent Jewish state, these questions have grown acute. They have been discussed and debated in light of our own tradition and of the spirit of the times, including sources from other cultures. For other nations and states, the effort to define and put into practice moral guidelines for the conduct of war is also a relatively recent phenomenon.
Classic and modern Torah exegesis offers any number of explanations and apologetic readings of the war against the Midianites. Two of them are of particular interest today.
The first seems, at least at first glance, to be the simple meaning of the text. God commands the war of revenge. It is not simply a general command, as becomes clear as the story progresses. God requires the Israelites to comply with his command in all its details, and reacts angrily when the people and its leaders do not do so. In modern times, this requirement of total obedience to God is exemplified by the philosopher Søren Kirkegaard, who argues that the will of God defines morality. In other words, there is no basis for evoking or applying values that come from outside the Bible to critique the actions recounted there. If God commanded Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac on an altar, then, by definition, the sacrifice of Isaac on an altar is moral, correct, and mandatory, even if it is difficult and seems to violate other values. This is the approach taken by some fundamentalist Jews today, who argue that we, as Jews, are obligated by the morality of the Bible, not that of modern Western civilization.
The second approach is the one I learned as a child from my father and teacher z”l, to whom this dvar Torah is dedicated. It appears in classical Torah commentary (for example, Nachmanides on Abraham’s exile of Hagar). But, as far as I can see, it is not applied to the war on Midian or any similar case. I learned from my father that such difficult passages are to be read as negative examples that teach us what not to do. “How is our holy book different from those of other religions?” he would ask, and answer: “Our sources do not portray us only as righteous. They don’t skip or paint over the bad deeds of our forefathers and our tradition. They wash our dirty linen in public to make us understand that we need to be on the alert, and to stress that even the Chosen People, the Jews, are not only capable of sinning but actually sin in practice. Therefore, we are not meant to accept whatever God says uncritically.”
On this reading, when God enjoins Moses to wage a war of revenge on Midian, he expects Moses, and the nation as a whole, to respond as Abraham did in his dialogue with God on the fate of Sodom. In other words, the command to wage vengeance on Midian was a test that we failed. We must learn from it that when we receive an immoral or illegal order, we must refuse to obey, not just when the order comes from an army officer, but also when it comes from God or his prophets.
A basis for both these approaches can be found in the Torah and its commentators. But they can also be shown wanting. Kierkegaard, for example, cannot account for Abraham’s response to God’s intention to destroy Sodom and all its inhabitants. On the other hand, my father has trouble explaining why the story of the war on Midian offers no even a hint that it is meant as a test and that he expected Moses, and the nation as a whole, to refuse to carry out his orders.
Today, many of us feel lost in the face of the moral dilemmas raised by our war against Hamas. We feel as if we are lost in the wilderness. Our country’s and army’s leaders declare that the current war is not a war of revenge, wars of revenge being unacceptable according today’s international standards. It is, they say, purely a justifiable defensive war, a war of survival. But does a defensive war, and the desire to prevent future brutal slaughters of Jews, justify all the IDF’s actions in the Gaza Strip? I cannot answer that question, and I don’t think there is any simple answer.
I recently found indirect support for my father’s position in an unexpected place—in a debate relating to the laws of Shabbat in the Babylonian Talmud (Shabbat 69b). The text asks what a person should do if he gets lost in the wilderness and does not know when Shabbat is. Rav Huna maintains that he must count six days and observe Shabbat on the seventh, even if in the world outside the wilderness that day is not Shabbat. Hiya bar Abba disagrees and insists that such a person must immediately observe Shabbat and then count six days until again observing Shabbat. The Gemara explains that Rav Huna believes that the person lost in the wilderness must emulate God, who counted six days and then Shabbat. Hiya bar Abba, in contrast, maintains that the lost person must emulate Adam and Eve, who were created on the sixth day, just before Shabbat, and therefore first experienced Shabbat and then counted six days until the next Shabbat. But they sinned just before the first Shabbat, and were punished, so that immediately after that Shabbat they had to labor and work hard until the next day of rest.
The message is that Shabbat looks different from the divine and human perspectives. What is surprising about the Talmudic passage is that it does not privilege the divine perspective.
This is how we need to look at moral dilemmas in wartime. Even if Kierkegaard is correct that God’s will defines morality (which I doubt is the case), that does not release us from the obligation to grapple with difficult questions as human beings. As humans, we must labor for six days before reaching Shabbat. This applies to moral questions as well. Moral principles are not handed down to us by God, ready to use. We must achieve them through great labor. And we have no means to do so other than to think them through rationally, taking into consideration the whole range of sources available to us, not just in our own tradition but in the traditions of the world as a whole.