I reread this week the speech given by Terumi Tanaka at the ceremony to present the Nobel Peace Prize to the organisation he co-chairs, Nihon Hidankyo, the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organisations.
It is, as you will be aware, the 80th anniversary
of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’ve been looking at the footage of
that time, listening to scratched audio recordings of the pilot who flew the
bomber and hearing the voices of survivors.
I am one of the survivors of the
atomic bombing of Nagasaki [taught Tanaka]. At the time, I was 13 years old, at
home, around 3 kilometers east of ground zero.
It was August 9, 1945. I suddenly
heard the buzzing sound of a bomber jet, and was soon after engulfed in a
bright, white light. Surprised, I ran downstairs and got down on the floor,
covering my eyes and ears with my hands. The next moment, an intense shock wave
passed through our entire house. I have no memory of that moment, but when I
came to my senses, I found myself under a large, glass sliding door. It was a
miracle that none of the glass was broken, and I was somehow spared injuries.
He went on to document wandering through the devastation of
the aftermath of that bombing, finding the corpses of two aunts, a cousin, and
his grandfather and another uncle alive at that time – who both died shortly
after.
The deaths I witnessed at that
time could hardly be described as human deaths. There were hundreds of people
suffering in agony, unable to receive any kind of medical attention. I strongly
felt that even in war, such killing and maiming must never be allowed to
happen.
The work of the organisation he leads was in part about
providing care and funds for victims, but also about the attempt to save “humankind
from its crisis through the lessons learned from our experience.” He claimed,
on behalf of the organisation, partial credit for a “nuclear taboo” but noted
12,000 nuclear warheads still remain in the world, 4,000 of which, he said, were
operationally deployed. He referred to statements made by Israeli then-and-still
junior minister Amichai Ben-Eliyahu who appeared to be open to the possibility
of a nuclear weapon being used in Gaza. Prime Minister Netanyahu reprimanded Ben-Eliyahu,
but Tanaka doesn’t seem to be re-assured.
From a Jewish perspective, the aftermath of nuclear
devastation feels reminiscent of the most apocalyptic visions of our prophets,
“A day of densest clouds, [warned
the prophet Zephania, “The people] shall walk like blind men. Their blood shall
be spilled like dust... Moreover, their silver and gold Shall not avail to save
them.... The whole land shall be consumed.” (Chapter 1)
And in the aftermath of the second world war, throughout the
Cold War and Israel pursued her own nuclear deterrence, Rabbis and religious
ethicists went to work on this question – awful indeed as nuclear devastation
is, can it be permitted to hold, to build and to develop nuclear weapons as a deterrent.
Rabbi Brad Artson, spends much of his 1988 book, Love
Peace and Pursue Peace, classifying the Jewish approach to war, compulsory
wars – to include self-defence – Milchemet Mitzvah and the optional wars
Milchemet Reishut.
And finally, towards
the very end of the book, turns to nuclear war.
Recall, [he writes,] the law of
the rodef, the pursuer, and how the person who was being attacked had the right
to stop the attacker. The right to kill the attacker was strictly limited-only
during the actual attack, and only if there was no less extreme way of
preventing the assault. [he cites Talmud Sanhedrin 74a]
if one was pursuing his fellow
to slay him, and the pursued could have saved himself by maiming the limb of
the pursuer, but in-stead killed his pursuer, the pursued should be executed on
that account.
The military parallel to this
legislation about individual self-defense would imply that warfare which
exceeds the minimal level of force which is required for defense is criminal-a
capital offense. Nuclear warfare, in its inability to be targeted to limited
goals must inevitably exceed any proportional level of force, a violation of a
principle of the just conduct of war.
There is, he says, no proportionality in nuclear conflict and,
he claims, proportionality is a key part of the Jewish approach to the law of
War.
The former Chief Rabbi of British Orthodoxy felt similarly, writing
in 1962
It would appear that a defensive
war likely to endanger the survival of the attacking and the defending nation
alike, if not in-deed of the entire human race, can never be justified. On the
assumption, then, that the choice posed by a threatened nuclear attack would be
either complete mutual destruction or surrender, only the second alternative
may be morally vindicated.[1]
That is to say that Rabbi Immanuel Jakobovitz felt the
nuclear response to threat would be so disproportionate as to mandate surrender.
The issue is the way in which civilian destruction comes alongside
any nuclear threat. Attack on us is not understood, in Jewish thought as permitting
an unlimited destructive response. I’m aware that sentence will have a
contemporary resonance. So be it.
This is Rabbi Maurice Lamm, for decades the guiding voice of
Yeshiva University, writing in 1965, i an article entitled, Red or Dead.
Before the atomic era, "war
or peace" was a reasonable choice. Political or economic aims could be
achieved by means of war. Now, however, the development of weapons that can
destroy continents and annihilate whole populations has ended the
reasonableness of this choice. It has eliminated the distinction between the military
and the civilian, for its devastation knows no bounds. It has nullified the
possibility of victory, even the possibility of truce after war, for nothing
can remain save rubble and bones.
Rabbi Artson, in his book, Love Peace, writes
There is some irony to the fact
that it was Harry Truman, the only President to order the use of an atomic
bomb, who understood that: [and here Artson quotes Truman]
You have got to understand
that this isn't a military weapon. It is used to wipe out women, children, and
unarmed people, and not for military use. So we have to treat this differently
from rifles and cannon and ordinary things like that."
Artson suggests a new categorisation for war, in our time,
where technology has so far outstripped the imagined horrors of legally acceptable
violence in our classical texts – Michemet Mitzvah, Milchemet Reishut, Din
Rodef- imagined in our classical texts. The phrase he suggests for an understanding
of war in our time is מִלְחֶמֶת
עִרְבּוּבְיָא Milchemet Irbuviah – literally
a war of chaos.
The phrase appears once in Shir HaShirim Rabba 4:4 to
describe a war of over 60,000.
Most modern warfare fits this
category [Artson writes]. Yet even modern conventional wars are dwarfed in the
number of lives they scar or terminate when compared to the horrible effects of
thermonuclear destruction. That truly is a milhemet irbuviah, a war
which brings on complete chaos, a war, in fact, which returns us to the chaos
which preceded Creation-a chaos which is our impudent and foolish rejection of
Creation, a rejection of life.
What are we to learn from this history, this awful history,
where the wreckage and devastation of the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki are so morally challenging and where there are still 12,000 nuclear
warheads and where, despite the claims that those bombs would surely bring
peace to the world …. ahh, for peace in the world.
My mind returns to the remarkable opening scene in the Oscar
winning documentary, The Gatekeepers featuring interviews with all the surviving
directors of Israel’s Shin Bet counter-terrorist security service. I shared
this in my Rosh Hashanah sermon back in September last year.
The movie, opens with grainy black and white footage of a
van driving down a road. Yuval Diskin is explaining the situation.
“Let’s
say,” he says, “you are hunting a terrorist and you’ve been looking for them
for a long time and you can get him, but there are 1 or 2 other people in the
car and you’re not sure if they are part of the gang or not. What to do? Shoot
or don’t shoot? There’s no time. These situations last seconds, minutes at
most. People expect a decision, and by a decision, they mean “to act.” ‘Don’t
do it,’ seems easier, but it’s often harder.”
And the
crosshairs of the drone footage converge on the roof of the van and the van
erupts into a fireball.
The point
of the movie, and I think the lesson of Hiroshima, is that it can be
overwhelmingly tempting to use a weapon you have spent time and money developing
and readying if you find yourselves threatened or attacked. It feels like the
strong thing to do. And it will always feels as if using the very weapon you
have spent time and money developing will solve the problem you face – it will
bring peace. To a hammer, goes the saying, every problem looks like a nail. But
the ability of weapons to bring peace is limited in the extreme – especially when
this gnawing question of proportionality raises its head – as it always will in
a war of chaos.
The lesson
of the 80 years that have passed since the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki,
is that the devastation of those cities does not end with the moment military
victory is assured. It carries on, like a half-life, slowly, perhaps,
diminishing over time, but still raw and horrendous decades after the initial
destruction.
We need
other paths. We need to spend the efforts and resources we, as humans, have
poured into military responses and weaponry and violence into building for
peace. Truman again, “Let us not become so preoccupied with weapons that we
lose sight of the fact that war itself is the real villain.” Deterrence, Artson
writes in the conclusion of his book, “can only be accepted temporarily,” and we
must always “pursue [peace even] if is not readily obtainable.” It’s only
acceptable to gather military strength to deter and use military strength to
fight for peace, if fight for peace, if the fight against war if being waged
with even greater commitment.
In the
words of the Prayer for Peace, based on language of Rabbi Nachman
May it be Your will,
Holy One, our God, our ancestors’ God,
that you erase war and bloodshed from the world
and in its place draw down
a great and glorious peace
so that nation shall not lift up sword against nation
neither shall they learn war any more.
Rather, may all the inhabitants of the earth
recognize and deeply know
this great truth:
that we have not come into this world
for strife and division
nor for hatred and rage,
nor provocation and bloodshed.
We have come here only
to encounter You,
eternally blessed One.
Shabbat Shalom
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