The Patterning Instict, Religion and the Improvement of our Human Selves

I want to talk about a book I’ve been reading, Jeremy Lent’s The Patterning Instinct

Lent starts with the model we think we know about how human beings evolve. He suggests that most of us think that human development starts with a proto-ape who hits another proto-ape with a bone, resulting in the other fighting back with a stone, then a pointy thing, then a bullet then a missile. And the narrative of human development is I’m going to hit you and if you hit back I’ll hit you harder. And the world out there can feel a bit like that.

But then he says this – we’ve got it backwards. The driving force of human development is not ever-increasing violence, it’s ever-increasing kindness, or rather ever-increasing turning towards community building and co-operation.

And he starts piling on the evidence.

If the goal was to be stronger and tougher, why are we so weak? Through evolution we have lost claws, lost sharp teeth, our skin is soft. In area after area he documents how the human has evolved to work together, in community, in selflessness, not selfishness.

The scientific consensus is that being tougher and harder isn’t how the fittest of us have survived.

We’ve survived through becoming softer and weaker – almost so as to force ourselves, as an entire human race, into relying on other people for our own survival and flourishing.

The book piles on the evidence for this in terms of the evolution of our bones and organs, our brain most particularly – on a neurological level – we are built to look for patterns of interconnectivity.

And I know we live in a world that too often doesn’t feel that way, but it turns out that the story of humanity is the story partnering with one another, using empathy and being communal, rather than selfishly minded.

It’s a big issue, in our fragile world, at this fragile time. I saw one reviewer suggest that Lent’s book could be read as a counter-argument to the conclusion of a similarly expansive narrative of the human race, Noah Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. Harari sees the human as essentially violent. He sees religion as essentially a tool wielded by frauds to wreck that violence. He sees the end of the human race – and this emerges in his second book Homo Deus – as we are overtaken by computer algorithms and, with a nod to no-self Buddist teachings, he’s fine with that.

Lent on the other hand wants to stop us slipping away from who we truly are as social, interconnected, communal minded creatures. There’s work to do pull the tiller towards the direction of this social version of ourselves, it’s urgent work, but it’s work to pull the tiller towards who we truly are. That’s hugely optimistic.

So what does Lent have to say about religion? Of course, if you want to know about how humans beings have come together to form communities – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to know about our greatest communal creations; from the buildings we have built to the music we have composed to the stories we have told – religion is going to be at the heart of that narrative. If you want to tell a story of how one person changed or improved the life of another person, or how one group of people sought to improve the life of other – religion is going to be at the heart of narrative again, and again across time and across the world.

Let me pause a moment and address this canard; sometimes I hear people say that religion is a cause of violence and therefore a bad thing. Let me just try this. Think of the three worst instances of violence in the century now 20 years past – I’ll give you Stalinism, I’ll give you Nazism and I’ll give Maoism, or I don’t know you would want to include genocide in Cambodia or Rwanda or former Yugoslavia – well I would consider religion culpable of zero out of six right there. And if you were to want to suggest that every now and then there was a Pastor who supported Hitler or a Jew who became entranced by Stalinism, I would say this. Let’s put religion’s culpability for violence on one side of a scale, and then put religion’s power as a force for peace on the other. Give me, as the advocate for religion, points for Archbishop Desmond Tutu for his work in the peaceful dismantling of Apartheid, give me points for all the religious among the Righteous Among the Nations who gave their lives and risked their lives for the sake of Jews fleeing Nazi brutality – give me points for Sister Maria Rozak who turned her nunnery into a shelter for dozens of Jewish refugees from the Vilna Ghetto including the great poet and resistance fighter Abba Kovner and future Member of Israel’s Kenesset Haika Grossman.

 Give me points for Martin Luther King, an ordained second-generation Baptist minister, and his good friend, the man who marched on his right hand side at Selma, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel – actually the great uncle of one our members here. Give me points for every act of charity and love and mutual support that has ever emerged from a church, a mosque, a Gurdwara or a Synagogue and I’ll stack any failing of religion on the other end of the scale and, Dr Harari, Prof Dawkings and colleagues, we’ll see how the scales balance out.

The point is this, if we are communally hardwired, as humans, and I believe we are, it’s not, I believe, just a mathematical weighing up that has caused us to be this way. Somewhere, somehow we have trained our subconscious to look beyond our own need. We have been touched by a belief that otherness, beyondness is necessary for our human flourishing. And that’s where religion comes in. Religion is the millennia-old act of believing that there is something to be gained by looking beyond our own personal selfish understanding, and an attempt to fuse that looking out at the beyond ourselves with the looking out of our fellows, other people with whom we share a belief in the way to look beyond. And all the stories we tell of our religions, and all the traditions and songs and the foods and all of that – it’s how we hold ourselves together so we can look beyond.

And I believe, as a person of faith, that somehow, somewhere in all of that, we are met – in our looking beyond, by that which is truly beyond. Somehow, we are touched, or if not ourselves, we’ll share the journey with someone we believe was so touched – even if they are long dead. And that, in that moment of being touched, all our reaching toward community and the beyond is guided towards decency and selflessness, or, as I would say as a religious person, holiness.

That’s why I believe in religion.

But let me give Jeremy Lent his due, and I also want to say something about so-what, about what we should do now.

For Jeremy Lent religion is a spandrel. 

A spandrel is the triangular piece that emerges in architecture when you use arches, or really any kind of circular form embedded in a square form. We’ve got a good few in this very building. For Jeremy Lent the spandrel is something that is capable of looking beautiful and attracting attention, but it’s not really a genuinely important part of the architectural scheme – it’s the bit that is left over because you really wanted an arch. His point is that though religion might seem to be integral to how human beings have come together through thousands of years and integral to how human beings have shown kindness and altruism for thousands of years, religion isn’t really the thing behind all this. Religion, says Jeremy Lent, is the left-over bit from the other stuff. Well I just don’t agree. That is to say, I do agree about the metaphor, I just don't agree with the message. The real issue about a spandrel is that it’s a necessary part of building an arch in a square space. You can’t have one without the other and every architect knows that. Spandrels are the equivalent of a Rubin-vase-that-is-also-two-human-faces. Similarly, religion is an intrinsic part of the human instinct and a necessary complement to our quest for human progress, it isn’t the irrelevant afterthought. And it's unfair and lacking in a much-vaunted claim to desire scientific rigour honesty to suggest otherwise.

That’s some high-level theology. So what do we do about it? Actually, this week’s Torah portion provides helpful insight. Jacob is dying and he has twelves sons he wishes to bless. Lola gave the example of the blessing Jacob give Joseph – about a wild donkey and an archer and she said it wasn’t a blessing that could guide her in her life, and indeed, I think that’s the point. Jacob’s blessing of Joseph wasn’t a blessing for Lola, it was a blessing for Joseph. And for each of his 12 sons Jacob has a different blessing, and a different blessing for his grandson also. We could have had a very short Torah reading today in which the Torah could have said, Jacob wanted to bless his children. He called them all together and said … and then there would have been the thing he would have said to all of them. But that’s not what the Torah records. It records each blessing individually.

I’m reminded of a portion we’ll read later in the year. Eventually, the children of Israel will get out of Egypt and head into the wilderness and receive the instructions to build a Tabernacle in the wilderness. And when the tabernacle is dedicated, a representative from each of the twelve tribes of Israel brings an offering. Each tribe brings;

One silver bowl weighing 130 shekels and one silver basin of 70 shekels, both filled with choice flour with oil mixed in, a gold ladle of 10 shekels, filled with incense; a bull a ram, a lamb in its first year, a goat two oxen, five rams, five he-goats, and five yearling lambs. 

And we get told, in identical language, this list 12 times, for each of the tribes. And the question is asked, why didn’t the Torah just tell us that everyone bought the same thing and do it once and be done.

The Rabbis say it’s to remind us that each individual needs to be honoured in their own right.  Just as Jacob does at the end of his life.

Here’s how to give a blessing; You look into the heart of a person, You look to find that particular part of that person that is utterly unique, never before seen, never after to be seen – it’s to look for what we would call the Tzelem, the image of God infolded into each human – but infolded differently in me than in you or you or you.

And it’s to direct that Tzelem, that unique perfect possibility, on a path of goodness. That’s my job. That’s why I’m so honoured to be a representative of religion and of this religion most especially. A blessing is a direction towards the path of our souls, that part of who we are which knows, somehow that we are here to good, to be kind, to reach towards others. It’s a nudge along the path each of us know we want to tread but area nervous, or blocked, or blinded.

So try this, try this if you are a parent or a child, a person living alone, or living by yourself or in community – find someone to bless. You can like them, or not like them, they can be relatives or strangers – and look for that piece of that person that is truly important. You don’t need to tell them you are blessing them – if you are English that bit will feel awkward, but share something with them that can guide them on this path of goodness, of shared communal existence, share something with them that guide them well on path in which their soul needs to travel. Open up a possibility, acknowledge a piece of wonderment. Just wish ‘em well. But guide towards the good.

I think that action, that moment of blessing or being blessed is the very heart of what it truly means to be religious. And I do like, as I hope you have figured out, I do like religion.

Shabbat Shalom

Armistice - 100 Years Since the End of World War One

In honour of the centenary of the Armistice for the Great War, I’ve been reading a series of sermons collected by Mark Saperstein in his terrific "Jewish Preaching in Times of War" (Littman 2008). These are sermons preached from right within the First World War. I owe a huge debt to Professor Saperstein's work.

You can feel clouds of war gathering already in 1913 reading this extract from the Induction Sermon of Joseph Hertz as Chief Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations of this country. Hertz, of course, was the first rabbinic graduate of JTS, and this was his local Shul. I’m not sure where the sermon was preached - it could have been at this very pulpit.

“Ours is an age of doubt and disillusionment. Times are out of joint. Theological foundations are rocking. Dreams of humanity that but yesterday seemed within grasp of realization are dissolving into thin air in the face of the malicious race-hatred that is being fanatically preached and the purposeless human slighter cynically practised, in the opening decades of the 20^th Century.”

Hertz came to this country from South Africa.  I wonder if he brought with him a particular fear of war having been closer to the Boer War than other British Rabbis.

Then in July 1914, war broke out. In August of that year, the Jewish Chronicle reported Rev Morris Joseph preaching at Berkley Street Synagogue,

“We resume our Sabbath services this week in circumstances all but unparallel in the history of mankind...The lust to destroy and slay has taken possession of minds hitherto chiefly concerned to heal the hurt of the world and to set the feet of mankind more firmly on the highway of progress. It is a cruel blow to our optimism and our most cherished ideals. It makes us doubt the value, the reality of our civilisation, the fixity of purpose of God himself.”

Joseph went on to argue that our faith should be strong in face of such challenges, but the existential challenges, particularly to those who felt that the world was a romantic place of progress, were very real.

Saperstein suggests that part of the rip at the heart of Rabbis speaking about the First World War - and how could they not speak about the First World War - is that so many had German ancestry themselves.

In a High Holyday sermon in Philadelphia, German-born Rabbi, Joseph Krauskopf shared this;

“Not in the darkest ages of the past has the world been so full of violence, so crimsoned with blood, so smitten with savagery. Our eyes roam over scores of battlefields, our feet stumble against the bodies of thousands of human beings slain, of tens of thousands mangles - slain and mangled by fellow human beings who had never known each other, who had never entertained the slightest ill-feeling against each other... We enter homes from which went forth in the prime of youth and manhood, and in response to the fatherland’s call, husbands and fathers, brothers and sons, who will never, never return, who moulder in some unknown grave or ditch, who have paid with their heart’s blood some diplomat’s blunder, some monarch’s land greed or lust of power.”

Saperstein notes that British Rabbis had found it easier to support the Boer War, American Rabbis, largely from Eastern Europe, had found it easier to support the war against the Spanish.

But this war, the Great War, pitted Jew against Jew.

Rabbi George, Gedaliah, Silverstone, was an Orthodox Rabbi, born in Poland, serving a congregation in Washington

“Whose heart did not throb with agony, whose eyes did not fill with tears, whose blood did not turn cold in his veins upon reading in the newspapers about a Jewish soldier in the Russian army who stabbed with his bayonet a soldier from the Austrian army. The mortally wounded man cried out with his last breath, Shma Yisael Adonai Eloheinu Adonia Ehad’ and with the world echad, his soul departed. When the Russian soldier realised that he had killed one of his brothers, that he had thrust his bayonet into a fellow Jew, he went out of his mind with grief. Alas, alas, that things like this happen in our time.”

Some were even opposed to entering the war. The American Rabbi to a German-speaking congregation, Maurice Harris of Temple Israel of Harlem, argued for civil disobedience in the face of what he saw was unjustifiable militarism;

“How stirred was the civilised world when 1500 persons lost their lives on the Titanic - and now such a loss of life is a daily incident” He called for civil disobedience to keep American out of the War - 22 Sept 1914, “Even when monarchs, bureaucracies and Governments, trained in the militant school, may be hesitant in relegating war to the past, the masses of people must decide for peace. If they decide with an insistent note, “We will not fight,” where is the power of Government to promulgate a war? The old standard set in the Crimean was, ‘Theirs not to reason why, theirs but to do and die,’ must be rejected by the people. They are not pawns, but living beings. Theirs is to reason why. They must ask what right has a Government to plunge the land into war?”

But for the vast majority, especially once war had been declared by the Americans, it was possible to feel conflict about war in general, to feel conflict when the enemy also has Jewish soldiers and still support this war and to support it without equivocation, especially after the attacks on the American ships, the Essex and the Lusitania. And most especially after America formally entered the war. At this point, any suggestion of failing to support their country could have been seen as treacherous, but it’s not just a fear of being labelled disloyal to his homeland that motivates Rabbi Stephen S. Wise, the great leader of American Reform Judaism in the early 20^th C;     

“We have not gone into the war because of the Lusitania, nor because of any single ferocity of undersea warfare, but because these and similar things represent a type of national mind or rather of governmental theory which will either subdue and conquer the world or be overcome by it. To the task of repressing and of combating this world-menace that nations may again dwell amid security  and all peoples emerge from under the shadow of the destroying sword - we have resolved to dedicate our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honour.”

There is a proud nationalism in these words of the Detroit based Reform Rabbi, Leo Franklin;

The US President’s declaration of war “leaves no doubt as to where this American people stand upon the question of a final settlement with those who have betrayed humanity; that it definitely cuts off all hope that any might have held for the discussion of peace while Germany and her allies occupy an inch of territory that is not rightfully theirs... It says much for the spirit of the American people that it stands to a man squarely behind the President in his decision and that its men and its women are willing to continue their sacrifices of life and of treasure; yes that they would have resented as un-American any other attitude than that which has been taken by the President.”

“The time has passed” he later taught “to ask whether our participation in the war will prolong it or bring it to a more speedy conclusion. It is too late for us to discuss these things now, even if, now that war has been declared. What seems to me to be the case is that this great people have heard what was spoken to our fathers centuries ago “Lo Taamod Al Daam Re’echa” - Thou shall not stand by the blood of your fellow.’ (Lev 19:16)

And later Rabbi Franklin preached “America’s tasks is not so much to bring the blood-thirsty Teuton to his knee as it is to wipe out for all time the possibility for the spread of that Teutonic autocracy.” He wanted German to be “cured of her madness and lifted out of her degradation, to sit once again in the circle of civilisation” but before that was possible, America and her Allies must “win this war, must win it in no indecisive manner and on no terms of compromised, but must win it in such a way that there shall be no doubt henceforth in the mind of any man or in the consciousness of any people that autocracy is dead beyond the possibility of resurrection, that tyranny is destroyed forever from the earth, and that Prussianism, that foul and filthy thing through which the lowest degradation of the human spirit expressed itself, shall never lift its hideous head again”

Powerful words - words it is impossible not to read without weeping for the autocracy that was still to come long after the defeat of Germany in WW1.

I want to conclude with Rabbi Joseph Hertz, as it were, formerly of this parish. Saperstein reports that on the first Sat of 1915 and again in 1916 Hertz and his Sephardi colleague, Hacham Moses Gaster, presumably from just down the road at the Spanish and Portuguese congregation on Lauderdale Rd, held an Intercession Service, a new Minhag-Anglia version of the traditional talmudic Day of fasting and supplication.

These are Hertz’ words from that service - 1^st January 1916. May we never have need again of such sermonic bravery and pain.

Chanukah - Between History and Religion

We have an (almost) contemporary record of the Chanukah story. While the Rabbis never considered the Books of the Maccabees part of the Bible, the early Church did preserving them as, what Christians call, ‘inter-testamental literature.’ They make for a compelling read. There’s pride, honour, gutsy under-dogs and an arrogant enemy brought to humility. There’s also a rededication project - that, of course, is the literal meaning of the word Chanukah.

My favourite passage is the heroic refusal of Mattathias to bow down to the statue of the wicked King Epiphanes. The Maccabean patriarch has been singled out to bow first;

But Mattathias answered and said in a loud voice: “Even if all the nations that live under the rule of the king obey him, and have chosen to obey his commandments, everyone of them abandoning the religion of their ancestors,  I and my sons and my brothers will continue to live by the covenant of our ancestors.  Far be it from us to desert the law and the ordinances.  We will not obey the king’s words by turning aside from our religion to the right hand or to the left.”

What the First Book of Maccabees doesn’t do, however, is recount the miracle of a long-lasting flask of oil. That miracle doesn’t appear in the Second, Third or Fourth Book of Maccabees either, or the reasonably contemporary historical narrative of the great Jewish/Roman historian Josephus. The miracle of the oil only makes its first appearance in early (Tannatic) Rabbinic literature, dating from probably around 200 years after the event.

Talmud Shabbat 21a

Chanukah begins on the twenty-fifth of Kislev. On these eight days eulogies and fasting are forbidden. For when the Greeks entered the Temple, they defiled all the oils therein, and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed against and defeated them, they made search and found only one cruse of oil which lay with the seal of the High Priest. It contained enough for only one day’s lighting; yet a miracle occurred and they lit the lamp with it for eight days. The following year these days were marked as a Festival with Hallel and praise.

While the Talmud does contain the story of the oil, the Rabbis mention neither the Maccabees nor any narratives of heroism.

The Maccabees seem to have been edited out of the Rabbinic history since their dynastic rule was marked by corruption, murder and other impropriety. (Really there is a mini-series waiting here for someone). I wonder if another reason for the absence of praise of military-based heroism is the Rabbinic discomfort with military might as a way of solving challenges. The Haftarah for Shabbat Chanukah - chosen by the same Rabbis who are responsible for the Talmud - contains the verse, ‘Not by might and not by power, but by [God’s] spirit.’

Rabbi David Golinkin, from the Masorti Machon Schechter in Jerusalem, has a terrific post on the original Megillah for Chanukah (not a tradition still in use) - you can read his piece here or watch here. His suggests re-creating a public recitation of a story of Chanukah in our homes and synagogues. We might try it this Shabbat. But this deeper level of historical connection would come at the cost of what must be a deliberate Rabbinic decision - to downplay the military importance of the historical event in favour of more peaceful miracle.

May we all be blessed to have the opportunity to spend Chanukah in peace, celebrating miracles of light, and not placed in a position where military solutions are our only response to the challenges facing us.

A peaceful, light-filled, Chanukah to all,

Rabbi Jeremy

The first Book of Maccabees can be read on-line here.

Jewish Reflections on War and Peace

It's a week when we read of Pinhas' great blessing for what amounts to a bloody act of violence.
In this article, published recently, I try and set out a Jewish attitude towards violence, war and peace.

Shabbat shalom

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Jewish Reflections on War and Peace^[1]

Jeremy Gordon

 

Judaism believes in peace, loves peace and prays and works towards peace. The greatest visions of the Bible are of the wolf lying down with lamb (Isaiah 11) and of swords being beaten into ploughshares (Isaiah 2). Beyond the Bible the Rabbis, in their codification of Jewish life, infused every major prayer experience of the Jew with the yearning for peace. The second century sage Rav Shimon son of Halafta, says ‘a blessing is useless unless it comes with peace’.^[2] The great Medieval commentator Rabbi Yom Tov Isbili, known as the Ritba (Spain d. 1330) collated a list of codified Jewish prayers that have as their conclusion the plea for peace; it includes the grace after meals, the principal doxology (Kaddish), the central prayer of evening, morning and afternoon services (Amidah), the priestly blessing (Numbers 6) and others.^[3] Judaism believes in peace.

 

But the Hebrew Bible also knows violence. The commandment lo tirzah (Exodus 20:13) is inaccurately translated in the King James Bible as ‘thou shall not kill’. The correct rendition of the original Hebrew is ‘thou shall not murder’. The Bible justifies and even demands violence, even unto killing, on too many occasions to list. That said there is a noteworthy attitude towards violence that suffuses not only the Bible, but also the project of Rabbinic Judaism. Time and time again in the Bible and Rabbinic texts one can see the impulse to violence and war subjected to controls designed to ameliorate the destructive potential of military brutality.

 

The Bible mandates (Deut 20 & 21) that an invading army should offer peace to a city before waging war against it. It demands that fruit trees, around an ancient city, are not destroyed by siege warfare, asking rhetorically ‘is a tree a person, to be besieged by you?’ It insists that any beautiful woman captured in combat is not to be treated as chattel to be ‘used’ and/or abandoned at will … and the list goes on.

 

One can see the same tendency in Rabbinic texts.  Maimonides, (d. 1204) the greatest of medieval Jewish sages, set out precise Laws of War in his code the Mishneh Torah. One mandate demands that ‘when besieging a city in order to capture it, you should not surround it on all four sides, but only on three sides, allowing an escape path for anyone who wishes to save his life’.^[4] Aside from noting the seeming military lunacy of a three-sided siege there are two other points to note when considering the significance of this kind of religious engagement with war. Firstly, while Maimonides is able to produce a Biblical verse to justify his codification (Numbers 31:7), on the face of it the verse mandates no such behaviour; Maimonides need not have included this mandate, he’s willing the mandate into existence driven by a greater sense and understanding of what Judaism must stand for. Secondly this militarily self-defeating mandate has had practical impact for the contemporary Israeli army, as will be discussed below.

 

The messy business of Israel’s contemporary engagement will be treated more extensively later in this paper, but it’s important to understand that for close to two thousand years Maimonides’ demands were of no practical import whatsoever. The dominant norm governing Judaism’s engagement with violence was not that of a military power, squaring military necessity and morality, but that of a wandering, stateless, army-less people subject to the attitudes to violence of other nations and nationally enshrined faiths. In 70CE the Romans destroyed the Israelite State based around Jerusalem, in the years before and after this all the other vestiges of Jewish national and military presence were also erased. Judaism became a people with no physical border to protect, no army and no possibility of waging war. From Seleucids to Romans to Christians to Muslims, across time and place Jews have been persecuted, beaten, burnt, and, in a period as dark as humanity has experienced, been subject to a level of genocidal brutality beyond decent humans’ ability to imagine. Throughout almost two millennia of Diaspora existence Jews were forbidden from bearing arms and, by and large, accepted this and other externally imposed regulations as the cost of survival, of ‘doing business’, in a world governed by foreign might. Jews became pacifists by circumstance. Any drive to conquer territory was sublimated into mercantile endeavour or the exegetical engagement characteristic of Rabbinic Judaism. In place of soldiers Judaism valorised scholars. The Rabbis even turned the soldiers of the Bible into intellectuals. The Book of Samuel refers to David, slayer of Goliath, as ‘a brave fighter and man of war’.  The Talmud explains this means he knew how argue his point in ‘the war of Torah.’^[5] Offered only the opportunity of military surrender, Jews and Judaism waged war on the entire notion of military bravado and, playing by rules they themselves constructed, declared themselves victorious without recourse to sword or bullet.

 

But by the beginning of the twentieth century Jews were growing weary of this purely exegetical triumph. The pacifism was being beaten out of them. By the dark years of the ’30s and ’40s the suggestion that Jews could respond to antisemitic violence with words alone seemed more than vapid, it bordered on the offensive. The great pacifist, Mahatma Ghandi wrote, in 1938, that the Jews of Germany should protest against Hitler only using non-violent means. ‘I am as certain as I am dictating these words that the stoniest German heart will melt [if only the Jews], adopt active nonviolence… I do not despair of his [Hitler's] responding to human suffering even though caused by him’.^[6] The Jewish philosopher Martin Buber (hardly known as a militarist!) took Ghandi to task. The Jews of Germany, as Buber knew from personal experience, were dealing with a genocidal mania that would not respond to non-violence. Non-violent resistance in the face of utter brutality was capitulation. Of course, said Buber, the violent response was one that could only be employed with ‘fear and trembling’ but ‘[I]f there is no other way of preventing the evil destroying the good, I trust I shall use force and give myself up into God's hands’.^[7] Alongside its abnegation of violence and love of peace Judaism began to place increasing weight on the value of self-defence.

 

Then the wheels of history turned and Israel found itself with an army, a state and, arrayed around and even inside its borders, armed aggressors. Now what? Certainly ethical and religious factors have always been central to the vision of the defence of the Israeli State. The Israel Defence Forces (IDF) have an ethics code, drafted by religious leaders, professors, lawyers and generals and drummed into soldiers during training. The code articulates the values of ‘Human Dignity’, ‘Responsibility’, and ‘Purity of Arms’ – ‘IDF servicemen and women will use their weapons and force only for the purpose of their mission, only to the necessary extent and will maintain their humanity even during combat. IDF soldiers will not use their weapons and force to harm human beings who are not combatants or prisoners of war, and will do all in their power to avoid causing harm to their lives, bodies, dignity and property’. ^[8] When soldiers fail to live up to values espoused in the code they can expect investigation and reprimand. But the challenges faced by the Israeli State do not fit easily into categories outlined in a document written in ivory towers. Terrorist aggressors, usually dressed as civilians, tend to launch attacks from and/or into densely populated areas full of civilians; both Arabs and Jews are liable to suffer the consequences of terrorist actions. In the aftermath of Operation Cast Lead, December 2008, the philosopher Moshe Halbertal, a member of the team who drafted the IDF Code, expressed his empathy for Israeli soldiers confronted by recognisable military violence, but no recognisable army. ‘By disguising themselves as civilians and by attacking civilians with no uniforms and with no front’, he wrote, ‘paramilitary terrorist organizations attempt nothing less than to erase the distinction between combatants and noncombatants on both sides of the struggle’.^[9] Israel faces what Halbertal calls acts of ‘assymetrical warfare’. It’s hard to balance out risks of loss and risks of collateral damage even in moments of security, let alone in the heat of incoming mortars and katyusha rockets.

 

The aftermath of an incident now fifty years old will serve as a test case from which to consider more contemporary religious responses. In 1953 Palestinian terrorists launched attacks on Israel from Kibiya, a village on the then Jordanian-controlled West Bank. The Israeli military responded ferociously. The village was all but destroyed; many villagers were killed. It was an action with uncanny echoes for our times. Some religious leaders expressed no compunction in accepting the validity of violence in the face of terrorist attack on Jewish lives. Rav Shaul Yisraeli, who went on to become one of the heads of Yeshivat Mercaz Harav Kook justified the use of force as follows: ‘There is a place for acts of retribution and revenge against the oppressors of Israel. … They are responsible for any damage that comes to them, their sympathizers, or their children. They must bear their sin.  There is no obligation to refrain from reprisal for fear that it might harm innocent people, for we did not cause it.  They are the cause and we are innocent’.^[10] This is the tough uncompromising perspective of a hawkish politician, but Yisraeli justified the attack on Kibiya with reference to a classic Rabbinic concept. The community of nations, he claimed, believed these kinds of military actions were permissible, therefore Israel could avail herself of this international consensus in an application of a classic Rabbinic principle dina d’malkhuta dina – the law of the land is the law.^[11] ‘The foundation of dina d’malkhutah dina relates not only to what transpires within a state, but also to international matters as is the accepted custom’, claimed Yisraeli. Putting aside the issue of whether the international community would have accepted the legality of actions taken in Kibiyah, Yisraeli’s claim is that Israel should be judged by the standard of the ethics of nations at large. If the British bomb Dresden and the Americans lay waste to Hiroshima (both examples cited in support of his position), the Israelis can lay waste to Kibiya not only as a matter of military expediency, but also without religious qualm.

 

More critical positions also crystallised in the aftermath of the attack on Kibiyah. The philosopher and commentator Yeshayhu Leibowitz acknowledged the attack could be defended with reference to Rabbinic tradition or the standards of other nations, ‘but let us not try to do so. Let us rather recognize its distressing nature’. Leibowitz compared Kibiya’s destruction to the Biblical tale of Dinah.^[12] Dinah, daughter of Jacob, was kidnapped, taken to Shechem and raped, an action that resulted in her brothers destroying the town and its male inhabitants. Leibowitz claimed the brothers ‘had a decisive justification [for launching the all-out raid]. Nevertheless, because of this action, their father Jacob cursed the two tribes for generations…Let us not establish [the modern State of Israel] on the foundation of the curse of our father Jacob!’^[13]

 

Both these responses – the hawkish and the cursing – can be observed in contemporary Jewish and Israeli discourse responding to contemporary acts of Israeli military violence, but there is a third way which, I argue is truer to Jewish discourse and analysis. Rav Shlomo Goren (d. 1994) founded the Israel Defence Forces Rabbinate and served as its first Chief Rabbi for about two decades, subsequently serving as Chief Rabbi of Israel. Much of his vast scholarly output concerned military matters. His formally collected Responsa on Matters of the Military, War, and Security^[14] alone run to four volumes and cover a vast range of issues, theoretical and practical, as applied to Generals and to Privates. Goren was no apologist. In a radical and broad application of principles learnt from an obscure law in Deuteronomy^[15] he deems Israelis responsible for any death that occurs anywhere in the occupied territories.^[16] In 1982 Goren was Chief Rabbi of Israel and used his position to insist that an escape path be left open during the siege of Beirut, (in accordance with Maimonides’ demand as discussed above).^[17] Responsa literature is technical, and there are many competing factors to be balanced as religious aspiration and ugly brutality come into conflict. It also requires deep scholarship and understanding of religious sensitivity and of military necessity. Goren’s approach is untidy, often unpopular and even occasionally unsafe. But it is, I argue, the truest reflection of a Jewish tradition torn between dreams of peace and harsh political and historical realities. Those who wish to speak on the validity, or otherwise, of various acts of military violence need to study much, speak carefully and know that the safety of certainty is not given to human beings. ‘Who knows if your blood is redder’, asks the Talmud, ‘perhaps their blood is redder’.^[18]

 

Ethics and war make for uncomfortable bed-fellows. Military ethicists, particularly those who speak in the name of a religious tradition, should be troubled sleepers, uneasy and unsure, afraid that their pronouncements could condone the spillage of a single drop of blood. No matter whose blood may be shed, every drop is sacred, ‘for the soul of all flesh is in its blood’.^[19] At the heart of Judaism lies an extraordinary articulation of the value of human life. All humans, the book of Genesis tells us, are created from one original template – Adam. This is so, state the Rabbis, in order to teach us that ‘whoever destroys a single soul, is considered as though they had destroyed an entire world; and whoever saves a single soul is considered as though they had saved an entire world’.^[20] It is, of course, an articulation that Muslim scholars will recognise from their own scriptures.^[21] The demand of the One God shared by both Jews and Muslims is that this message be taught and taught again and again until the day when swords can indeed be turned into ploughshares, nations and individuals will cease lifting up swords against one another and none shall learn war any more. And then every person, Jew and Palestinian, shall be able to sit under their vine and under their fig tree and none shall make them afraid.^[22]

 

Jeremy Gordon is Rabbi of New London Synagogue.

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^[1] An earlier version of this paper appeared in Arches Quarterly (3:5, 2010), an interfaith journal aimed, in particular, at an Islamic audience.

^[2] BMidbar Rabba 11.

^[3] Ritba Megilla 18a d.v. U-Mah C14.

^[4] Hil Melakhim 6:11. See Sifrei Bmidbar Mattot 157 beshem Rebbi Natan.

^[5] Talmud Bavli Sanhedrin 93b.

^[6] The Collected Works of Mahatma Gandhi (Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, Government of India) v. 68, p. 189, Cf loc cit, pp. 191-92 & 205. 

^[7] Published in The Letters of Martin Buber: A Life of Dialogue By Martin Buber, Nahum N. Glatzer, Paul Mendes-Flohr (Syracuse University Press, 1996). The full exchange may be found in A Land of Two Peoples: Martin Buber on Jews and Arabs ed. P. Mendes-Flohr (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1983) pp. 106-126.

^[8] Available at http://dover.idf.il/IDF/English/about/doctrine/ethics.htm.

^[9] Writing in the New Republic November 6^th, 2009, available at http://www.tnr.com/article/world/the-goldstone-illusion.

^[10] See Edrei, Arye (2006) "Divine Spirit and Physical Power: Rabbi Shlomo Goren and the Military Ethic of the Israel Defense Forces," Theoretical Inquiries in Law: Vol. 7 : No. 1, Article 11.
Available at: http://www.bepress.com/til/default/vol7/iss1/art11 at p. 70. I am indebted to Prof Edrei for his original research.

^[11] Talmud Bavli, Ned. 28a; Git. 10b; BK 113a; BB 54b and 55a. There is an irony, of course, in the notion that dina d’malkhuta, by its very nation a diasporic invention, is turned here into a staging post for bullish nationalism.

^[12] Genesis 34.

^[13] Y. Leibowitz, “After Kibiyeh,” in Judaism, Human Values and the Jewish State (Eliezer

Goldman ed., Eliezer Goldman et al. trans., 1992).

^[14] Meshiv Milhama: She’elot U-teshuvot Be-inyene Tsava Milhamah U-vitahon (1983-1992).

^[15] Deuteronomy 21:1-9, if a dead body is found between two Israelite towns the Priests of the town nearest must accept responsibility for the blood shed and seek forgiveness.

[16] See Edrie A. loc cit at p. 286.

^[17] Rav Goren’s letter on the subject appeared in Hatzofeh 6th August 1982.

^[18] Sanhedrin 74a.

^[19] Leviticus 17:14.

^[20] Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5, dated to the second century. The text has been cited according to the Kauffman manuscript, acknowledged as bearing the correct original version of this text. See Eprhaim Elimelech Urbach, "Kol Hamekayem Nefesh Achat ..." Gilgulav Shel Nusach [Whoever Saves One Soul ... The Evolution of a Text], 40 Tarbitz 268 (1971).

^[21] Kuran 5:32.

^[22] Micah 4:4.

Chanukah and Putting the Fun into Fundamentalism

Article in the Jewish Quarterly Winter 2007  -  Number 20

The historical origins of Chanukah are dark, violent and a little too redolent of modern religious conflicts to make most contemporary readers feel comfortable. So what are we to make of the story behind the miracle of the one flask of oil?

Rabbi Jeremy Gordon investigates.

The winsome nature of modern Chanukah celebrations hides a spiritual truth about the Jewish approach to insurgent violence. The Maccabees’ grim and bloody triumph has been glossed over with a diversionary tactic in one of the most extraordinary rebranding exercises in religious history. Leave to one side the Maccabees, spun the Rabbis. They were a ruthless bunch of fundamentalists, who butchered their assimilationist fellow Jews with the same zeal as they fought their oppressors. They went on to have a poor and violent record as Governors of the Jewish state. Let’s celebrate the oil, say the Rabbis, not the fighting; sing of praise to God who bent the laws of physics, play down the role of the warriors. As a result of this Rabbinic whitewash we are left with an emasculated festival, no longer threatening to trumpet the violent and morally provocative insurgencies of ancient times.

Religious truth forms over time. Looking for balanced ethical and spiritual reflection in a time of war is unrealistic. What picture has emerged in the millennia following the Maccabean insurgency? Firstly, neither of the Maccabean books made it into the Hebrew Bible. They are perhaps a little late (around 100 BCE) but it is also reasonable to suspect that their military tone and nature may have assured their exclusion. Secondly, the religious festival Chanukah (‘rededication’), is not named after the Maccabees but after an act of religious service, another little snub to the notion that violence can be religiously celebrated. And what violence:

Mattathias had only just finished exhorting the people to stand firm in the face of the bribes and threats of Antiochus when an Israelite arrived ready to offer a sacrifice on the idolatrous altar. Mattathias ‘was filled with zeal and ran up and slaughtered’ the miscreant, at the same time he killed the king’s officer and tore down the altar. ‘Let everybody who is zealous for the Law and stands by the covenant come out after me,’ he called. And then, the first book of Maccabees relates, he and his sons fled to the mountains. In contemporary terms the Macabees are insurgents. They hide in mountain caves and launch themselves at mightier armies with little, other than faith, to safeguard their efforts. ‘How can we fight, few as we are, against such a strong host?’ one cavilling Israelite asks. Judas replies:

‘It is easy for many to be inclosed in the hands of the few, and there is no difference in the sight of heaven between saving through many or through few, for victory in war does not depend upon the size of the force, but strength comes from heaven. They come against us to destroy us and our wives and our children and to plunder us, but we are fighting for our lives and our laws. God himself will crush them before us and you must not be afraid of them.’ (I Maccabees 1)

The language is alarmingly close to  modern faith-driven insurgent rhetoric. Other parallels also leap off the page. The insurgency places a steep financial cost on the King, who is forced to re-finance to pay for the troop deployments. The King brings, into war, weapons at the very cutting edge of contemporary technologies – in Antiochus’ case fearsome elephants. There is even a ‘suicide bomber’: Eleazar Avaran, who seeing that ‘one of the elephants was armed with royal armour’, ran boldly up to it in the midst of the phalanx, ‘slaying to the right and left’ and ‘slipped under the elephant and stabbed it underneath and killed it, and it fell to the earth upon him and he died there.’ (I Maccabees 6)

Disquieting parallels emerge with contemporary allied forces. Two thousand years ago the King’s soldiers forced captives to eat ‘unlawful swine meat’ before unspeakable physical depredations are visited on them (2 Maccabees 7). Reading this ugly chapter in the light of the appalling treatment meted out at the American-run Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo detention facilities makes looking at comparisons between ancient and modern insurgents very tempting.

We live in judgemental times. We judge anything from ten-year-old children’s exam results to celebrity body-mass. Goodness knows what would happen if we were to turn our hyper-judgemental faculties on Judah and his cohorts. Before rushing  in, however, we should acknowledge that judging ancient conflicts from the comfort of twenty-first century armchairs is a deeply precarious exercise. Too much history has been lost, too many of the norms by which we might understand Maccabean responses are unknown. To be clear: I make no claim as to the relationship between treatment of Jews at the hands of Antiochus and Muslims at the hands of the various forces who now find themselves facing the Taliban, Al Qaida and their ilk. But, on the other hand, we can’t let the important differences between ancient and contemporary insurgency narratives absolve us entirely of the discomfort we should feel reading stories that underlie a festival so beloved in contemporary Jewish identity. So what are we left with other than a cute story about a flask of oil?

Here is the story of Chanukah as it appears in the Talmud, a document redacted some 600 years after the event:

‘When the Greeks entered the Temple they defiled all the oils there and when the Hasmonean dynasty prevailed against them and defeated them, they searched and found only one flask of oil which lay with the seal of the High Priest, but it contained enough oil for one day’s lighting only. But there was a miracle and they lit the candelabra with it for eight days. The following year these days were appointed a festival.’ (Shabbat 21b )

Remarkably there is nothing like this tale in any more contemporary record of the festival. Even more remarkably the entire feel of the record in the Talmud is radically different to the tone evoked in the contemporary records. The Talmud gives the impression of an immediate re-lighting of the candelabra, just as the troops re-enter the Temple compound. I’m reminded of stories of then Israeli Army Chaplain Shlomo Goren arriving at the Kotel in 1967 and instantly sounding the shofar. But here is the story of what happened on the twenty-fifth day of the Hebrew month of Kislev — the first day of Chanukah — in the contemporary record:

‘Then said Judas and his brothers, “Behold, our enemies are crushed; let us go up to cleanse the sanctuary and dedicate it.” And they saw the sanctuary desolate, the altar profaned, and the gates burned. Judas chose blameless priests devoted to the law, they cleansed the sanctuary, removed the defiled stones, tore down the altar, and stored the stones in a convenient place on the temple hill until there should come a prophet to tell what to do with them. They built a new altar, rebuilt the sanctuary, the interior, consecrated the courts, made new holy vessels, and brought the lampstand, the incense altar and the table into the temple … [the schedule of repairs goes on]… Thus they finished all the work and early in the morning on the twenty-fifth of Kislev they rose and offered sacrifice on the new altar and Judas and all the assembly of Israel determined that every year at that season the days of dedication of the altar should be observed with gladness and joy for eight days.’ (1 Maccabees 4)

Dedication — Chanukah — is not instantaneous. The war is long past and the 25th Kislev is the culmination of, surely, months of building and decorating all of which would have necessitated sophisticated supply chains. Forget the magic of eight days of flickering fire, the really odd thing about this story is that we are required to believe that those in charge of the rebuild forgot to order in oil.

The shift in emphasis is not an uncommon Rabbinic trope. There are many violent moments in ancient religious literature. But the Rabbis suck the oxygen away from these tales, depriving the military hero of the opportunity to crow about his victory. Violent passion is transmuted into a passion for Torah and the supremacy of the Divine. The Rabbis even turned soldiers of the tradition into scholars. The Book of Samuel commends David, the slayer of Goliath, as a brave fighter and man of war. The Talmud explains this means he knew how to argue his point in ‘the war of Torah’ (BT Sanhedrin 93b).

The almost childish nature of contemporary Chanukah celebrations masks a most adult coup de theologie and maybe celebrating this story of the oil allows us to celebrate, still, a festival whose contemporary resonance should otherwise have us shifting uneasily amongst the detritus of doughnuts and dreidels.

Jeremy Gordon is Rabbi of St Albans Masorti Synagogue.