God Slot Part III

My most recent God Slot is on the BBC iplayer at http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tlcx1/Sarah_Kennedy_01_09_2010

44:10 in.

 

Shannah Tovah and best wishes to all.

God-Slot part Two

The second of my six contributions to BBC Radio 2’s Pause for Thought can be found on the BBC iplayer at

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tjs4x

44:30 minutes in.

I’ll also be speaking on the eve of Rosh Hashanah at around 5:40am or you should be able to listen next week’s contribution on iplayer by Googling ‘Sarah Kennedy Radio 2’ and clicking through.

 

God Slot

Radio 2’s God slot is at the most ungodly hour of 5:45am. This past Wednesday and the following five Wednesdays you can hear me sharing a Pause for Thought at this time.

For those of you interested but unable to make the 5:45am listening time, the programme is available on-line. I thought only for those logging on with a British IP address, but I was able to get this from Spain..

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00tdnp8

at 42 minutes in.

 

 

Prepenting with Amichai

Prepent

One of my favourite contemporary teachers of Judaism is Amichai Lau-Levine. He’s taken on a challenge of blogging a series of reflections on Rosh Hashnah called ‘Prepent.’ With his permission I’m sharing today’s reflection and the warm encouragement that we all take his invitation to ‘pay it forward.’ Or subscribe to his future blogs at http://groups.google.com/group/PREPENT5771/subscribe?pli=1

 

Someone who is close to me is dealing with depression, finding it hard to get out of the house and take life on. She now works with a life coach, and they made a deal: each day she will work out for 20 minutes – any kind of work out at all – outside the house. When done – she texts him a brief ‘did it’ message. She respects him, and wants to do it. I offered to help by also taking on 20 minutes daily, starting today – and when I’m done – I’ll text her. It’s like a daisy chain of commitment to self-improvement, discipline, and daily change. I’m in to win. The next 30 days, a daily 20 minutes. Maybe more. Want to join and text me with you ‘did it’ daisy chain? Then pay it forwards. Maybe your 20 minutes isn’t about bodywork. Maybe it’s writing a page in your book, going through your address book one letter a day and finding who you need to make amends with, or maybe 20 daily minutes are about some other non violent playful warfare on the field of change?

Gym shorts on, here we go. 30 days to go. You can do it! 

 

Meaty Matters

I want to talk, this week, about food. What could be more Jewish a subject? In my sermon I'll be trying to translate the sense of a holy relationship with our food into an approach to the myriad of decisions a careful consumer faces every time they walk an aisle or line their stomach.

 

In this note I want to relay information provided by Henry Grunwald, past-President of the Board of Deputies and Chairman of Shechita UK.  In a letter to Rabbis from across the denominations Henry recently wrote;

 

"By now you will have heard that the European Parliament recently voted on an amendment to the EU Regulation on food information to consumers to in future label meat and meat products derived from animals that have been slaughtered by shechita, „meat from slaughter without stunning‟. This will significantly impact on the kosher meat industry, imperilling the economic viability of Shechita. The millions of tonnes of meat from animals which are not properly stunned or cruelly re-stunned by secular methods will not be required to be labelled. Labelling religiously and humanely slaughtered meat products in isolation is discrimination, and is designed to deter potential buyers.

 

"If cruelty to animals is an honest and proper concern of any consumer then all such labelling of meat and meat products if introduced, should in fairness be applied to all methods of slaughter used, which may include stunning by electrocution, captive-bolt or gassing. Consumers should also be entitled to know whether the meat came from an animal that had been mis-stunned or re-stunned, before it was slaughtered, if an informed choice is the true intent of this amendment. According to Compassion for World Farming (no supporter of Shechita), 9% of all meat slaughtered using conventional stunning in Europe is "mis-stunned" by the captive-bolt or electricity, causing additional and unnecessary pain and stress to animals. Research by the British Veterinary Association showed that 59% of sheep are mis-stunned, but the Regulation does not require labelling to indicate this. And Shechita accounts for only 0.037% of all animal slaughtered in Europe."

 

This is an invidious attack designed to cause maximum damage while appearing only minimally antisemitic. Meat-eaters and vegetarians alike, and even those who – dare it be said – don't keep kosher should all be alarmed.

 

For more information on the work of Shechita UK, please see www.shechitauk.org

 

Shabbat Shalom and B'tei Avon

On Anat Hoffman, David Rotem and a Jewish Life Lived Behind Blinkers

 

I spent Shavuot, 9 years ago, in Jerusalem.

Having stayed up studying all night I wandered down to the Kottel to daven shacharit at dawn.

It’s a well known tradition in Jerusalem.

The whole area was packed.

There must have been 8-10,000 people who had been up all night and were now getting ready to daven as the sun rose, a recreation of the moment of revelation.

 

I was planning on davenning with a group of other Masorti Jews. And arrangements had been made for us.

We were shepherded into a fenced off-pen.

Around that row of fencing, was a sort of moat and then another fence – we were doubly penned in.

All for our own protection.

By half way through the services it became clear why we needed the protection.

Bottles – plastic bottles, but bottles none the less – were being thrown at us, principally by Haredi kids perched high above the plaza.

And the occasional nappy.

All because we were davenning on what they perceived to be their Kottel plaza.

How dare we seek to address God, in the language and prayers of our shared ancestors, without accepting every dictate of Haredi or Ultra-orthodox Judaism.

 

Standing there, hiding under my tallis while the bottles were flying, I developed a whole different understanding of the importance of asking this question - who owns Judaism in Israel.

 

The famous story is that Israel’s first Prime Minister – the avowedly secular – David Ben Gurion met with Rabbi Avraham Karelitz, the Chazon Ish, one of the great idealogues of early C20 Haredi Judaism.

Karelitz cited a passage from the Talmudic tractate Sanhedrin.^[1]

 

The Talmud demands that when two camels meet on a narrow mountain pass the camel bearing goods has the right of way. The camel without goods is expected to defer. Karelitz said that since religious Jewry was bearing the tradition, secular Jewry would have to defer to religious Judaism – to him.

Ben-Gurion refused to accept that secular Judaism was ‘empty,’ but it’s hard to read the history of Ben-Gurion’s relationship with the Haredim without thinking that he did accept Karelitz’s premise.

 

In the years that followed Ben Gurion agreed that the right to register all Jewish weddings in Israel should be given to the Haredim. He also allowed Yeshivah Students to be exempted from military service and gave Haredi religious girls the right to be exempted from Sherut Leumi – a programme of non-military civic service which was already an exemption from full military service designed specifically for the religious.

 

It’s widely acknowledged that Ben Gurion made one mistake, but I think he made another.

The mistake he definitely made is that he thought Haredi Judaism would melt away in Israel. He couldn’t understand who would want to cling on to the ways of the Shettl and Ghetto when the option was the Zionist Dream. He got that wrong.

The original exemption for Yeshivah students, in the early 1950s, applied to 400 individuals.

Today there are 60,000 exemptions from military service claimed by Yeshivah students.

Today 25% of all Jewish primary school-age children are enrolled in Haredi institutions which discourage their students from serving in the IDF. In ten years the number of Haredi exemptions is expected to double.

And in 20 years from now it’s estimated that 40% of Jewish children will attend Haredi schools all of which discourage their students from serving in the IDF.

 

It turns out that Haredi Judaism is more attractive than Ben Gurion thought.

It certainly turns out that Haredi Jews procreate at a far faster rate than Ben-Gurion expected.

 

But it’s the second mistake Ben Gurion made that interests me most.

This is the mistake of believing that another group, usually Haredi or Chasidic, can be trusted to look after Judaism properly.

I’ve encountered, particularly in American Conservative communities or British United Synagogue ones, members of a Shul like this one who nonetheless give significant amounts of charitable support to the Ultra-orthodox as a kind of insurance policy.

It’s a terrible mistake.

 

I think this is what Ben Gurion must have felt in discussion with Karelitz.

In that argument about whether the Zionists or the Ultra-Orthodox were carrying the hopes, dreams and aspirations of Judaism on their backs as, like two camels on a mountain pass, he must have consciously or sub-consciously, accepted Karelitz’s premise.

It’s easy to be impressed by the beard.

It’s easy to be impressed by the Yiddishisms and affect of authenticity many ultra-orthodox speakers specialise in.

It’s easy to think that just because so many Ultra-orthodox Jews spend day and night with their nose to a page of Talmud, they must care about Jews like us and Judaism like ours.

And that would be an error; historically, philosophically and theologically.

 

I don’t want to over-generalise.

There are certainly long-bearded, Yiddish-speaking, Talmud studying moderates, but the history of ultra-orthodox Judaism in the last 150 years has been a history of the Ultra-orthodox pursuing entirely isolationist and selfish agendas that not only take no notice of the needs of liberal Jews, but actively and passionately ride roughshod over any claim that anyone other than a Haredi could possibly speak with authenticity about a faith they claim belongs to them uniquely.

 

I think contemporary Judaism is finally waking up to the dangers of handing over to the Haredim our faith.

 

In 2002, some two years after my experience at the Kottel the Supreme Court of Israel decreed who could and couldn’t pray on the Kottel Plaza. The Haredim got the front of the Plaza, the bit directly facing the Western Wall.

But an excavated area of the Southern Wall of the Temple, known as Robinson’s Arch, was made available to Masorti, Reform – more progressive groups.

We were to be allowed to pray, our way, just around the corner.

Not ideal, but a workable compromise.

Among the groups who use Robinsons Arch are the Women of the Wall. Women who want to be given the chance to take hold of their Judaism at the most important site in Judaism.

One of their leaders I’ve known for 20 years – Anat Hoffman.

Anat is a former Jerusalem Municipal Councillor, a native born Israeli, a wonderful and passionate voice for decency in so many different forums.

And this week Anat was arrested, for carrying a sefer Torah across the Kottel plaza on her way to Robinsons Arch.

 

Police surrounded Hoffman and tried to take the Torah off her. She was arrested, fined 5,000NIS and banned from the Kottel for 30 days.

She’s a seasoned campaigner and knows how to put a soundbite together, but there is truth in what she told reporters –

 

The police, Hoffman said, took it upon themselves to reinterpret the Supreme Court ruling — and that is a very dangerous development. It’s a slippery slope. Today they say women cannot hold the Torah. Tomorrow it will be, women cannot look at the Torah. Then it will be women cannot be at the Kotel at all. Before you know it, all of Jerusalem will be segregated. That is where we are headed.

 

I think what she meant is that the police, sub-consciously or otherwise just assumed that the Haredim represent the more laden camel – that they must be right when it comes to interpreting Judaism, that they must ‘own’ the most holy places in our faith.

But I reject the notion that the Kottel belongs to the Hareidim.

I reject the notion that the Hareidim are the laden camel.

Norman Solomon, in his Jacobs Memorial Lecture a couple of weeks ago is absolutely right.

When the Haredim read the Talmud they see nothing other than pure pristine Judaism.

They don’t understand how the whole apparatus of rabbinic law and lore only makes sense as a meditation on our relationship with the surrounding non-Jewish world.

The language of the Talmud is the vernacular.

The technical terms and rhetorical structures are borrowed from the Greeks.

The structures of commerce are massively influenced by the surrounding Sassanian culture – actually that’s a truth that Rabbi Jacobs explored and charted in his PhD.

The Talmud doesn’t want us to live our Jewish lives in black and white, ignoring anything that smacks of the challenges of modernity.

They Talmud is suffused with shades, with nuance.

The Talmud is pre-eminently concerned with how we live our Jewish lives while engaging with the challenges of the modern and the contemporary.

The aim is not to cut ourselves off, seal ourselves in and draw up a drawbridge.

 

It’s not just the Talmud.

How could a person possibly read Moses Maimonides, the greatest Rabbi – the tradition jests – since Moses of Biblical fame - and not understand how important it is to engage with the contemporary culture in all its scientific, academic, philosophic and sociological splendor.

Judaism is not about keeping our head down and paying attention only to internal voice of Talmudic dialectics.

It is about keeping our head up, reading everything seeking to understand again and again as time passes and natures shift, how to keep the tradition we have received fresh, relevant and vital.

Karlevitz was wrong when he claimed that the Haredi represents the most heavily laden camel. It is the Masorti Jew, us, who are most heavily laden camel.

We carry our tradition, but we also carry an understanding of genetics and evolution, quantum mechanics and astral physics, Friedrich Hegel and Immanuel Kant, Feminism and Freud, Mozart and Beethoven.

It’s the Haredi Jew, carrying only the Talmud, who should be making way.

 

And there is one other terribly worrying development in Israel this week that shares its origin with Ben Gurion’s second mistake about Haredi Judaism – the mistake that thought Judaism is safest when entrusted with the extremists. The Orthodox MK David Rotem is advocating a Bill that restricts the way in which Jews may convert. And this week the Bill passed through committee and will now go to the full Kenesset.

 

At present a Jew can go and live in Israel under the Law of Return if they have an ethnic connection to Judaism (a Jewish grandparent, parent or spouse) or if they have converted under the auspices of a legitimate Bet Din, such as ours.

Under this new proposed law, the only people who will be able to make aliyah through conversion alone will be people who convert under the supervision of the Haredi Municipal Rabbinates in Israel.

 

The Bill hands over the right to determine who can become a Jew to the Haredim.

It’s a disastrous Bill.

At the peak of the Russian Aliyah, then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon tried to set up a more moderate conversion system to normalise the legal status of tens of thousands of these Russian Jews.

As most of us know those conversions have now been retroactively annulled by the Haredim.

David Rotem seems to think that putting yet more power into the hands of the Haredim will help.

He seems to think that taking the diverse range of access points into different streams of Jewish life and placing them all into the hands of the Haredim will result in a more benign and open-hearted form of Judaism.

It’s hard to know whether he is being foolish or disingenuous.

It’s impossible for me to see how giving the Haredim yet more power will result in a more open form of Judaism.

It’s impossible for me to support this mistake of Ben Gurion – a mistake predicated on the notion that the Haredim would ever be looking after the best interest of Jews like me, Jews like us, Judaism like ours.

 

L’Havdil, we hear this language in the context of decisions to engage, or not engage with Hamas.

The argument goes that we have to empower the moderates, we can’t allow the extremists to be the representative voice of what we understand to be the people in the street.

It should be the same thing with Judaism. We can’t empower the Haredim. We have to do everything we can to empower the moderates.

Not least because we represent the more industrious camel in this mountain stand-off.

Not least because if we do leave the Haredim in charge we should expect our kind of Judaism to be penned behind fences and pelted with bottles and nappies.

And that’s not what the Jewish State is meant to be all about.

 

I’ve nothing against fervent Judaism. Indeed we could do with more of it in this community and many others.

The problem is the blinkers. The problem is the belief that Judaism should be lived in a self imposed Ghetto in which contemporary values and contemporary challenges have no place.

Eizeh hu hacham

Who is wise, said the Rabbis,

Mishelomed mi kol adam - one who learns from every person – Jew or non-Jew, frum or secular, iconoclast or non-conformist.

 

We protect the future of Judaism by opening up, embracing, engaging.

Not by sheltering ourselves away and penning ourselves in

And any development which suggests that Judaism is safer in the hands of those who view the Jewish world through blinkered eyes needs to be opposed.

 

Shabbat shalom

---

^[1] 32b

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

---

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.