Weekly D'var Torah

Our Torah is meant to guide and inspire us through all of life’s journeys.  Unfortunately, conflict is a feature in almost all of them.  Conflicts within families, conflicts within ourselves, conflicts with nature, conflicting values… and conflict in the most horrific, violent form as well. 

It is a tragic fact of human existence that all of human history has been marred by people making war against each other.  How ironic it is that the past seventy years, with all of the wars humanity has endured (Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, Afghanistan, Iraq, Ukraine, Israel’s wars, the Falkland Islands, Africa’s many conflicts, the former Yugoslavia), have gone down in history as the longest period without a major war.   Einstein said that while he didn’t know what awful weapons would be used in World War III he did predict that “...World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones”- because the world would be devastated back to the Stone Age.

The wars in the Torah don’t feature guns and bombs but they are awful nevertheless.  We try to avoid fighting: when the Idumeans (descendants of Jacob’s brother Esau) object to our passing through their territory on our way to Israel, G-d tells us to make a detour.  When we need to cross the territory of Sichon, ruler of the Amorites, we offer to stay on the highway and pay for any food and water we take along the way.   Sichon won’t have it and he attacks with all of his armies and is completely destroyed by Israel’s faith-driven military, discplined into a matchless fighting force by the rigors of forty years of desert wandering.  The Israelites fall upon all of the fortresses and cities of the Amorites and occupy their land, now part of modern day Jordan.

Og, the King of Bashan, today’s Golan Heights, arrives to avenge Sichon.  He and his nation meet the same fate and the Israelite tribes leave no one alive.  In fact, the tribes of Reuven and Gad and part of the tribe of Menashe, lay claim to the grazing lands and ask Moses that they be given them rather than crossing the Jordan into Israel.  They swear to Moses to first ensure that the Canaanites are destroyed, aiding the other tribes, before returning to their grassy hills and plains. 

Then Midian sends in an assault not of soldiers but of priestesses of idolatry to corrupt and undermine Israel’s relationship with G-d.  The resulting schism wipes out over forty thousand Israelites before the Covenant is re-asserted.  Israel’s rage against Midian is terrible to behold.   It is hard to read these passages.  The reappearance of the nations that were supposedly wiped out a chapter or two later does assuage the horror a little: perhaps dispossession rather than bloodshed is what is meant.  But still, how can the G-d of love who created humanity in the Divine Image sanction let alone mandate such violence? 

I do not have the answers.  Rabbi Arthur Woskow, one of the founders of the Jewish Renewal Movement, said that difficult passages, texts, practices and parts of our tradition should not be excised, edited, removed or censored.  Instead, we should confront them, wrestle with them, find some way to find meaning.  Rabbi Wakow calls this confrontation with texts, practices and aspects of Judaism that bring us distress, “G-d Wrestling”- which is the literal translation of the name Israel:  Wrestler with G-d. 

“The one who sheds the blood of man, by man let his blood be shed,” G-d tells Noah as he and his family exit the ark to rebuild the world. “I will demand justice from you for all of the blood that is shed.”  The Torah seems to be showing us in the most raw and tragic way: war and killing are wrong- but so is it wrong to allow yourselves to be subjected to wanton violence.  Does this justify violence? 

In the Exodus story during the smiting of the First Born and the destruction of Egypt at the Sea, it is G-d and G-d alone who acts.  “G-d will fight for you,” says Moses.  “You- just keep still!”  But in a world where it is G-d who seems to be keeping still and silent in the face of deadly evil, what is the Torah’s message? 

Perhaps the distress and agony we feel are themselves the message.  Perhaps even self-defense has a price of pain for even the victor.  Golda Meir, who as an Israeli mom and then as a leader, faced the murderous fury of a terrible enemy time after time, never stopped believing in peace.  She said words that ring with agony, sorrow and longing:

When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons. (quote from her oral autobiography, “A Land of Our Own”)

I can only offer my belief that every narrative of war and violence, from Cain and Abel on leads inevitably, directly and with great hope and faith to the deathless message and desperate call to action of Prophet Micah, one of the first to dare to prophesy in the name of G-d (chapter 4):

Keyn Yehi Ratzon, May it be Thy will- speedily and in our day- Amen!