The season of war

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross

The sexy drama of David and Bathsheba, which was the subject of a 1951 costume drama featuring Gregory Peck and Susan Hayward, took place during what the Biblical source material in the 11th chapter of Second Samuel refers to as “the return of the year, that season when kings go off to war.” Or, as the Romans would say: March — the very name of which is a tribute to the war-god Mars, patron spirit of chaotic mayhem and murder in the interests of the state, whose eponymous month marks the end of winter when the roads are once more becoming passible.

In our era of ’round-the-clock conflict, of night-fighters and radar-guided missiles, and of pilots in Nevada carrying out real-time drone strikes halfway around the planet in central Asia, we easily forget that until relatively recently, combat was not an all-year endeavor. Thomas Berger writes of two enemy Indian bands, coming upon each other on the frozen plains in the snow of deep winter after a fruitless day of hunting, who begin wearily unlimbering their bows until one of their number signs to the other party, “let’s just fight later, when the weather is better.” In the Old World, men and pack animals couldn’t even find the road to walk, under the winter snow … or, in the case of our home turf in Israel, navigate the roads during the winter rains without treading them into an impassible morass.

…let us at least aspire to the simpler kind of world in which 'kings go off to war' only at certain foreseeable seasons…

Which may be what God had in mind when Haman was tossing lots.

The prime minister of Persia, seeking a date propitious for a genocidal campaign against the Jews of the Empire, flipped his pick-up sticks in the air and inquired of his panoply of deities, “Is this date the day of destruction?” When they landed separately (every day for 11½ months), it meant “no.” But they finally fell touching, as a gesture of the affirmative, in the middle of Adar … which is to say, March. Haman must have been pleased that his summons for the entire populace of the 127 jurisdictions of the Achaemenid Empire to rise up and murder their Jewish neighbors fell out at the time of year expeditious for fighting — not too hot, not too cold, and no rain to hamper the action.

But the sanguinary despot could not have anticipated that, through the courageous intervention of the Empress Esther and her uncle Mordechai, the edict of genocide would be reversed. So the same seasonal climate that made for the most effective warfare stood to the advantage not of those who attacked the Jews of Persia but rather of our own people, facing mobs of race-rioters throughout the Empire and — by the Emperor’s own decree — standing for our lives.

As I write this, the Jewish state is still deeply engaged in an ongoing hostagerescue operation in the Gaza Strip. That campaign began last October, just as Israel’s rainy season was beginning, and is still ongoing coming up on the end of the rainy season in March. If we cannot have Isaiah’s kind of world, in which “nation shall not lift up sword against nation,” let us at least aspire to the simpler kind of world in which “kings go off to war” only at certain foreseeable seasons, with people going home to gather their harvest in the summer and rest in winter.

And if Purim this month is a reminder that evil is always with us, may God’s choice of the date be an encouragement that the evil cannot win in the end.

Rabbi Mark Wm. Gross serves at Jewish Congregation of Marco Island.