Judaism - A martial religion?

BY JON DANNEMANN

War, noted Carl von Clausewitz, the famous 19th century military strategist, is both “an act of force to compel the enemy to do our will” and thereby “a continuation of politics with an admixture of other means”. War is inherently violent, and inherently political. This raises a question: Can Judaism bring its ethical outlook to the battlefield in any way?

A modern critic may allege that Judaism is no suitable point of departure for the study of war and statecraft. For nearly two millennia, our politics pertained to community, but not to society.

For much of that time, we have been defenceless, and have reclaimed our sovereignty only recently.

Moreover, some of our texts seem to compel us into collective violence unconscionable to our contemporary sensitivities, such as against the Midianites, the nations of Canaan, and against Amalek. How do we reconcile our self-image with such injunctions?

The charge that old Jewish texts glorify gratuitous violence is at odds with the idea that Judaism has nothing to say on statecraft. Either way, such readings interrogate the Tanakh in a fundamentalist manner that Rabbi Sacks z’’l cautioned against. There is something distinctly postmodern in this line of questioning. The text and only the text itself seem to matter. Many followers of religion nowadays actually share this outlook with their atheist and materialist counterparts.

A reading more faithful to the Jewish tradition will employ the classic devices of context, subtext, and intertext.

Context does not resolve the dilemma. The campaign against Amalek was commanded against an exceptionally evil group, but the commandment is for all times. It is directed wholesale against an entire group.

Subtext asks what is implied and understood. In this vein, Rav Kook and Rabbi Moshe Seidel discuss in their correspondence that in an age of brutality, Israel had no choice but to go to war in a similar manner, in order to deter other cultures from retaining their brutal practices.

As for intertextuality, Rabbi Sacks pointed out that there are many contrasting passages in Tanakh that command us to lead peaceful, loving lives. Drawing on Maimonides and the Talmud, he asserted that the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek is, firstly, highly circumscribed, and secondly, far from Judaism’s true aspirations. We no longer know who Amalek is. We must offer peace first, and our oral and prophetic traditions consider arms, not ornaments but implements, the necessity of which will vanish in the Messianic era. What matters is words, not swords, education, not martial brutishness. The Tanakh’s real agenda is an evolutionary ethic in which such conduct will no longer be necessary.

It is no accident that a statue at the UN Headquarters quotes the prophet Isaiah: “They shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, nor shall they learn war any more”. May the study of our tradition merit such a transformation.

Jon Dannemann has just completed a year of the Rabbi Sacks Learning Fellowship for young professionals – visit www.lsjs.ac.uk/ the-rabbi-sacks-learning-fellowship.php for more information.

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