israel

“War! What Is It Good For?”: Sermon for Shabbat Bemidbar, 5784

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At the height of the Vietnam War, American radio stations were blasting Edwin Starr’s “War”:  “War!  What is it good for?  Absolutely nothing!”

A blistering cover of the original recorded by the Temptations a year earlier, “War” became a runaway hit, holding the number one spot on the Billboard charts for three weeks in the summer of 1970.

“Say it again: War! What is it good for?” 

We ask, as we mark eight months of war.  

We ask on behalf of our hostages.

We ask on behalf of the Israeli people, still reeling from the physical, sexual, and emotional violence inflicted on October 7th.  

We ask for the sleepless Israeli parents with children serving in Gaza, in the North, in the West Bank, in all the places we tourists dare not go.  

We ask for the more than 100,000 Israelis still displaced from their homes, for the residents of the northern towns burned by incendiary rockets fired by Hezbollah just this week.  

We ask for the Palestinian civilians in Gaza killed and maimed and displaced from their homes, for the hungry and the thirsty, the sick and the frightened, whom Hamas has victimized by making them human shields, by stealing their food and water and medicine and fuel, and, worse: their hope.

We ask for the Jewish students for whom this war has become an inescapable fact and feature of collegiate life, abused with hate speech, accused of genocide.  Kids who just want to hang out with their friends and drink beer and even attend classes or study in the library free from harassment.  

We ask alongside the growing number of Israelis who are tired of this war, sick and tired of politicians whom they do not trust to prosecute this war.  We ask alongside the tens of thousands of Israelis who protest every week, begging their government to shift focus from bombarding Rafah to bringing hostages home.  

“War! What is it good for?”  

This is a reasonable question to ask, eight months into a terrible war.  

It is, however, a difficult question to answer.  

We turn to the Jewish tradition.  Our prayer book is a love song to peace.  Oseh shalom bimromav—“May the One who makes Peace in the heavens bring peace upon us”; Shalom rav al Yisrael am’cha—“May a great peace come upon Your people Israel”; Sim shalom, tovah u’vracha—“Grant peace and goodness and blessing….”  

If the Siddur were all we had, you’d probably conclude there is no place for war in the Jewish tradition.  But the Torah, TaNaKh, Mishnah, Talmud, and Midrash, the collections of Rabbinic teaching and storytelling, the annals of Jewish history and codes of Jewish law, all make clear that war is not only sometimes permissible, but even, sometimes, imperative.  

The Torah itself provides conditions for going to war and the rules governing military conscription, exemption, and ethical conduct in war.  This week’s Torah portion, Bemidbar, opens the Book of Numbers with a census of the Israelites, mustering them tribe by tribe in the Sinai Desert for a planned invasion of the Promised Land.  Military conscription, at least for the men, was part and parcel of being numbered among the Israelite ranks.

שְׂא֗וּ אֶת־רֹאשׁ֙ כׇּל־עֲדַ֣ת בְּנֵֽי־יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל לְמִשְׁפְּחֹתָ֖ם לְבֵ֣ית אֲבֹתָ֑ם בְּמִסְפַּ֣ר שֵׁמ֔וֹת כׇּל־זָכָ֖ר לְגֻלְגְּלֹתָֽם׃

Take a census of the whole Israelite company [of fighters] by the clans of its ancestral houses, listing the names, every male, head by head.

מִבֶּ֨ן עֶשְׂרִ֤ים שָׁנָה֙ וָמַ֔עְלָה כׇּל־יֹצֵ֥א צָבָ֖א בְּיִשְׂרָאֵ֑ל תִּפְקְד֥וּ אֹתָ֛ם לְצִבְאֹתָ֖ם אַתָּ֥ה וְאַהֲרֹֽן׃

You and Aaron shall record them by their groups, from the age of twenty years up, all those in Israel who are able to bear arms (Num. 1:1-2).

The Book of Numbers describes how, over the course of their wilderness journey, a debilitated band of escaped slaves will be rehabilitated as a fighting force to be feared by Israel’s enemies.  It leads to Deuteronomy, in which Moses readies the troops for combat, straight on to the Book of Joshua, a logbook of the military campaign against the Canaanites.1

Wars are, of course, fought for numerous reasons, among them economic, political, and territorial; wars are fought over ideology and religion, and, even, sometimes, out of revenge.  

Judaism designates two primary categories of war:  Milhemet Reshut, or Discretionary War, in other words, a war that you may fight; and Milhemet Mitzvah, or Commanded War, a war that you must fight.  (Literally, a war that is a mitzvah to fight.)   

RaSHI and Maimonides, each writing in the 12th Century, defined Milhemet Mitzvah as a defensive war that one fights only in response to an already-launched attack. (Cf. RaSHI to Bavli, Sotah 44b, and Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Melakhim 5:1).     

The Sages are divided over how to categorize wartime operations designed to prevent an enemy from attacking.  The Meiri, writing in France in the 13th century, concludes that “one can launch a preemptive strike against an enemy amassing forces on a border,” which he considers “sufficiently defensive to be categorized as a Milhemet Mitzvah,” a war of obligation (Commentary to Sotah 44b). 

In sum, the more a war can be seen as defensive, the more likely Jewish tradition will classify it as obligatory; the more offensive or expansionist, the more likely to be classified as discretionary.  

At no time does Judaism give permission to conduct war wantonly, without regard for civilian life, not in the traditional literature, nor in the ethical code of the IDF known as Tohar Ha-Neshek or “Purity of Arms.”  

But principle and practice are not the same thing and in the chaos of war, bright lines blur; decisions are made without good intelligence; and terrible suffering is inevitably inflicted on non-combatants.  

This is a grievous fact of war, but it is neither unusual nor even necessarily immoral.  War is not a war crime. The morality of war is not measured in the proportionality of body count between one belligerent and another, but rather in the proportionality of the effectiveness of wartime measures taken, against the identified military objectives.  

The Allied invasion of Normandy on June 6th, 1944–eighty years ago yesterday—resulted in somewhere between 4,400 and 10,000 Allied casualties and an estimated 4,000 to 9,000 German casualties.  But no one evaluates the merit, or morality, of that invasion this way.  How many Allied lives were worth sacrificing in order to defeat the Nazis?  How many German lives?  These questions are strictly rhetorical.  

What to do about the War in Gaza?  This is not a rhetorical question.  It is also one without any easy answers.

There are reasonable people advocating for the war to continue until Israel’s aims have been accomplished; and there are reasonable people—including a growing number of Israelis—who believe that a cease-fire and exchange of hostages, followed by longer-term efforts to eradicate Hamas’s fighters and its political leadership, would be the way to go.  

There are reasonable people who would point out that even with tens of thousands dead in Gaza, a two-to-one combatant to civilian ratio of wartime dead is better, in fact more humane, than any other urban war of the modern era, noting as well that no other army has ever had to fight a jihadist militia that intentionally puts its own civilians in harm’s way.  

Indeed, we would note that since coming to power in 2006–the same year tonight’s Chai Society inductees joined the temple—Hamas has done exactly one thing, which is to prepare for October 7th, by training tens of thousands of fighters in land-, air-, sea-, and cyber-warfare; diverting vast resources into into building massive infrastructure for launching and asymmetrical war; all while brainwashing the children of Gaza to become Islamofascist martyrs devoted to the cause of eliminating Israel. 

There are also reasonable people who would point out that further pulverization of Gaza only makes it easier for Hamas to raise up a next generation of jihadists sworn to Israel’s destruction.  

There are certainly plenty of reasonable people—especially Israelis—who do not trust Netanyahu and his bedfellows to represent the interests of the Israeli public.

And most reasonable people agree that this war will not truly end until a political roadmap, not a military one, is developed and implemented. 

What is not reasonable, I would submit, is excoriating the war as a “genocide,” or celebrating the perpetrators of October 7th, or harassing Jewish people for the “sin” of being Jewish, or calling for “Palestinian liberation” when what is meant is not an end to Palestinian suffering in Gaza and the West Bank, but the elimination of Israel.

What is not reasonable is the incessant hectoring about Israel’s war in Gaza without a scintilla of moral outrage over the half a million human beings who perished in the Tigray War which consumed Ethiopia just two years ago; or the more than a half a million dead in the Syrian Civil war of the last decade; or the more than 150,000 killed in war in Yemen, also lying in freshly dug graves, coupled with another 227,000 dead of famine; or, for that matter, the dead of the Russian-Ukrainian war, now also well into six figures after more than two years of fighting.  Protest war all you like, but at least know what you’re protesting, and why you choose to protest only this war, especially given the ample menu of bloodshed on offer from just the last few years.

Judaism is in fact not a pacifist tradition, meaning “the belief that any violence, including war, is unjustifiable under any circumstances, and that all disputes should be settled by peaceful means.”  Judaism is not pacifist, even though it is deeply and pervasively peace-loving.

Jewish history, Jewish text, Jewish morality, and Jewish lived experience at this very moment, all offer an answer to the question, “War! What is it good for?”  

That answer is not, “Absolutely nothing.” 

From the Sinai Desert to the Normandy Beaches, from June 6th, 1944 to October 7th, 2023, to this day, eight months later—the only reasonable answer is this:

War is only good for anything when every alternative is worse.

Shabbat Shalom.

  1.  In this way the Book of Numbers presages the oft-stereotyped transformation of the image of the Jew in the 20th century, from the feeble bocher bent over his books in some decrepit shetl yeshiva of Europe to the tan and muscular Israeli wielding his military rifle with pride, or the young pioneer dredging swamps and building kibbutzim, planting vegetables at dawn and dancing the hora at night.  This transformation, cartoonishly exaggerated and trafficking in stereotypes thought it may be, nevertheless passes through the crucible of War.  It is war, more than peace, that defines and unifies a people around a purpose.  I say this not to glorify war but to help us understand its purpose and power:  Even on October 8th, 2023, Israelis understood no less than Americans understood on September 12th, 2001 that even given other clear military aims, we would have to go to war to restore our wounded pride and purpose as a nation.  
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THE YIZKOR WE NEED THIS PESACH

~ rabbiblake ~ 1 Comment

7th Day Pesach 5784

An article by Rabbi Shlomo Brody published last week in Tablet magazine reviews the historical development of the Yizkor memorial service.  As I read it, I remembered, vaguely, that I had written a term paper on this very subject for a liturgy course in rabbinical school.  My area of academic concentration was Medieval Jewish literature which, despite every reasonable conjecture to the contrary, has proved relevant to my work as a congregational rabbi on more than one occasion.  

I spent my HUC days poring over martyrdom texts written by Ashkenazi Jews between the 11th and 15th centuries.  As a tradition that values human life above nearly all else, Judaism generally frowns on martyrdom, with a few notable exceptions.  

The first arises after the failed Bar Kochba rebellion in the 2nd Century, when a self-styled Messiah (Shimon Bar Koziba, a.k.a. “Bar Kochba,” meaning “son of a star”) leads a doomed rebellion of Jews against the Roman Empire—the second failed revolt against Rome in 60 years—and a group of prominent leaders and teachers of Torah, most famously Rabbi Akiva, is rounded up by the Romans and executed to public spectacle.  These martyrs are recalled in the Yom Kippur afternoon service, in a liturgy known as “Eleh Ezkra,” “These do I remember,” or as it’s called in English, “the Martyrology.”  Judaism praises these martyrs for accepting death rather than desecrating the name of God, or so the reasoning goes.  

The other exception arises starting in 1096, when Ashkenazi Jews (that is, Jews of the Rhineland, straddling modern-day France and Germany) were brutally attacked by Christian Crusaders on their way to “liberate” the Holy Land from Muslim “infidels.”  In response to this trauma, Jewish writers wrote commemorative verses for martyrs who took their own lives rather than submit to the Christian marauders who inflicted physical, sexual, and emotional torment on their victims the likes of which none of us had seen in our lifetimes before October 7th, 2023.  

During this period, numerous piyyutim, or devotional poems, were composed, lauding the martyrs, castigating the assailants, and testifying to the sanctification of God’s name for which these pious Jews had died. (To this day, the traditional term for martyrdom is Kiddush Ha-Shem, which means “sanctification of the Name.”) Similar poems proliferate after Jews are put to death (often by burning at the stake, sometimes whole communities at a time) for alleged crimes like murdering Christian children to use their blood for making matzo (the notorious “blood libel”).  

A paucity of reliable eyewitness testimony or other contemporaneous artifacts suggests that the proportion of Jews who chose martyrdom over forced conversion or worse was actually very small; but in literature, if not in life, their numbers are exaggerated to match their esteem.  

In Germany, a controversial custom arose in the wake of the attacks:  writing down the names of the dead in a Memorbücher, or “Memory Book,” called Sefer Zikaron in Hebrew.  As Brody points out, “The list of names was introduced with the prayerful wish: ‘May God remember [Yizkor Elohim].’ Alongside the martyrs, communal leaders or benefactors were listed. These names would then be read aloud in the community. Reading the book turned into a communal ritual.” 

Several prominent rabbis initially opposed this practice, questioning its theological efficacy (could a prayer really effect divine mercy for the soul of the dead?) and even likening the practice to a kind of idolatry:  worship of the dead.  As often happens to rabbis in congregational life (I told you this stuff was relevant), the traumatized community’s need for a collective memorial practice overrode the rabbis’ theological objections, and became a cherished part of Jewish life, with names of the dead often inscribed on the walls of synagogues and in books of remembrance, and read aloud before Kaddish (all customs practiced at WRT).  

In times of collective grief, new prayers were composed to commemorate the slain. One, called Av Ha-Rachamim (“Father of Mercy”), “beseeches God to remember ‘the pious, upright, and blameless, the holy communities, who laid down their lives for the sanctification of [the] Name.’  It further calls on God to take revenge for their spilled blood” (Ibid) and exact vengeance on their enemies. The prayer gained further traction when, in the middle of the fourteenth century, pogroms broke out against Jewish communities in the wake of the Black Plague.  

When, in the middle of the 17th Century, the Cossack warlord Bogdan Chmielnizki led a massacre of tens of thousands of Polish Jews, another new martyrdom prayer entered the liturgy:  El Malei Rachamim, “The God of Abundant Compassion,” a prayer asking God to shelter the souls of the righteous beneath the wings of the Divine Presence (Shekhinah) and to bind up their souls in the bonds of life everlasting”—words that are recited today at every Jewish funeral, but which began as a response to communal trauma.

Taken together, these prayers and poems and lists of the dead gradually coalesce into the Jewish practice of Yizkor, the memorial service that will eventually be adopted into the liturgy for Yom Kippur and the Shalosh Regalim, the three pilgrimage Festivals of Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot.  So we offer Yizkor prayers four times a year.  (By “we,” I mean Ashkenazi Jews; to this day, Sepharadim do not have a communal Yizkor, because the precipitating catastrophes for this liturgy did not happen in Sephardic lands.)  

And, for the most part, our Yizkor, though a communal experience, is centered around the emotional and spiritual needs of the individual mourner.  You will find in our Siddur a wide array of poems, both traditional and modern, and formulas for saying Yizkor, with the emphasis on personal bereavement.

And yet, today is also the first Yizkor since the last Yizkor, which was recited collectively throughout the Jewish world on October 7th and 8th, 2023—on the Festivals of Shemini Atzeret and Simchat Torah—the conclusion of Sukkot.  

One of the great ironies of human life is that we experience mourning as the loneliest of ordeals when in fact it is the most universal.  It is a cruel trick of Nature that the human psyche has evolved to respond to the death of a loved one as uniquely shattering.  “No one can know my pain,” we think; “no one understands what this feels like.”  This was not just someone’s husband, wife, parent, child, or friend:  this one was mine, and now, I am utterly alone.  Such is the force of death and such the devastation of loss.  And still, the force of death is a mirror image of the force of life even as grief is reflected love. 

Judaism, in its compassionate wisdom, saw fit to merge the intensely personal experience of grief with the intensely Jewish need to be in community, and vice versa.  Yizkor: what began as collective remembrance in the face of unfathomable communal trauma also became the sacred container for every individual bereavement.  In so doing, Yizkor makes plain its meaning:  you are not alone.

We need Yizkor this year, more than ever.  We need to be together in our grief and heartbreak, for the trauma of October 7th and the trauma of every day since.  By way of giving us some space for memory—alone and together—I will share this poem by the Adi Keissar, an acclaimed Israeli poet whose family arrived as refugees from Yemen beginning in 1882 on her father’s side, and, on her mother’s side, in the wake of the expulsion of Yemen’s Jews in the 1950’s.

I’m not sure

if I could go back to life this time

A morning run, bike trip, party

without the face of the dead

haunting me

I’m not sure

if I could come back alive this time

An empty baby bed, a blanket

coloured red.

What I’m sure of

Automatic weapons, fire and smoke

shattered windows and a broken door

sirens going up and down

ashes and wreckage

The world is burning

and I am the flames

The hours blended

also, the days

At night came the dreams

and the mosquitos

to suck my skin

As from a hidden signal

swirled around me

all night

buzzed in the darkness

asked for my blood.

All through the night

the air stood still

between me and the world

not going in and not coming out

In the morning I opened a window

the sun was shining in the sky

the silence filled the empty streets

I’m not sure

if I could ever hear silence

that doesn’t hide a disaster within.

אוקטובר\ עדי קיסר

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָהּ

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר לַחַיִּים

רִיצַת בֹּקֶר, טִיּוּל אוֹפַנַּיִם, מְסִבָּה

מִבְּלִי שֶׁיָּבוֹאוּ אֵלַי פְּנֵי הַמֵּתִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ הַפַּעַם לַחְזֹר בַּחַיִּים

מִטַּת תִּינוֹק רֵיקָה, שְׂמִיכָה,

בְּצֶבַע אָדֹם.

בְּמָה אֲנִי בְּטוּחָה:

בַּיְּרִיּוֹת עַל אוֹטוֹמָט, בְּאֵשׁ וּבֶעָשָׁן

בְּחַלּוֹנוֹת מְנֻפָּצִים וּבְדֶלֶת שְׁבוּרָה

בְּאַזְעָקוֹת עוֹלוֹת וְיוֹרְדוֹת

בְּאֵפֶר וּבַהֲרִיסוֹת

הָעוֹלָם בּוֹעֵר

וַאֲנִי הַלֶּהָבוֹת.

הַשָּׁעוֹת נִדְבְּקוּ זוֹ בָּזוּ

גַּם הַיָּמִים

וּבַלַּיְלָה הִגִּיעוּ הַחֲלוֹמוֹת

וְהַיַּתּוּשִׁים

לִמְצֹץ אֶת עוֹרִי

כְּמוֹ מִתּוֹךְ אוֹת סָמוּי

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה

זִמְזְמוּ בַּחֹשֶׁךְ

בִּקְּשׁוּ אֶת דָּמִי.

כָּל הַלַּיְלָה עָמַד הָאֲוִיר

תָּלוּי בֵּינִי וּבֵין הָעוֹלָם

לֹא נִכְנַס וְלֹא יוֹצֵא.

בַּבֹּקֶר פָּתַחְתִּי חַלּוֹן

הַשֶּׁמֶשׁ זָרְחָה בַּשָּׁמַיִם

הַשֶּׁקֶט עָמַד בָּרְחוֹבוֹת הָרֵיקִים

אֲנִי לֹא בְּטוּחָה

שֶׁאַצְלִיחַ פַּעַם לִשְׁמֹעַ שֶׁקֶט

שֶׁלֹּא מַחְבִּיא בְּתוֹכוֹ אָסוֹן.