War and Peace in Judaism

Shabbat Ki Teitzei 5782

Shabbat is a day of rest and peace—of course, that’s what we mean when we say Shabbat Shalom.  But in our world, peace can often seem elusive.

The news this morning brought reports of a breakthrough by the Ukrainian Army in the northern part of the country as it recovered many miles of its country from the Russian invaders.  This grinding war has taken up the attention of the world over the past six months and more, with its terrible death tolls and awful destruction.  But of course, Judaism is not exactly unfamiliar with the topic of war.   

Which brings us to this week’s Torah portion, Ki Teitzei, which begins with an exploration of the laws of warfare.  How are we supposed to act in wartime?  This portion’s subject raises the whole issue of war and peace in religious thought. 

Of course, we all prefer to think of our religious doctrines as being dedicated to creating peace, not war.  Much of Jewish liturgy, and general religious language, is focused on peace.  Yet here we have a Torah section beginning with an assumption we will engage in war.  That’s true even in the wording of the first phrase: Ki Teitzei lamilchama al oyvecha—when you go out to war against your enemy, not if you go out to war.

Nothing turns someone off to religion more quickly than hearing about religious wars, and I have had many people tell me that they think the greatest cause of war in human history is religion; you know, the Crusades, and jihads, and so on.  While that’s certainly not factually true—World War I and World War II, the greatest, most extensive and most terrible wars in all human history, which resulted in the deaths of more people than all previous wars combined, were not religious wars at all, and human beings have slaughtered one another over territory and political systems and racial and cultural difference for millennia without needing to worry about religion in order to kill others. 

Still, many people have been slaughtered in the name of God over time, and Jewish people at a higher rate than others.  It certainly strikes an ugly, discordant note to hear about warfare and religion blended together. 

Since 9/11, the concept of jihad and Islamic warfare and terrorism have become distressingly familiar to us in America, and almost exactly 22 years after 9/11 we have finally extracted ourselves from the longest conflicts in American history in Iraq and Afghanistan—and the net results of both wars are disheartening.  Both wars were provoked by acts taken in the name of religion, and both were filled with perverse, ugly forms of religious fanaticism.  While ISIS was beaten back in Syria and Iraq, the current state of thos nations is terrible.  And Afghanistan certainly doesn’t look like it will end any better.

Many people see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a religious war between Islam and Judaism, and there are areas of religious terrorism and warfare in nearly every part of the world right now.  Thinking about this combination of war and religion is both distressingly common and kind of depressing. 

No one who respects the positive role religion plays in our world likes to think about a linkage between the kind of wholesale slaughter that war entails and the pious belief in God.  And yet there it is.

Lest you think this tendency is restricted to Western religions like Judaism, Christianity and Islam, you might recall the violent Buddhist monks who encouraged brutal attacks and expulsions of Muslims in Myanmar (Burma) and Hindus in Sri Lanka.  It seems to me that this is very much the antithesis of how we expect religious leaders to behave, but especially so Buddhists.  Buddhism has the reputation of being a religion dedicated to enlightenment and non-violence.  If Buddhist monks encourage religious terrorism what’s next?  Peace symbols used as nunchuks?  Switzerland declaring war on Sweden?  Genocidal tyrants quoting Gandhi to justify slaughter?  

And so, when our Jewish Scripture, the Torah, teaches us about warfare the tendency is to want to wash our hands of the whole mess.  How can we advocate for peace and claim our God is “oseh HaShalom” the Maker of Peace, how can we pray the Shalom Rav prayer requesting of God great peace in the world, while at the same time calmly discussing how we are to go about slaughtering other people in God’s name?  Isn’t it the duty of religion to advocate for peace and to denounce all war?

In general, this is true.  But the sad fact of human civilization is that a war is almost always going on somewhere, and sometimes everywhere, in the world, and that the number of years in which this planet has been free of war is very few.  One calculation I found says that of the 3400 years of recorded human history only 250 years have been free of a documented war—that is, once every 15 years or so we have a year without a war.  To be honest, that seems wildly optimistic.  In my lifetime I cannot recall a single year in which warfare has not been waged somewhere on the globe.

Which makes the agenda of the opening section of our Torah reading sadly and strangely appropriate at any time.  For it does not begin “If you go out to war against your enemy” but “when you go out to war against your enemy.”  Pragmatically, the Torah treats war as the tragic but inevitable result of human conflict.  We hate war; we seek to avoid war at all costs; we know that war is destructive to much of what we believe in and pray for.  But we also know that there simply are times when it cannot be avoided, when in our fallible human ways we will fall into war.  Perhaps the best translation here is “When you have to go out to war…”

If that is so, and we are destined to end up at war, does it mean that we can engage in any kind of conduct to further our military aims?

There is an old platitude, “All’s fair in love and war.”  But the Torah, right here in Ki Teitzei, informs us that all is not fair in war, and that we need to restrain ourselves both in our military conduct and in the ways in which we re-enter society.  That restraint is essential to our moral claim to serve God through our own actions, to “fight for the right.”  We are obligated to act in ways that sustain and reinforce holiness, even under the exigencies of military necessity.

Our section of Deuteronomy scrupulously outlines the ways in which we must restrain ourselves when forced to engage in warfare.  We are not to destroy the productive capacity of the land of our enemies.  We are not to exploit captives, women especially, as though they were subhuman.  We are to have a cleansing process after battle before we are to reengage in civilian society.

This code contrasts with, for example, the torture used at American prisons like Abu Ghraib during the Iraq conflict, or at Guantanamo.  It contradicts the massacres of non-combatants perpetrated by the Assad regime in Syria, and throughout the long, terrible civil war in Iraq by ISIS, or by the Taliban long ago and again, right now, in Afghanistan.  None of these would have been accepted in ancient Israel 3,000 years ago.  Even in warfare there must be limits, and it is painful to recognize that in some ways we are more primitive than our ancestors were three millennia ago.

The contemporary Israeli Army, the IDF, has its own code of conduct, the “Tohorat Neshek, the purity of arms.” It is a serious effort to interpret the concept of “fighting only the right way” into practical terms.  And when Israeli soldiers fail that test, they are held accountable, put through a review process, tried, and sometimes jailed.  While the IDF’s rules and laws today are certainly not the same as those of Ki Teitzei, the concepts remain valid.  Even while engaged in the violence of warfare, the dehumanizing experience of seeking to fight, suppress, and kill others, we must try to maintain our humanity, restrain ourselves within limits based on principles.   

But perhaps the greatest lesson, for those of us fortunate enough not to be engaged in military conflict or trying to negotiate Israeli/Palestinian peace, is that if rules can be applied to the harshest form of human interaction, to warfare itself, they can certainly be applied to the lesser friction and human interaction tzoris that we experience in our own lives.  If our ancestors managed to avoid the worst excesses of warfare, we too can learn to avoid the worst excesses that our society presents to us—the conflicts and arguments and disputes that damage us, those around us, and our world.

I mean, if we can control ourselves during war, when people are quite literally trying to kill us all the time, can’t we control our verbal responses to those we disagree with politically?  Can’t we learn to live in harmony even when we have philosophical differences with our neighbors?  Can’t we avoid gossiping about our colleagues, our associates, our friends, even our enemies?

And if can learn from Ki Teitzei to moderate our responses and our behavior, and to structure our organizations and our lives to avoid that kind of reactivity, free of these excesses of conflict, then perhaps we can resume our real task in life: creating a world of holiness and blessing, perhaps even one that lives up the concept of a Community Shabbat, and to our many prayers of peace.  And then this coming Jewish New Year may prove to be a true year of peace.  Ken Yehi Ratson.  May this be God’s will.  And ours.