(for the week of July 10th, 2010/28 Tammuz, 5770)
Parashat “Matot-Masei”
Numbers 30:2-36:13
I am not a pacifist but I believe that war is inherently evil. I am willing to concede that there is such a thing as necessary evil (e.g., killing in the name of self-defense). And I am deeply grateful, without reservation, to the men and women who are willing to take on the physically, morally and spiritually perilous work of protecting us. But I don’t believe there truly is such a thing as a “good war,” a “just war” or a “holy war.” At best, there are wars of tragic necessity in which the evil that threatens us is sufficiently great to justify the evil of sending our soldiers to murder other human beings. But I’ve never been able to imagine God cheering.
In the first part of this week’s double Torah portion (Numbers 31), we come upon a deeply troubling story. The Torah reports that at God’s command, Moses sends the army out to avenge the people against the Midianites and the army supposedly kills every Midianite male (though, curiously, the Midianites will reappear later in the time of Joshua). To Moses’ distress, the army also takes the Midianites’ flocks and wealth as booty and make the women and other dependents captives. Moses reprimands the officers and has them go back and kill all the male captives and all the women who aren’t virgins (and, therefore, might have taken part in the seduction of the Israelite men and the resulting idolatry described in the last two portions). The remainder of the passage talks about the rituals of purification for the soldiers and the proper division of the booty.
Not only does the Torah not express any moral reservation about the supposed extermination of the Midianites, the act is framed as the fulfillment of God’s express command—a mitzvah. How can such a troubling story not raise questions for us about the holiness of the Torah, the God it describes and the life to which it summons us? How can we not struggle to reconcile this Torah with a Torah that also commands us to “love your neighbor as yourself,” “protect the stranger,” “seek peace,” view every human being as an “image of God” and not commit murder? And what does the commanding Voice of whatever we understand as “God” say to us about the morality of war as a human activity? Can there ever be such a thing as a “holy” war?
There is scant consolation in the fact that these questions seem to be as old as humanity. And I do not have any simple, comforting answers to offer up. I know that I am deeply suspicious of the religious certainty of zealots who promote war as God’s command—whether those zealots live in the Torah’s stories or in practically every modern country around the world, including America and Israel. I also know that I accept but am not placated by the argument from historical relativism (i.e., that such a violent worldview was normative for the time in which the Torah was written even if it no longer feels like the word of God in our time). But in the end, I’m left with the less than satisfying comfort of my commitment to keep wrestling with these questions—to struggle with the Torah’s vision of God and God’s Truth, to try and understand how our ancestors could have seen the extermination of another people as God’s command, to look deeply and honestly at the ongoing tension between the necessity of war and the evil of war and to ask how the human urge to violence and vengeance possibly folds into what it means for us to be created in God’s image. Those seem to be enough, important questions to glean from one week of Torah study.
