Beware an over-reliance on power, the rabbis warned

The source of the Talmud’s cryptic remark is anonymous. It is probably from first-century or second-century Galilee, a community that was intimately acquainted with devastation and destruction from many years of wars with the Roman armies.

It reflects a rabbinic view that, while force may sometimes be necessary – “if he comes to kill you, you kill him first”, in the words of the Talmud in Sanhedrin 72a – the use of force by a Jewish state is limited by thought and intellect.

Indeed, the message of the first Mishnah in the eighth chapter of the tractate of Sotah, where the cryptic comment quoted above is found, is that the nation of Israel does not need to engage in total war. The “encampment of the ark”, as the Mishnah describes the army of Israel, can restrict its numbers: it is protected by its unity, its faith and its Torah.

This restricted, nuanced approach to war is encapsulated in the Talmud’s remark in Megillah 10b that, while humans may rejoice in the downfall of the wicked, God himself does not rejoice. Life is precious. Loss of life, even that of our enemy, remains tragic.

In the words of the Mishnah in Sanhedrin (4:5), “anyone who destroys a single life is like someone who destroyed a whole world”.

These restrictions of war are expressed in many areas of the halachah: we make war but we are forbidden to destroy fruit trees and wells or to cut off water supplies; we lay siege to a city but we are commanded to allow its inhabitants to flee; we must prevent murder or rape, even at the cost of the would-be killer’s or rapist’s life, but we bear his blood-guilt if we could have prevented the crime in another way (Mishneh Torah, Laws of War, Chapter 6; Laws of Murder and Saving Life, Chapter 1).

Of course these moral and political complexities are difficult to teach and many rabbis in the UK will not teach them,. In Israel, perhaps the most distinguished of those who recently did was Rav Shagar, Rabbi Shimon Gershon Rosenberg.

Born in Israel in 1949, Rav Shagar served on the Golan in 1973. When he died from cancer in 2007, he was one of Israel’s leading moral voices and educators.

In his essay, “Seventy Bullocks and One Sukka”, translated in “Faith Shattered and Restored” (Maggid Books, 2017, Pages 184-185), he urges us to cultivate our sensitivity towards others’ suffering by drawing from our own history of exile, suffering and oppression.

He asks:

“What happens when the balance of power shifts, when the exiled nation, scattered to the ends of the earth by virtue of its own exalted quality, becomes sovereign over a defined territory? Now that it has won dominion, must its collective historical memory of diaspora and defeat compel it to treat the other residents of the land with contempt and hostility?

"The Torah’s objective in decreeing the memory of the Exodus is to establish a solidarity of the defeated, not the victors.”

Then, in words which might have been written just last week, Rav Shagar warns of the dangers of Jewish power and Jewish victory.

“Epic past triumphs are not meant to make us drunk with power; rather they are to instil in us the faith that it is God ‘who gives you power’, steering us away from the temptation to believe that ‘my power and the might of hand have gotten me this wealth’.

“Aggression exerts a powerful draw, and the Torah warns repeatedly against it in its passages of rebuke.

“Preoccupation with power and the pursuit of authority over others stem from a dearth of faith in the Lord, blessed by He, and fly in the face of that which the Torah seeks to impart to the nation as it inherits the land: memory and the sensitivity it engenders. . . .

“Such a state of mind precludes faithful devotion to God and sensitivity to the suffering of the strangers in our midst – a quality we were dispersed to the ends of the earth in order to acquire”.

How to think about the exercise of Jewish power is the greatest challenge facing Israel today: is it to be a Jewish state in its ethical core, or is it to become just a state for Jews, a state like all other states where, in the words of Lord Acton, “power tends to corrupt and absolute power corrupts absolutely”?

The Talmud teaches us that those who cannot think are unqualified to fight. Let’s not be among them.

Benedict Roth is a teacher of Talmud. His daily Mishnah class is on www.thedailymishnah.com

Image: Israeli army Merkava battle tanks deploy along the border with the Gaza Strip in response to the Hamas attack of October 7, 2023 (Getty)