There has been quite a lot of thinking recently in the "mainstream" Jewish community about the war in Israel and religious ethics. The Jewish Ethics Project is an initiative set up by members of Orthodox synagogues in North London and others, among them Daniel Greenberg, the parliamentary commissioner for standards.
Although interested in a broad range of ethical issues, a glance at its online resources indicates a healthy preoccupation with the ethics of the Gaza war, with some articles by rabbis drawing on their perspectives on the Torah’s guidance to critique Israeli government policy and conduct in the war. An Orthodox Jewish conference in North London last month co-sponsored by the JEP also considered Torah perspectives on, among other issues, tensions between war and the exercise of power.
Of course, Israel has for a long-time mixed-up religion and politics, particularly due to the rabbinical sponsorship of Charedi political parties such as Shas and United Torah Judaism. However, it is not at all self-evident that this is a good idea for a democracy.
In the UK, political commentary by the rabbinate has, with the notable (and in my view right-thinking) intervention of the Chief Rabbi against Jeremy Corbyn in the 2019 general election campaign, avoided getting involved in party politics. The Chief Rabbi’s intervention was shocking due to its unprecedented nature, and certainly the rabbinate has largely (with some exceptions) steered clear of pronouncements about Israeli government policy.
It is not only rabbis who have a difficult relationship with ethics and politics. To take just one example, directly after the carpet bombing of Dresden in World War Two, the Bishop of Chichester, George Bell, spoke out vociferously against killing of German civilians in a speech, in the House of Lords. In opposing Dresden, Bell argued that the Government and the King had a moral responsibility to Heavenly authority, which they were ignoring in allowing the indiscriminate mass killing of civilians.
He was roundly condemned for his intervention by other Lords including the Archbishop of York and members of the government, who argued back that it was a lesser evil to bomb the Germans than for more Allied soldiers to die or to delay the freeing of millions from Nazi enslavement or worse.
If politics is the art of the possible, then in war it is about deciding on what is the lesser evil. A messy, difficult business. But not one in democracies that is devoid of ethics, or morals, or indeed responsibility to Heaven. Yet politics is the necessary unpleasant game of democratic life that elected politicians engage in.
It is elected politicians who make those messy, difficult decisions in a war about what is the greater and lesser evil, and as democratic politicians they are accountable to the people for those decisions. Usually in a democracy at war, if it comes to resisting having the way of life of your people, their freedom, or their lives, destroyed by the enemy, then politicians decide that is the lesser evil, even if others end up suffering.
There are good reasons as well why in most democracies, the idea of clergy pronouncing on this is what the Bible says is right, and this is what’s wrong, is very much frowned on. These reasons should be especially evident in Britain because it is through the particular political history of Britain that the world worked out why separating the church from political decision making was a good idea.
It was in Britain that we realised that letting kings and the church persecute and burn to death people whose faith was different from the prevailing orthodoxy was a really bad idea.
It is in Britain that the Enlightenment ideas of Locke and Hume changed the psyche of a whole society, promoting a commitment to toleration of religious and political differences, a toleration which led to the modern democratic open society that we live in and that much of the world has adopted. It is that history that discourages or should discourage the clergy from telling us what is right and what is wrong in terms of political decisions.
It doesn’t seem to me a good idea to suggest that we can work out that democratic political decision A conforms with Torah and decision B doesn’t
In the same way, it doesn’t seem to me a good idea to suggest that we can work out that democratic political decision A conforms with Torah and decision B doesn’t, or that the decisions of the Israeli government in Gaza have somehow been against the Torah and therefore unethical.
As many would argue, the Israeli government has, just like in WWII, been responsible to the Israeli people for taking truly awful life and death decisions about what is the greater and lesser evil, faced with the possible destruction of that people and their way of life.
Political decisions are messy, difficult and inescapably imperfect. They are the art of the possible. Dressing up political positions as Torah from Sinai is misguided. The lesson of the English and Scottish Enlightenments was that what seem like ethics from Heaven can often in reality be more about politics that favour one group or one group’s ideology over another.
Yes, ethics are important and yes Jewish ethics are also important. I think it is fine for the clergy to express their political opinions which are inevitably and rightly influenced by their religious ethics. But I think they must accept the consequences, as George Bell did, that they then enter the rough and tumble of the political arena.
When it comes to the actions of the Israeli government, or indeed the British, whether you are a bishop or a rabbi or otherwise, it’s better to admit that if you have an opinion, and in democracy everyone can, that’s politics not Torah.
Joe Mintz is professor of inclusive education at University College London
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