"Allow me to pass

right nor to the left."

You shall sell me food

will only pass through by my feet. (Devarim 2:27-28)

Israel now sent messengers to Sihon king of the Amorites (Bamidbar 21:21): As Scripture says: Shun

evil and do good (Psalms 34:15). The

Torah did not require the pursuit of commandments, but rather if you happen

upon a bird's nest (Devarim 22:6), When

you happen to encounter your enemy's ox (Shemot

23:4), When you happen to see your enemy's ass (23:5) when you beat down the fruit of your

olive trees (Devarim 24:20), when

you gather the grapes (24:21), when

you enter another man's vineyard (23:25).

All of them involve an obligation – if you happened upon them – but you need

not chase after them. But peace – seek it in your place, and pursue it in other

places. And so did Israel: Even though the Holy One blessed be He told them Begin

the expulsion, take possession of his land! (3:31),

they pursued peace, as it says: Israel now sent messengers, etc.

(Tanhuma Hukat 22)

Strange but significant to relate, therefore,

our entry into the Holy Land, and the beginning of the war against the seven

nations whom we were commanded to drive out, were marked by the Divine command

not to meddle with or harass certain specific nations and "words of

peace" to one whose conquest had been expressly called for by the

Almighty.

(N.

Leibowitz Studies in Devarim, A. Newman translator, pg. 31)

The

Speech on Ethics and War

Hanoch

Ben Pazi

So it was, when

all the men of war finished dying from among the people (Devarim 2:16) and now

Moses wants to present the people with an alternative address on war. He will

not speak of hatred, jealousy, or love of battle, but rather of war being

subject to law and morality: and judge justly between a man and his brother,

and between his stranger (Devarim

1:16).

Listen to Zarathustra's war cry:

I know the hatred and envy of your hearts. Ye

are not great enough not to know of hatred and envy. Then be great enough not

to be ashamed of them!… I see many soldiers; could I but see many men of war!…

You I advise not to peace, but to victory. Let your work be a fight, let your

peace be a victory!¹

These words are taken from a speech placed by

Nietzsche into Zarathustra's mouth. It is meant to emphasize war's advantages,

how war reveals the soul's powers of life. Nietzsche's speech calls upon people

to give rise to the super-men, the people who live life fully, who are here

called warriors. I propose to read Moses' first speech in the book of

Devarim as a war-speech; a war-speech of an entirely different type than most

war-speeches. It has nothing to say of the heat and excitement of battle. Instead,

it offers the possibility of a religious reaction to history – the ability to

consider the "red lines" of war. It differentiates between proper and

improper motivations for war.

The book of Devarim is presented as

consisting of a series of farewell addresses delivered by Moses to the People

Israel. Despite the exegetical difficulties involved in dividing the book into

speeches, it clearly includes the completion of the trek through the

wilderness, thoughts of entering the Land, the commandments and laws that will

be in force in the Land, along with the song and prophecy about the days that will

follow Moses' death. The first speech includes all of parashat Devarim, as well

as, it seems, the first verses of parashat Va'ethanan; it is meant to remind

the people of the events of the journey through the wilderness. To our great

surprise, the speech is not devoted to genuinely important matters such as the

Exodus from Egypt, the giving of the Torah, or even the awaited entrance into

the Land. Those topics are touched upon, but the guiding thread that unites the

speech as a whole is war and the proper attitude towards war. This may be one

of the first speeches in human history in which a leader reflects upon the wars

he waged, even offering a broader insight into the meaning of war in general. He

does not tell the people about acts of courage, or the myth of the war

experience (as George Mosse put it), or of tragedy and victory. He wants to

think of warfare as struggles that spring from the religious commitment to

truth and justice. His message is simple and might be seen as simplistic and

naïve, but it is, in fact, very profound and complex; it claims that the

only war that can be waged is one in which the Lord shall fight for you.

No war over national, territorial, or economic interests can be genuinely just.

A just war is free of personal interests; God Himself wages it. Perhaps in this

speech Moses wants to offer a personal interpretation since only a deep

understanding of the meaning of war brought him to understand the difficult

situation which he faced as someone who would not enter the land.

Michael Walzer, one of the leading political

philosophers who has dealt with the ethics of war, once said that Judaism has

no tradition of philosophical discussion of war and peace.² Often we

moderns find ourselves even less comfortable when studying Scripture; the

stories of war found in the Torah and Prophets arouse moral discomfort. Sometimes

it seems that the two worlds are divided by an unbridgeable chasm. Parashat

Devarim allows us to rethink the meaning of war – and perhaps also of peace – in

the Torah in terms of the relationship between morality, law, and war.

I first took notice of Moses' speech when my

son, Noam, brought me a question from a test he took in fourth grade. The

children were asked to specify the names that the peoples living in

trans-Jordan used to refer to each other: Eimim, Zamzumim, Refa'im. He asked me

why it was important for Jewish children to memorize these names. Noam's

suggested answer related to how nations can humiliate each other with

derogatory names. For instance, derogatory names and disparaging expressions

can be used deliberately against those whom you want to be seen as enemies in

order to promote hatred and make way for the nation and its soldiers to go off

to war.

From this military perspective, Moses has

produced a masterful speech; notice its rhetoric, inner logic, structure, and

footnotes. One can almost imagine Moses taking a slip of paper out of his

pocket and saying, the Ammonites call them Zamzumim, taking his time

with the word Za-m-zu-mi-m, in order for his audience to appreciate Ammonites'

contempt for the Refa'im. The speech is carefully divided into two balanced

sections, one referring to things the people have only heard of in stories, the

other relating to events they have lived through personally. The first part is

devoted to the story of the generation which left Egypt – the Generation of the

Wilderness – in which Moses describes their fate in the aftermath of the sin of

the spies: that generation's decision to go to war to conquer the Land, their

stinging failure, and their devastating routing by the Amorites. The second

section, in contrast, describes recent events that were well-known to the

Israelites, the wars they had fought that very year. Now Moses dwells upon the

avoidance of war, how Israel has no quarrel with Edom, how Israel abstains from

war with Moab and Amon, but fights a miraculous war against two legendary

kings: Sihon and Og.

This line of interpretation can also explain

the differences between how the story of the sin of the spies is told in

parashat Shelah and how it is told in Devarim. This time, in Devarim, Moses

describes the spies' mission as preparatory for the military conquest of the Land:

Let us send men ahead of us so that they will search

out the land for us (1:22). The

mission was motivated by the desire to conquer the Land, and the reaction of

the spies and the people was related to this military aspect: they feared war. No

less importantly, the way in which they attempted to atone for the sin of the

spies ends up being sinful in its own right: they try to atone for their fear

by waging another war.

The message of Moses' speech is already found

in the very fact of its existence. By delivering his speech, Moses lends great

importance to something that had usually been less important to his style of

leadership: speaking to the people. If you thought that action was the

principle part of leadership – entering the Land, fighting the seven nations,

and building the Temple – the book of Devarim opens by expressing the

importance of reflexive thinking about Jewish history. This message is already

impressed upon us by the book's very first verse: These

are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on that side of the Jordan.

And while we listen to this verse, the words Moses uttered by the burning bush

echo in our heads: I am not a man of words. We have arrived at

the book of Devarim and Moses' speech has been cured. His communicative

difficulties have been replaced by his direct address to the nation as its

leader. Moses personifies the transition from a politics of action to

dialogical political action, and perhaps to dialogical education.

If reflection and self-accounting take a

central role in understanding the nature of war, they can be found in this

speech's unique rhetorical power, especially in the transition between its two

sections: And the days when we went from Kadesh

as the Lord swore to them. Also the hand

among the people (Devarim 2:14-16). Instead

of describing how the generation that left Egypt is replaced by the generation

that enters the Land, Moses speaks of waiting for the men of war to

completely die out. The expression men of war is familiar in Scripture;

elsewhere it is always used to denote combat troops. We come across the

expression in Bamidbar after the war with Midian, in the Book of Samuel, and

many times in Jeremiah. Why is the generation of the wilderness called men

of war? Both Rashi and RaShBaM treat this question, since it creates a gulf

between the expression's literal meaning and its metaphorical meaning for an

entire generation. The people of the generation of the wilderness are called men

of war but they fought only one failed war to conquer the Land, while the

later generations – the generations of peace – fights many wars.

Why? Because Moses was more concerned with

the motivation for war. The second generation is able to do without war

because they are not fighting their own wars. In that moment of

theological-political reflection, Moses can ask about the people's motivation to

fight. From there he goes on to delineate what is proper and improper and even

allowed and prohibited when speaking about "the other nation." All of

these questions are very relevant for the Torah's philosophical discussion of

war. Moses' words set the limits of the permitted and the forbidden in warfare:

do not provoke them to war; for I have given it as an inheritance to

the Seirites; and call to them for peace, etc. This position is far

from pacifism, but it does create a strong connection between ethics and war. It

is also of religious significance, setting up a connection between

moral-religious intentions and political success.

The great difficulty with this speech is that

it leaves out the most important part: by what criterion can we know if a

particular war would be appropriate or inappropriate? When does someone know

whether he is fighting a war for his own sake or for the sake of justice? When

does he know if it is God's war or just a national war in religious garb? Moses'

speech does address this difficulty. The fact that the men of war say we will go up and fight, according to all that the Lord,

our God, has commanded us (1:41) does not change their deed into a war of

God. Now it must be understood that while the first generation called the war

they declared following the story of the spies a war commanded by God,

it is not be understood as such, as Moses explains: Do not go up and do not

fight, for I am not in your midst. And Moses drives it home: and they

chased you as do the bees (1:48).

Not power, or ability, or consciousness of

the land of Israel, or even the restoration of deterrence can grant the right

to wage war. Fear of the Edomites did not permit war against them; on the

contrary – be very careful (2:4). War

cannot be justified by the delegitimization of other nations in order to

represent them as enemies, hatred, the settling of national accounts, or economic

interests. The theology presented in this speech proclaims that the only

permitted war is God's war, and not the war of his representatives. As far as

faith in concerned, this is the faith. The sons of Esau are your brothers: do

not provoke them. The sons of Lot have rights just like you: Do not

distress the Moabites. As for the Amonites: do not distress them or

provoke them. Moses' religious-spiritual explanations include recognition

of the rights of inheritance granted to other nations by God and the religious

duty to respect their successes and inheritance. This is not a pacifist stance,

but rather a religious and moral stance: there are just wars and unjust wars. Two

great kings, both of them giants – King Sihon of Heshbon the Amorite and King Og

of the Bashan– are mentioned as refusing to engage in neighborly relations. They

both do battle against Israel and God fights against them.

If territory is no basis for a claim, and

living space is not a justification, and if you can't go to war for food and

water or even to establish deterrence, can we find the touchstone that reveals

the possible connection between war and justice? Moses gives his answer through

the structure of his speech: law comes before war. Morality comes

before the conquest of the Land. Before the Israelites ask to devote

themselves to conquering and settling the Land, they must first establish a

proper constitution and the right’s of people in matters of justice, law, and

morality. Morality comes before war and war remains subordinate to it: and judge justly between a man and his brother, and

between his stranger… You shall not favor persons in judgment…

God (1:16-17).

As the Jewish poetess

and thinker Margerete Susman said: "When asking of man that he

realize their vision of peace, the prophets do not ask for tremendous,

earth-shattering things, but for the simple, the most sober and modest things

that are in everyone's reach: simple humanity… The

stranger who sojourns with you shall be as a native from among you –

this demand is the simplest and most primary, it seems self-evident… it is

the small seed from which will grow a tree that gives shade to a world of peace

and humanity."³

1. Nietzsche Thus

Spake Zarathustra, based on Thomas Common translation http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1998/1998-h/1998-h.htm

2. Michael Walzer, "War and Peace in the Jewish Tradition," in The

Ethics of War and Peace, Terry Nardin (ed.), Princeton, 1996, p.95.

3. M. Susman, Deutung Biblischer Gestalten, 1955.

Dr. Hanokh Ben Pazzi teaches in the

department of Jewish Philosphy at Bar Ilan University.

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