"Allow me to pass through your land: I will go along by the highway, I will turn neither to the right nor to the left."

You shall sell me food for money, that I may eat; and give me water for money, that I may drink; I 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 barnea, until we crossed the brook of Zered, numbered thirty eight years, until all the generation of the men of war expired from the midst of the camp, just as the Lord swore to them. Also the hand of the Lord was upon them, to destroy them from the midst of the camp, until they were consumed. So it was, when all the men of war finished dying from 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... you shall not fear any man, for the judgment is upon 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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