Drashot for Shoftim - Enjoy!

William Tecumseh Sherman

Friday, 24 August 2012

On Fruit Trees and Captive Cities

We have all heard the expression ‘War is Hell.’  We might not be aware of the origins of the claim.  But we don’t even think of questioning the truth in it.  How could we?

          In this room are not many who have had direct, personal experience in war.  Sadly, the generation that knew the Second World War has largely passed on.  We still have a handful of members who either fought as combatants in that war or who were as civilians displaced from their homes and countries.  But most of us in the room this evening are too young to have first-hand experience.  For us, the stories told us by our parents – in some of our cases, by our grandparents – have had to suffice.

          There have been wars since then.  Of course, there was the Korean War.  We do have one member who is a veteran of that conflict.  And then there was Vietnam.  Before I came to Australia, I was not so aware that Vietnam was an Australian war also.  I had been aware that Australians not much older than me had fought in it.  But I had not realized that Australia’s Vietnam experience paralleled that of the USA so closely.  I did not know that, while you had a draft, it was quite selective and that many young men avoided service through various kinds of deferments.  It was this selectivity that made the lot of those who did go to Vietnam seem so unfair, just like in America.  The length and inconclusive end of the conflict made Australia shy of such entanglements for decades, just as with the USA.

Vietnam created a generational gap between my parents’ generation, and mine.  My father and the young men of his generation fought willingly in World War Two and came home with a sense of having participated in a campaign for a great and just cause.  Members of my generation who went to Vietnam often went under duress and came home traumatized for having participated in a conflict where it was never quite so clear who were the ‘Good Guys’ and who were the bad.  They fought without having a sense of being supported by their countrymen at home.  And they came home traumatised, after all their experiences, for not having brought the conflict to a conclusive end.

So War is Hell.  The first recorded use of the phrase is actually by William Tecumseh Sherman.  Many of you have heard his name.  He was a Union general in the American Civil War, fought between 1861 and 1865.  In the Southern States, those whose succession from the Union formed the Confederacy, Sherman’s name still evokes expressions of disgust.  Sherman, after all sacked Atlanta and led the march to the Atlantic Coast, on which he pursued an unbridled, scorched earth policy.  For Sherman, ‘War is Hell’ was an answer to those who criticised his displacement of a civilian population on hundreds of square miles of rural territory.  Thousands of people left homeless?  Crops destroyed in the fields, which will surely lead to famine?  War is Hell.  With the phrase, he scoffed at the notion that there is any need for taming the injury of war toward civilian populations.

And then there was Carl von Clausewitz, the ‘Mad Prussian.’  Clausewitz is the one who famously informed us that ‘War is the continuation of politics by other means.’ We can see the truth of this notion.  We might recoil from it because we want to see the resort to arms as a major phase shift in the management of a conflict, where Clausewitz seemed to see it as simply another step in the acting out of international conflict.  Less famously, Clausewitz declared: ‘Earlier theorists aimed to equip the conduct of war with principles (or) rules.  All these attempts are objectionable, however, because they aim at fixed values.  In war everything is uncertain and variable, intertwined with psychological forces and effects, and the product of a continuous interaction of opposites.’ Clausewitz viewed any tendency to set rules whose purpose is to abrogate the brutality of war, as absurd.

And then there was the Torah.  In this week’s parashah, we find some of the Torah’s laws concerning the conduct of warfare.  In particular, tomorrow morning we shall read the verse that prohibits uprooting a besieged city’s fruit trees.  The sieging army may make use of them for food, but may not destroy them.  Bal tashchit – Do Not Destroy – has become a body of law concerning constraint in war.  It has also developed into an environmental ethic, but more about that another time.

If Clausewitz had his way, there would be no fetters against the use of force for moral purposes.  His only support of proportionality was for pragmatic reasons.  But in the real world of warfare there are many constraints to the conduct of belligerents.  There are important conventions regarding the treatment of civilians, enemy combatants taken prisoner, and the enemy’s battlefield wounded.  These constraints are not universally followed, but that does not bring them into question.  When a country’s army does not follow the conventions, it produces such loathing in world opinion because the world expects them to be followed.  Somewhat.

Although much of the commonly-accepted constraints can be traced to early Christian thinkers, we find a highly-developed body of laws in the Talmud.  And the Talmud, while its text is esoteric in non-Jewish circles, is based on oral principles which certainly would have been well-known to Christianity’s founders who were, after all, Jews.

 But our reading this week sounds more than a little contradictory.  On one hand it forbids the wanton destruction of fruit trees.  On the other hand it tells us:  When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace.  If it responds peacefully and lets you in, all the people present there shall serve you as forced labour.  If it does not surrender to you, but would join battle with you, you shall lay siege to it.  When the Lord your God delivers it into your hand, you shall put all its males to the sword.

Why the deep concern over trees, juxtaposed with the license to kill all the town’s men?  Is this some deep mystery to be probed, or is it just an example of the Torah’s brutality?  It’s neither.

This passage is a sermon Moses was delivering to the people Israel, concerning the conduct of the coming war of conquest against the Canaanite nations.  Some historians and archaeologists say that the war never happened; they assert that evidence outside the books of the Prophets suggest that it was more an ‘infiltration’ than a war.  True?  Personally, I’ll leave that for the historians.  The Torah’s purpose is not to teach us history, rather morality.  If that’s so, what is the moral lesson in this?

For Shlomo Goren, the first chief rabbi of the modern Israeli Defence Forces, the lesson is the danger of creeping avodah zarah – paganism.   He pointed to how the proscription of the Canaanite nations included a warning against finding attraction for their practices.  Given our history, one can see that this is a very valid concern.  We – like the rest of humanity – are easily led astray by our eyes.  That which we see, which is attractive to us, we pursue.  Often, with no constraints.  This is the essence of paganism.  It isn’t necessarily about statues.  It’s about worship of things.

So Rav Goren saw in the brutality that Moses was presumably unleashing through his sermon, a lesson in not making accommodation with the worship of material gods.  And he offered the caution that, in the modern conflict of the Israeli state with the Arab confrontation states, the Jewish fighter must not see the Arabs as an incarnation of the Canaanite nations.  He cautioned that the laws of the Canaanite conquest should be seen as a one-time event, not as guidelines for warfare against Israel’s enemies in any age.  Shlomo Goren, by the way, in his lifetime was considered to be the spiritual leader of the ‘Settler Movement.’  You know, those ‘Evil Settlers’?  The zealots who supposedly want to kill every Arab?  One can agree or disagree with the Settlers’ quest to bring a Jewish presence to every corner of the traditional Land of Israel.  One can consider them heroes, or misguided.  But they are definitely not the bloodthirsty baby killers that the Palestinian Propaganda Machine and its fans in the West, have asserted with much success.

I realize that I have barely scratched the surface of the topic of morality in war.  For that I beg forgiveness.  I guess I don’t need to beg forgiveness for not making you sit through a sermon long enough to touch all the major points of the subject...  It’s a fascinating subject, and an important one.  There is a definite Jewish ethic of warfare, and it should be an important voice among the different traditions of the world in bringing some order to the chaos.  For now, my message is that we should endeavour to know the sources – our sources – better.  I’m going to talk about another aspect of this subject tomorrow morning.  That’s not a promise, but a threat!  Shabbat shalom.

 

Carl von Clausewitz

Saturday, 25 August 2012

Living with Violence

A few weeks ago, I talked about Bal Tashchit, Do Not Destroy.  It forms an overall Jewish ethic on the conduct of warfare, but also on protection of the environment.  This week, Rabbi Gary Robuck, of North Shore Temple Emanuel, wrote an excellent drash on the aspect of protecting the environment.  If you do not subscribe to the weekly e-mailed drashot from the UPJ, you can find his drash posted on the UPJ website.  Rabbi Robuck has very thoroughly and effectively presented the import of Bal Tashchit with regard to an environmental ethic.  Therefore, I wish to continue speaking this morning about the aspect of ethics in warfare, about which I began last night.

          As you all know by now, I spent 26 years serving in the US forces – the first 14 years in cryptologic intelligence, and the final 12 years as a chaplain.  Although I was on active duty for a number of years while my country was fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, I was not directly involved in either business.  I did spend some time in Iraq, supporting the troops there as a chaplain.  But the troops I worked with were not themselves front-line combatants.  Their immediate concerns had more to do with loneliness and relationship issues between Iraq and home.  They were not particularly concerned with the ethical aspects of fighting a war.

However, I did participate in Operation Eldorado Canyon, in April of 1986.  You may remember, that was an attack by the US Navy and Air Force on Tripoli, Libya.  President Reagan launched it in response to firm intelligence that agents of Libya’s now-deceased leader Muammar Qaddafi had bombed ‘La Belle’ night club in Berlin, frequented by US soldiers, ten days before.  During the operation, the US precision-bombed several high-value targets in Tripoli, including the compound of Qaddafi himself.  Qaddafi was unhurt, but the Libyans claimed – a claim never substantiated – that Qaddafi’s adopted infant daughter was killed in the bombing. My own role was as an analyst, sifting through reports of changing air order of battle to brief aircrews preparing for intelligence-gathering sorties. 

When damage assessments began coming in, there was a certain glee among the crews and we ground support personnel alike.  Nobody was particularly troubled by the report that we’d hit Qaddafi’s compound.  It is illegal according to the conventions of war, to target senior political leaders for assassination.  However, in the minds of all the guys with whom I worked, the raid on Qaddafi’s compound was ‘just deserts’ for his personally ordering the bombing that killed three Americans and injured 229 in that Berlin disco.  Nobody in my unit would have mourned Qaddafi’s passing then, and none of the guys I worked with then – or the residents of Lockerbie, Scotland for that matter, mourned his lynching by Libyan rebels last year.

So it is widely accepted that there are rules in the conduct of warfare.  But at the same time, the rules are easily set aside if the situation warrants.  In 1986, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and President Reagan thought the actions of Qaddafi as a terror mastermind, overruled any protection that he may have been afforded under the conventions of war and politics. 

Because the laws can be set aside, people who are decidedly Doves tend to pooh-pooh the very notion that there are laws governing the conduct of war.  They can point to ample situations where leaders simply set them aside, or else troops in the field violate them in the passion of the moment.

Some would argue that having laws to govern something that is essentially ungovernable is a sham.  In the case of war, having such conventions tends to obscure the reality that war is brutal and that cannot be changed.  ‘Pretending’ that war can be regulated, to be made ‘nicer,’ (this argument goes) makes it politically easier for a leader to commit to go to war.  I would argue against the position on every point.  First of all, war is not ungovernable.  Compare the customs of war as practiced in the medieval world, with those practiced by sovereign nations engaged in warfare in our age.  Ask someone who was a prisoner of war.  Barney Barnett, one of our members was a POW of the Germans during World War Two while serving in the British Army.  Although his experience as a captive of the Germans could not be called pleasant, he suffered no particular abuse.  The Wehrmacht treated their Western prisoners far better than they treated POWs from the Red Army, not to mention the Jews and other ‘enemies of the state.’  Why the difference?  Because the Germans were blinded by their racism.  Not only toward Jews; they saw the Slavs as Untermenschen.  So they abused the Soviet prisoners of War, using them as slave labour and even integrating them with other targeted peoples in death camps such as Auschwitz.  But enemies whom they respected – the Americans as well as the British and their Commonwealth partners – they tended to treat according to the conventions.

 The Israeli Defence Forces, coming from the Jewish state have a highly developed sense of battlefield ethics, and infractions of the law by their own soldiers are dealt with most harshly.  What’s interesting – nay, upsetting – is that Israel of all nations is seen as an unbridled aggressor in the world forum.  But the Israelis put themselves in danger time and again, in order to carry out operations with the least possible collateral damage.  I don’t expect the Palestinians to concede that.  But I do expect the BBC and other organs of the Western Press to acknowledge it.

Rabbinic law contains much legislation on when it is permissible to go to war, on the limits of the application of force, who can be conscripted for war, on the treatment of captives and on the treatment of the remains of the enemy’s battlefield dead.  Some readers express a critical view of the Torah’s even allowing the Jews to go to war.  Why not outlaw it?

The answer is the Rabbis’ expression:  The Torah is to live by, not to die by.  If Jewish law required a pacifistic response to all violence against the Jews, there would soon be no Jews left alive to live by the Torah.  The world of 3,500 years ago was no less dangerous than that of today.  Against certain enemies you can lay down your arms.  When Gandhi pursued a policy of non-violence, his ‘enemy’ was Great Britain:  not unimpeachable for sure, but one of the greatest forces for good in the world’s history.    When Martin Luther King, Jr. asked Black America to forswear violence, likewise his ‘enemy’ was one of the most moral nations every known.  When each of these great men suggested that the Jews should have taken a stand of absolute non-violence against Nazi Germany, they both showed themselves to have an incredible blind spot and flawed thinking.

To apply this analogy to a contemporary conflict, I quote the words of Dennis Prager, which ring true:  If the Palestinians would lay down their arms, tomorrow there would be a Palestinian state.  If the Israelis would lay down their arms, tomorrow there would be no Israel.

The reality that we live with is that our world is a dangerous place.  Nation will continue to lift up sword against nation.  The words of the Prophet Isaiah predicting the contrary have not yet come true.  It is therefore not incumbent upon us to beat our swords into ploughshares.  Yet, as I quoted General William Tecumseh Sherman last night, War is Hell.  We know that we must ameliorate the horrors of war if we are to survive with our humanity intact.  Thus Jewish Law, and its antecedents in younger world faiths, prescribes boundaries.  Sometimes those boundaries will be crossed.  But that does not call into question the ongoing effort to apply laws to the conduct of warfare, and to influence the other nations of the world to accept and abide by those laws.

Prophet Isaiah

May we see peace and security in our lifetime.  May we experience only a world where one can travel freely across borders, reaching out in friendship to the other nations of the world, even when we are in conflict with them.  But may we never let down our guard, our readiness to defend freedom and fight tyranny.  War is Hell, but a world in which tyranny prevails is worse.