Parashat Ki Tetzei

This week’s Torah portion is made up of many different topics. But what I wanted to talk about today is the first part of the first sentence of the parashat; “When you go out to war against your enemies”. It then continues to talk about morality in times of war, specifically; it talks about how to deal with “beautiful women” among the captives taken during war.

There are many questions we can ask about these few words. First, G-d desires peace in the world, so why is he telling us how to act in war? Shouldn’t G-d be telling us how to prevent war? The main answer here is that the Torah is a set of instructions for living in this world, not some fictional ideal world. G-d recognizes that there is evil in this world, and sometimes war is required to deal with this evil.

Secondly, why does G-d tell us what we can do with females among the captives of war? Wouldn’t the moral thing to do be to free the female captives? Here, again, G-d recognizes the truths about the world and about human nature. “Raping and pillaging” in the aftermath of war seems to be human nature. We’ve seen it throughout history, and we see it today. While this is certainly not admirable behavior, G-d knew that if the Torah were to forbid it outright, the law would be ignored. So instead the law was written that you may take female captives, but you must treat them as a wife, with all the same rights and privileges as any other wife. Rather than outlawing human nature, the Torah controls it.

The concept of morality in war seems to be one that is very topical today. Much of the world criticizes the IDF for its actions against the Arabs, but the irony is that the IDF is the most moral army in the world.

When NATO was operating in the Balkans, it would routinely carpet bomb civilian centers in an effort to destroy military targets within. Five years later, the same generals who ordered those bombing runs, criticize the IDF for targeted killings of terrorist masterminds. When the IDF was faced with a similar situation to NATO, it decided to send in the infantry to Jennin, at great risk to Israeli solders, rather than carpet bomb from a safe height. This decision was made because the IDF wanted to spare civilian casualties.

We often talk about the corruption of power. Israel suffers from the opposite problem, the corruption of powerlessness. Jews had been powerless for so long, their survival dependant on the good will of their neighbours and host countries. When Israel was formed, and the Jews had an army, for the first time in 2000 years, they didn’t suffer from the normal desires of conquest, the suffered from the desire for acceptance. The IDF’s decisions are not based on military considerations, but rather on how the UN, White House and the rest of the world will react. This leads to behaviours that could be considered immorally moral. They are so concerned with morality, that they immorally risk the lives of Israeli soldiers.

Finally, with Rosh Hashana coming up, I wanted to touch on a different dimension of this first verse. A literal translation of the verse is “When you go out to THE war…”. There are two grammatically strange items here. First it’s talking in the singular, not about when the nation goes out to war, but when an individual goes out to war. Secondly, it doesn’t seem to be talking about war in general, it’s talking about a specific war, THE war. The mystical commentaries tell us that this is referring to the spiritual war that each of us must fight within ourselves.

Shabbat Shalom.