If you are paying attention during the weekly Torah reading in synagogue, you will notice frequent descriptions or commandments involving putting people to death, sometimes individually – e.g., death penalty rulings (for example, Ex. 21:12-17), stories like that of the man stoned to death for collecting sticks on the Shabbat (Num. 15) or  the couple run through by Pinchas for exogamy (Num. 25); and sometimes collectively – e.g., the Egyptian first-born (Ex. 12), Amalekites (Ex. 17), the Canaanites (Deut. 7), the kingdoms of Sihon and Og (Num. 21).  And the historical prophetic books (Joshua, Judges, Samuel and Kings) up the bloody ante, with political murders, battles, massacres, and even a couple of suicides.

Our Jewish self-image as a peaceful people apparently originated during the rabbinic period, after the Bible was completed.  The rabbis ameliorated much of the biblical violence through textual interpretation, recoiling from the death penalty, from the literal understanding of “an eye for an eye…;” and seeking (sometimes struggling to find) moral justifications for collective acts of violence (e.g. the Amalekites attacked unprovoked and unfairly and deserved their fate).  It seems that there are two ways (at least) to understand this tendency to tone down the Bible’s violence:

Does it represent some kind of moral “advance”? – some kind of human progress? For example, just as the Greek myth has the Furies, goddesses of vengeance, being transformed into the Eumenides, goddesses of fertility, by means of Athena’s institution of trial by jury – so the “blood avenger” hotly pursuing the killer to the city of refuge in Num. 35 was “civilized” by the rabbis into a process of considered judgement by the local bet din or the Sanhedrin.

Or is it simply an expression of the fact that as a minority without sovereignty, it was not politically wise to draw attention to our past violent exploits? Perhaps being a peace-loving people was a survival strategy for a powerless people.  And thus, now that we’re no longer powerless, maybe the Bible’s violence should not be toned down, but embraced.

As a woke left liberal type, I guess I have always preferred option “a.”  However, as I look around and read the daily news, it is hard to avoid thinking that maybe “b” reflects the national “mentality” in our time.  The driving “conception” of the nation, now that it has achieved power (or thinks it has), seems to be that “peace-loving” is for losers.  The solution to the Palestinians’ inexplicable refusal to accept being ruled by us is to drive them out and/or to kill enough of them to convince them to give up their identity and/or their national aspirations.  This view can be seen as a return to the moral universe of the Bible; just as idols were to be smashed and Canaanites killed, so Palestinian flags are to be ripped down, and Palestinians, who are, by default, “terrorists,” are to be killed.  And so, far more than the weekly Torah portion presents bloody stories, the daily headlines pound us to the state of numbness with accounts of violent death, generally of nameless terrorists or supporters (or children or spouses or grandparents thereof), three in the West Bank, forty in Gaza, twelve in Lebanon, day after day after day; or of Israeli Palestinians caught in the crossfire of organized crime at the rate, so far this year, of one per day.  We live in a culture dominated by a constant feed of words and images of violent death – of anonymous persons, of whom all we know is that they are not “us.”  And now we have thrown off the pretense of being a just, merciful, peace-loving people (remember: no death penalty in Israel except for Adolph Eichmann!), enacting an unapologetically racist and violent law, requiring the death penalty for a Palestinian who kills a Jew for nationalist reasons.  Sort of feels biblical…

It is interesting to consider the impact of this atmosphere permeated by violence and death on our mental health, on our children’s formation, on our sustainability as a society (see under: PTSD; suicides in the army; emigration).  In the US, people accept mass shootings as part of life, but the victims are portrayed as people, and the public is still appalled by them.  Here, nobody seems to be appalled; after all, who are the victims, anyway?  Amalekites.  And it’s our children, good kids, the salt of the earth, heroic soldiers of the most moral army in the world, who are doing the shooting; or else it’s a few sadly “troubled youth” of the West Bank with their devoutly long tzitzit and peyot; or else it’s just Arabs killing Arabs.  So how can we be appalled?

Meanwhile, if we take a look at post-biblical Jewish history, it turns out that the more the nations of the world (primarily Christians and Muslims) oppressed us, expelled us, and massacred us, the more fiercely we clung to our identity and nurtured our hope – and our efforts – to survive, to thrive, to attain power and ultimately sovereignty.  So maybe suppression, expulsion, and killing is not such a promising long-term strategy for solving the Palestinian “problem.”

We’ve always, with pride and resignation, repeated our motto: “Ein Breira” – We have no choice.  But is it true?

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)