Translation of headline: the pope’s interpretation constitutes a bad legal ruling.

I am writing here about old news at this point, namely, remarks that Pope Leo XIV made last month on Palm Sunday. But I thought of those remarks anew as we now head into Yom Hatzmaut, Israeli Independence Day, and what it means for Jews to have an independent state today, particularly in light of centuries of persecution under the Catholic Church in Europe. The Catholic Church of today, in the wake of Vatican II, is no longer anti-Semitic, and has made great strides in its relationships with Jews. And Pope Leo seems like a sincere and morally upright person. I’m also proud as an American to see the first American Pope. I wanted to start with something nice…

When I was a Chaplain in the US Army Reserve, I actually connected on an intellectual level to my Catholic priest colleagues most of all. The Catholics have a tradition of oral interpretation and Canon Law which can be compared to our own system of halacha. In fact, Protestants often criticize both the Jews and the Catholics as being overly legalistic Pharisees for precisely this reason.

This is all why I was so disappointed to read the Pope’s remarks on Palm Sunday about the war in Iran. His hot take on the matter lacked the intellectual, legalistic nuance that is supposed to be common to both Halacha and Canon Law. Instead, his remarks struck me as simplistic and platitudinous.

The Vatican website records the part of his speech that I’m addressing here as follows:

“Pope Leo XIV went on to recall the prophet Isaiah’s words: ‘Even though you make many prayers, I will not listen: your hands are full of blood’ (Is 1:15). ‘Jesus is the King of Peace, who rejects war, whom no one can use to justify war,’ said the Pope. ‘He does not listen to the prayers of those who wage war, but rejects them.’”

It’s rather morally shallow to just say “war is bad”, without even addressing Just War Theory, and how war is sometimes sadly necessary. Just War Theory actually owes its origins to St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas and the Catholic Church. In the army chaplaincy, we learned extensively about Just War Theory. I found the thought of Augustine to be quite wise and timeless on that front. However, Augustine also had a dark side to his thought as relates to the Jews, which I learned about in my Master’s Degree studies in medieval Jewish history, and which Google’s AI capably summarizes as follows:

“Augustine of Hippo developed the ‘doctrine of Jewish witness,’ arguing that Jews should be dispersed, exiled, and living in servitude but not killed. By comparing them to Cain (marked for protection), he argued their survival and wandering serve as proof of Christian truth. This paradoxical ‘slay them not’ theology provided a unique, albeit subordinate, place for Jews in Christian society”

Centuries of Catholic antisemitism, deriving from Augustine, and later secularized and racialized by the Nazis, is precisely what made the Zionist movement necessary in the first place. The Church would no doubt say that they no longer believe in those ancient bigotries. And, to be sure, that history also does not need to mean that Israel should get a free pass for anything that it might do today. But it does mean that the Pope should express at least a basic level of historical empathy and understanding for Israel’s unique security predicament today.

Israel is uniquely vulnerable today in part because the Jewish population of the world is so small, as compared to the massive numbers of adherents that Israel’s enemies can muster. This can be seen on any college campus. And the Jewish population is small today as a direct result of centuries of Catholic subjugation and murder of Jews. Thank God for the influence of the millions of righteous Christian Zionists in the world, both Protestant and Catholic, which helps the tiny Jewish community to assuage this power imbalance.

We are currently in the month of Iyar, when Ashkenazi Jews around the world mourn over the trauma of the Crusades. The common practices are to avoid haircuts, weddings, and music during this time. In 1096 CE, the Pope ordered the faithful to conquer the Holy Land, and many Crusaders chose to assert their Christian dominance by massacring that Land’s original inhabitants, the Jews, both in Europe and in the Holy Land itself.

Today’s Pope overcompensates for this violent history by lurching to the other end of the false moral binary, and by asserting that all war is bad. And he quotes from the prophet Isaiah in his support. However, the name of this prophet was not actually “Isaiah”, but Yeshaya. And he uttered those words in a Hebrew that any Israeli today can understand, and in his capacity as a Jewish prophet in Eretz Yisrael; and he addressed them (in verse 1) to the sovereign Jewish government of that Land, the King of Judea, from which the very word Jew derives. And towards the end of that same chapter (verse 27), he declares that God will redeem Zion – a reminder that that word was not invented by Herzl – and restore its Jewish children to within her. It is precisely Iran’s denial of that ancient Jewish connection to our Land which lies at the root of the Just War that Israel is fighting today.

However, in the Pope’s defense: Jewish Law itself actually does codify something similar to what he’s saying, albeit with some crucial distinctions. Based on this same verse from Yeshaya, the code of Jewish Law, the Shulchan Aruch (Orah Hayyim 128:35) rules that a Kohen who has killed a person cannot perform the Priestly Blessing at synagogue. In modern times, the question arose if this ruling applies to Kohanim who have served as soldiers in their country’s armed forces, and who might have killed people in the line of duty. The great Poskim (decisors) ruled that this law does NOT apply to soldiers, since killing in the line of duty is not what the Shulchan Aruch was addressing. (It should go without saying that this exemption for soldiers only applies to when they were acting reasonably within their Just duties, and not to those who might commit wanton atrocities such as the infamous My Lai Massacre, which would indeed constitute murder).

Jews actually read these words of Yeshaya 1:15 every year in the Haftorah of Shabbat Chazon before Tisha B’av. We have been reading them every year for centuries, in lamenting the loss of our homeland. The custom of Ashkenazi Jews is to read all of Yeshaya Chapter 1 in the sad melody of Eicha (Lamentations). Sefardi and Mizrachi Jews, however, do not use the sad Eicha melody on Shabbat, since Shabbat is supposed to be a day of joy.

Ashkenazi sensibilities are generally more somber; and that is due to the uniquely evil antisemitism of the Catholic Church, which Sefardim did not experience. Eastern Jews did experience a horrendous deal of Muslim antisemitism, and it’s not my intention here to make this a competition of suffering, but only to point out that, historically, the European Christian variety of anti-Jewish bigotry was the worst.

The Haftorah for Yom Haatzmaut is also from the Book of Isaiah, from Chapter 11. It tells of the coming of the Mashiach, who will bring all Jews back to Eretz Yisrael (The Land of Israel). For centuries, the Catholic Church tried to compel us to accept that their own savior was the Messiah who was foretold in these verses. But we stubbornly insisted that the Messiah has not yet arrived. One of our proofs was always that the Jews have not yet been restored to Eretz Yisrael and rebuilt the Temple in Jerusalem.

By the grace of God, we are now largely restored to our Land – the beginning of the flowering of our redemption – and it’s the brave soldiers of the IDF who allow that miracle to remain true on the ground, with the aid of God’s Providence from above.

With regards to how the verse in Isaiah 1:15 might relate to Kohen-soldiers in the IDF specially, Rabbi Ovadia Yosef ruled the following (Yalkut Yosef, She’erit Yosef 3):

“All the more so here, where Kohanim who are IDF soldiers stand to defend Israel and our Holy Land — there is no doubt that they are performing a great mitzvah by confronting enemy armies that come to sow destruction and to kill, destroy and annihilate men, women, and children. This is what Maimonides ruled in Chapter 5 of Hilkhot Melakhim — that defending Israel from enemy attack is considered a milhemet mitzvah [a commanded war]. Therefore, there is absolutely no doubt that these Kohanim are fit to perform the priestly blessing… It is appropriate to say to them: ‘May your hands be strengthened, and may your strength be blessed.’ ”

This Yom Haatzmaut I am grateful that we Jews are no longer compelled by force to contend with the interpretation of our own Hebrew Scriptures by a Pope who has the chutzpah to try to “Goy-Splain” to us, from his place of extreme safety and privilege, what our own Israelite prophets were teaching us, and in a Hebrew that he can’t even read himself. To truly understand the Hebrew of Isaiah, the Pope might want to ask any one of the heroic Israeli pilots that he has condemned to translate them for him.

Instead, we will rule according to sages such as R. Ovadia Yosef, the chief rabbi of the sovereign state of Israel, who wrote his responsum in the language that Isaiah would recognize, both morally and culturally, as well as linguistically. And that’s what Yom Haatzmaut is all about.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)