telling us that you can have sex with captive women.) In the early days of this war I heard Rabbi Berel Wein, a scholar with many his- torical works published in the haredi world, claim that Hamas and Palestinians—yes, all of them—were the Amalekites, and that just as the Torah tells us that the latter must be eradicated in toto, including the women and children, so too must we eradicate the former. You may, at this point, be protesting: that that’s not what is meant, the Rabbis dealt with all this in the Talmud and after. All of that may be true, but clearly there are Jews
increasingly narrow. You are either on the side that says, there is no such thing as proportionality: the Holocaust is happening again and Israel has to answer to no one but itself. Or you stand for peace at any and all costs—even at the expense of Jew- ish safety and the viability of a homeland in Israel. This polarization is a central problem and not just incidental to what is happening in the world. One of the things that seems to be entering into communal discourse with the current Gaza war is the policing of who gets to
near-miraculous—and a whole lot of open questions. What does it mean to celebrate our military might? Why did it take over 2,000 years for another decisive Jewish vic- tory? What other holidays might be masquer- ading as military victories? If those questions feel eerily pertinent, it’s because many people are asking them—not only about a long-ago war but about the one that’s being waged in Israel right now. Among the long list of the Things You Get Asked as a Rabbi, especially when Israel is embroiled in some sort of conflict: What is the Jewish view of war? Are there Jewish ethics about the conduct of war? What is the IDF allowed to do halachically? What are our obligations towards hostages? Towards enemies? Towards non-combatants? I don’t claim to be an expert in this field and usually direct anyone who asks me about it to some articles on the topic—there have been no shortage of them written in the interim since the start of the war with Gaza. But when I do, I also point out that anyone interested can find backing, in the Torah and rabbinic literature, for a great many differ- ent—and sometimes conflicting—perspec- tives on these questions. Do you want to support an intervention that is peaceful and minimally harmful? You’ll find plenty of sources that remind us that no single life is more important than another, that we must provide for captives and ensure that we do violence only when we absolutely must. The Talmud discusses the great lengths a king needed to go to in order to engage in a war that wasn’t de- fensive—the definition and limits of which themselves come in for further careful analysis. The Rabbis then detail how far one must go to avoid unnecessary destruc- tion, pointing to the biblical passage that forbids tearing down fruit-bearing trees during a siege. People love to point out that the IDF even enshrined this in their training, including it in their doctrine of to- har haneshek , or purity of arms, instructing soldiers on how and when they are allowed to engage an enemy. Conversely: Do you want carnage and destruction to rain down on Gaza? You’ll be glad to see that the Bible is full of bloody battles to capture the land of Israel and that the early Israelites were instructed to destroy entire tribes like Amalek. And let’s not forget that there’s an entire passage in the Torah that discusses women captured in battle, outlining the steps one must follow to be able to sleep with them. (In case this isn’t sufficiently clear: the Torah seems to be
Smoke rises following an Israeli airstrike in the Gaza Strip, as seen from Sderot on Sunday, October 29, 2023.
and Jewish leaders who believe it to this day—leaders like Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburgh, a Chabad rabbi known for his radical views on Israeli-Arab relations, who praised Baruch Goldstein for the Hebron Massacre, and counts Bezalel Smotrich and other right-wing Knesset members as followers. The Torah can be used to prop up a very wide spectrum of opinions, and yet the ac- ceptable spectrum of opinion has become
participate in it and who is deemed beyond the pale. This policing may have existed in the past more subtly, but has become much more aggressive lately. This is true across the spectrum of Jews and Jewish thinking. Our feeds are filled with people saying they will block you if you don’t have any compas- sion for dead Palestinians, or for living ones who have to endure so much hardship. We see others being declared persona non grata
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