Shabbat Mattot-Mass'ei
Dear Members and Friends,
Time gives commentary to every text we read. Every generation brings new perspectives. We live in a particular moment, shaped by our values, our reality, and the moral frameworks of our time. When we read the weekly Torah portion, we don’t just read its stories. We bring ourselves to the text, and the passage of time becomes its commentary on the passage of text. The job of a Rabbi is to try to define the key and timeless message of the text and then apply it to today’s reality.
This week’s Torah portion, Mattot-Mass'ei, contains one of the most disturbing episodes in the entire Torah: the war against Midian. God commands Moses to ‘exact vengeance’ on the Midianites (Numbers 31:2), and the Israelites follow the order with devastating precision. Every male is killed. The women and children are taken captive. Even Balaam, the prophet who had earlier blessed Israel, is executed. When Moses learns that the women have been spared, he becomes angry, insisting that they, too, had played a role in leading Israel to the sin of driving people away from God. The result is a command to kill most women (Numbers 31:16-18).
How do we engage with such texts? This is not the Judaism most of us know and love today. Our Judaism is the one that celebrates peace, compassion, and the infinite value of human life. Our Judaism emphasises the importance of repentance and, therefore, gives a second chance to everyone. How do we respond to texts that seem so brutal and genocidal? Do we cancel or censor them? Do we ignore them and pretend they are not a part of our heritage? Or do we study them, face them honestly, and interpret them?
Rabbis traditionally choose the path of study and reinterpretation. They never denied these texts, but they also refused to leave them unaddressed. There are two main strategies that Torah scholars employ to interpret texts: placing them within a historical context and applying exegetical techniques. Let’s use both to gain a deeper understanding of this passage.
We must acknowledge the historical context of this text. The ancient Middle East was not a world of Geneva Conventions or human rights. Warfare in biblical times was often unacceptable by today’s standards, practised by all ancient cultures, not just ancient Israelites. Therefore, it is important not to impose modern ethics on ancient societies. Sometimes we read texts not to teach what to do, but to learn what not to do.
Throughout the ages, rabbis imposed many restrictions on biblical commandments associated with violence. For example, Sefer HaChinuch, a 13th-century work that explains the 613 commandments and their reasons, has a relevant passage. On the commandment to destroy the Seven Canaanite Nations (Mitzvah 425), the book states that although the commandment still exists in theory, it no longer applies in practice because these nations have been historically wiped out and can no longer be identified. Therefore, the command remains part of the Torah's law, but it is not actionable in our time. In other words, one cannot extend this violent commandment to any other nation. According to the same book, self-defence is permissible and indeed required, but it comes with a warning against harming innocent people and using excessive and disproportionate force.
Over time, Rabbis introduced a nuanced moral framework for war, centuries before such concepts became common in Western law. These are just a few examples:
✦ Always try to achieve peace first. This principle is based on the verse ‘When you approach a town to attack it, you shall offer it terms of peace.’ (Deuteronomy 20:10 Maimonides codifies in his Mishneh Torah that any war must only follow a sincere attempt at peaceful resolution.
✦ Prohibition against baseless destruction. This principle is called Bal Tashchit. Rooted in Deuteronomy 20:19–20, it forbids the destruction of fruit trees during war. The Rabbis expanded this to include all forms of unnecessary damage to civilian life and infrastructure.
✦ Show compassion to the enemy. In his Laws of War, Rambam stipulates two conditions of conducting a siege (6.7-8): ‘When you attack a city in order to defeat it, you cannot encircle it on all sides – rather, an avenue has to remain open to allow anyone who wishes to flee and save themselves.’
Nachmanides writes in his commentary on this text: ‘God commanded us that when we lay siege to a city, we leave one of the sides open to give the population a place to flee to. It is from this commandment that we learn to deal with compassion, even with our enemies, and even at the time of war.’ Other commentators also mention that the opening allows access to food and water, further emphasising the humane conduct expected of Israel even in warfare.
We live in a world of many wars. All wars cause immense suffering to innocent people, and this must stop. Naturally, I have my attention directed to Israel and Gaza, and what I see is a direct contradiction to Jewish law and Jewish morality. Too many Palestinians have died. Too many have been denied basic needs and dignity. Too many Palestinians suffer from the violence in the West Bank. Too many innocent Gazans died, sometimes in queues for food. All of this goes directly against Judaism and must be stopped. The world is rightly shocked and outraged by what we see.
Equally, Israelis are deeply traumatised by this war. They have suffered from attacks on numerous fronts. Most Israelis had to take their children and elderly parents to bomb shelters. Even one hostage kept by terrorists is too many, but there are over 50 hostages still held in Gaza without any access to humanitarian support. The world must remember them too.
There is an underlying question we must ask ourselves. In what world do we want to be - in the world of the Torah or the world of the Rabbis? I choose the Rabbinic tradition, which interprets, limits, and redefines those brutal biblical texts in ways that reflect evolving moral conduct. I want to live in a world that treats its enemies with dignity and respect, even if they do not extend the same courtesy to us. I want to live in a world that chooses life over death, universalism over tribalism, and humanity over indifference.
The Book of Proverbs offers its quiet wisdom:
“If your enemy is hungry, give them bread to eat.
If they are thirsty, provide them with water.
For if you do, you shall rake coals over their head,
and God will reward you accordingly” (25.21-22)
May this be God’s will. May we have the courage and humanity to build such a world.
Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Igor
Shabbat D'Varim
Dear Members and Friends,
Is peace between Israel and her Palestinian neighbours now a pipedream, a hallucinatory, vain hope with no possibility of its own Dayton Peace Accords, Good Friday Agreement or Truth and Reconciliation Commission? How do wars end? How does conflict between nations find its resolution? Perhaps, as the Psalmist says, we are born ‘with iniquity’, ‘conceived with sin’ (Psalm 51), in the sense that our inclination towards evil is nothing but evil all the time (Genesis 6:5). Perhaps we are not the pure creatures our morning liturgy speaks of when we pray, ‘My God, the soul You have given me is pure…’
If that is the case, then it is no wonder that human history is stained with accounts of violence and war, massacres, degradation, rape, greed and ambition. We can list too easily the barbaric and cruelly executed deaths in Cambodia and Bosnia, in Rwanda and Myanmar – places where humanity – if we can use this word of men – sank to subhuman methods to eradicate their enemies from the face of the earth.
All this in my own lifetime, in the decades after Raphael Lemkin coined a term to describe the ‘disintegration of the political and social institutions of culture, language, national feelings, religion, and the economic existence of national groups, and the destruction of personal security, liberty, health, dignity and even the lives of the individuals belonging to such groups.’
On Saturday night, as the sun sets and the stars appear in the sky, the Jewish world will come together to observe a fast that many of us thought was all but obsolete - Tisha B’Av. The 9 Av is the culmination of a three-week period of mourning in the Jewish calendar beginning on the 17 Tammuz, the date that marked the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in 586 BCE. Three weeks later, on the 9 Av, Jerusalem was conquered, the Temple destroyed, and the citizens of the city carried into exile.
The day is observed with the mournful chanting of the Book of Eicha (Lamentations), a five-chapter lament over the destruction of the First Temple – elegies that describe the utter devastation and ruin of Zion – the land and its inhabitants. Zion, personified as a lonely widow, weeping in the night, with none to comfort her, empty of her festival pilgrims, her gates deserted, her enemies now her masters, is not the innocent prey of Babylon’s victors. On the contrary, Jerusalem, says the poet, has sinned, ‘her uncleanness clings to her skirts…she has sunk appallingly’ (Lam. 1:8).
For the sages of the rabbinic period, Israel – the people - are not seen as victims, but as authors of their own crimes. On account of three things, the First Temple was destroyed, says the Talmud: because the people were guilty of idolatry, sexual immorality, and bloodshed. And the Second Temple was destroyed because of sinat chinam – baseless hatred.
There is no moral relativism here. The Rabbis measure the people’s conduct in the light of a permanent order to the universe. There is no room for individual moral preferences around faith, immorality or violence. Lamentations, and the rabbis’ theological reflections on 9 Av, are ruthless in portraying a God who is angry, without pity, who uses the Babylonians as a divine agent to punish the people. The devastation is relentless, ‘little children beg for bread…those who feasted on dainties lie famished in the streets…’ Those whose bodies were like sapphire are unrecognised in the streets, ‘their skin has shrivelled on their bones.’ ‘Better off were the slain of the sword than those slain by famine…’
It is not difficult to hear and see in these ancient texts, images of destruction, desolation and hunger in war-torn countries. Pity and compassion lie with our own people in the State of Israel, for those who waited for help and rescue from the army on October 7, for the hostages languishing deep in tunnels, many now dead, some perhaps still alive without access to medical aid. And our pity and compassion rests equally with the people of Gaza, doubly punished by their own Hamas-terrorist leaders and by Israel’s government and military commanders.
There are those who see Israel’s war against Hamas as justified, to be prosecuted until the hydra-headed monster is dead. But others argue that Israel’s longest war of nearly twenty-two months has become a war of unspeakable crimes, the veracity of which will need to be tested in the International Criminal Court.
As Liberal Jews, whose attachment to the State of Israel and its people is bound up with our spiritual heritage and with our place here in the diaspora of world Jewry, we need to place ourselves firmly in a place of objective justice, driven by equity and human rights. If as human beings, as Jews, we subscribe to the belief that every human being is created in the image of God – b’tzelem Elohim – that all humanity has a basic and inalienable right to water, to food, to sanitation, to education and medical aid, to a home and a land to call their own, then we must stand firmly with the call for an urgent ceasefire, for the release of the hostages, and for the Palestinian people’s right to their own homeland.
Only then will these hostilities wear themselves out; only then will both sides find their voices of humanity and compassion, able to listen to each other and to see each other as human beings.
Shabbat Shalom
Alexandra Wright
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