DAS Blog

This past Shabbos we read the second Haftorah of Rebuke, which, like the first read last week, is from the Book of Jeremiah, who, according to some, was key in writing the Book of Deuteronomy we start reading this week. While, at this point, the Haftoroth are generally considered to relate to the theme of the week rather than to the Torah portion, this week's Haftorah relates indeed to the Torah reading from the close of the Book of Numbers. God commands us that we "should not defile the land in which you live, in which I Myself abide, for I the Lord abide among the Israelite people" (Numbers 35:34). And Jeremiah describes what is happening due to the Israelite people defiling the land.

There are many directions in which one can go with this verse in Numbers when taken out of context. One important direction is that, per se, when considering the Universality of God's dwelling place, by defiling and despoiling any land, we violate God's commandment. Thus, environmental degradation is a serious breach of God's law.

But in the context of the Book of Numbers, the defilation of concern was human blood being spilt in the Land of Israel (which in fact, to be intellectually honest, was not exactly to what Jeremiah was reacting) without the murderer being brought to justice. In fact, the Torah specifically protects, but only via the institution of the City of Refuge, the accidental manslayer, and killing him, or in general killing outside of, e.g., a system of capital punishment in expiation for a killing compounds, rather than minimizes the blood-guilt placed on the land of Israel. While the Torah allows for self-defense, just (and even some fairly unjust) wars and capital punishment, any killing, even in retribution for other killings, is considered to be tantamount to the idolatry which Jeremiah holds deems the Jewish people no longer acceptable stewards of the land of Israel.

So what are we to make of the modern state of Israel's behavior in its current predicament? Certainly, it has a right to defend itself against attacks: indeed, too many people expect, as some Jews have put it, Israel to be the only country in the world which must follow Christian morality about "turning the other cheek", etc. And this present conflict has reached a point where Israel is, indeed, in a fight for its life. But does Israel have a right to willy-nilly shed the blood of its neighbors, who live in lands that could be considered part of the Holy Land? And when these people themselves are responsible for deaths in the Land of Israel, deaths occurring outside of the standard rules of war, by seeking vengeance, as it sometimes seems Israel is wont to do, Israel brings further blood-guilt upon the land. As we approach Tisha B'av, I know some will view the words of Jeremiah as a call to not let Israel fall again. And some will view the words of Jeremiah as a call to be more "frum" -- that we Jews must live solely within the four cubits of Halacha. But this is not the warning of Jeremiah: his warning is that we cannot let idolatry and blood-guilt -- the worship of machismo and the over-reliance, based on blind and idolatrous faith in that we have no way of knowing whether Israel's policy of strong retaliation makes matters better or worse for Israel, on overwhelming military responses as a "path to peace" -- again cause God to drive us from the land of Israel.

A key aspect of Jeremiah's preaching (and of the Prophetic tradition, from which may very well come the extreme emphasis on retelling the story of Slavery in and Exodus from Egypt) is the warning against reliance on alliance with Egypt as a means of keeping Israel free. While some would take this as a warning against trusting any international efforts for Israel's security (and given the history of the UN in using Israel as a whipping boy for the sins of the first world -- but Isaiah predicted this would happen to any Jewish State, which is why there was a certain practical wisdom of those Rabbis who argued that a Jewish State shouldn't exist until the Messiah comes), the Prophetic warnings are actually more specific: that, e.g., Egypt's interests are different than those of Judah as both countries are independent entities.

I remember in the run up to the Iraq war something which disturbs me to this day: Jews claiming that it was amazing that the U.S. was willing to depose Saddam Hussein, which was something that would benefit Israel even more than the U.S. Aside from the fact that this was too close to anti-Semitic rhetoric for me to do anything but wonder whether the Jews who said this sort of thing, who would be the first to so label Jewish liberals like myself, were self-hating, there was something else, beyond the internalization of anti-Semitic stereotypes about the Jews controlling everything, disturbing about this trust that the U.S. would do something at the behest of Israel. After all, if American and Israeli interests coincided so much as the AIPAC crowd claims, why should Zionism even exist at all? Why would we Jews need a separate country of our own when America represents our interests?

While some claimed that the Iraq war was an example of Israeli interests hijacking American foreign policy, in reality, trusting that what the U.S. does with our military might to be something which benefits Israel rather than the interests of the U.S. (or in the case of the Iraq war, the interests of those in power within this country), was a bit like Judah trusting Egypt to face down the Assyrian and Babylonian threats on Judah and Israel's behalf. When Jeremiah criticized Egypt, he wasn't displaying a hatred of Egypt (indeed, rather than fleeing to Babylonia, he fled to Egypt when Babylonia conquered Judah), but he was trying to convince the Judean people that Egypt was a nation with it's own agenda that may or may not be as friendly to Judah as it may seem. To paraphrase an old fable about a freezing bird with great application to the Arab/Israeli conflict (especially in terms of we Jews realizing which side of the political spectrum are our friends and which side are our enemies), not everyone that throws shit at you is your enemy and not everyone that gets you out of shit is your friend.

The U.S. has different interests than Israel ... that is neither bad nor good, it just is. This doesn't make the U.S. a bad place for Jews no less than Egypt was when Jeremiah fled there. But it does mean that not everything the U.S. does is good for Israel, and both Israel and its enemies, who hate Israel as an extension of the U.S. and conversely, need to realize this. In particular, the Iraq war, no matter how much some Jews and some anti-Semites convinced themselves otherwise, was not a war that was good for Israel. If the U.S. really wanted to remove an enemy of Israel, it would have targeted Syria, and thus prevented the whole current mess (although at what cost, I would hate to even think about). Heck, one can argue that this mess was caused by the Iraq war and it's empowerment and encouragement of Iran (we have deposed the counterweight to Iran in the ME and replaced it with a government that will be far more friendly to Iran, all the while bogging our military down so we have less leverage to use to force Iran to "play nice"), which, I might point out, is a pretty interesting consequence of the Iraq war given that many of its architects were, not so long ago, busy arming Iran as part of the Iran/Contra affair. Of course, if one is being casuistic, one might very well argue that if we didn't depose the Mossedegh regime, Iran would not be the threat to Israel it is today. For that matter, if the U.S. didn't decide to get all high-minded about not bribing dictatorial leaders and played Nasser's game rather than letting him get all his aid from Soviet Russia, the balance of power in the ME would be very different.

Whether the U.S. has done the right thing with its ME policy is one issue -- I personally think we've Cheneyed up the situation something horrible, from Nasser onward. But the issue at hand relating to the Prophetic tradition and it's advice for Israel -- besides that Israel suffers not from its external enemies, but from it's lack of justice, both internally and dealing with its neighbors and that the double standard to which the world holds Israel is an inevitable consequence of us being the "chosen people" and we should hold ourselves to that high standard as well rather than complaining about how the world hates us: and if statecraft cannot be conducted according to such high standards in the absence of the Messianic kingdom? Well, that's why the Rabbis said we Jews ought not to have a state until the Messiah comes! -- is that Israel should stop thinking the U.S. (and more so fundamentalist Christians who think Israel ought to just start WWIII in order to precipitate the second coming) is necessarily on Israel's side.

Israel does have a right to defend itself. And hopefully Israel and the U.S. will remain allies. But if the U.S. tells Israel to not defend itself when attacked (as in the first Iraq war) or goads Israel into over-reacting, Israel should follow its own interests rather than just deferring to the U.S. That is what being an independent state, the goal of Zionism, is about. Moreover we Jews need to be very careful, if only as a matter of appearances, about conflating US and Israeli interests: just because someone tries to sell a policy as "good for Israel" doesn't mean we Jews should support it -- indeed, our support of such policies for that reason gives truth to the anti-Semitic lie of dual loyalty.

And certainly, part of knowing who are your real friends, your real enemies and your real interests is that, in responding to attacks, Israel needs to respond proportionally and to the correct enemy. It is amazing how some liberals supported the right of the U.S. to respond to 9/11 by invading Afghanistan, but do not support the right of Israel to similarly respond militarily to terrorist attacks. On the other hand, those who realized the fallacy of the U.S. invasion of Iraq as supposedly part of a larger war on terror, ought to realize that Israel is making similar mistakes in so aggressively attacking Lebanon. And the Bible tells us that, in the Holy Land, God does not take kindly to it's chosen inhabitants making mistakes.

Another thing Jeremiah does point out with his talk about cisterns is that it's really all about the water. No matter how much the Israeli side talks about "making the desert bloom" or how much the Palestinians talk about how green was their valley before they were displaced (and while most leftists would ask why Jews should have more rights than Palestinians, vis-a-vis Return, it would seem to me that there are good reasons why we Jews ought to have this right ... the relevant question is why should Palestinians have any more right to return than any other late 1940s era refugee group? Of course, if Palestinian refugees really wanted to return, you'd think at least a few would try to convert to Judaism to do so ...), the fact remains that the Land of Israel is a semi-desert which blooms only by the grace of God. When people, especially the religious leaders, in Jeremiah's words, stop asking "where is God" and instead assume that God is on their side, they risk alienating a vengeful God -- and that is not a smart thing to do in a desert that blooms by the grace of God. Moreover, the fundamental problem, being that of water, indicates that the fundamental problem is one of population. Baruch Hashem, there so many Jews that we just cannot all fit in the Land of Israel short of a miracle possible only in Messianic times (so much for Israel being a place where all Jews can go when things go bad for us in the Diaspora -- Zionism could never solve "the Jewish problem" as there simply are too many of us to not have a gesunte Diaspora) ... and there are also so many Palestinians (it's amazing how talk of the "demographic problem" either act as if the increase in the Palestinian population is a normal sort of increase, and not the abnormal out of control population growth that lack of hope begets, or descend into racist territory in fearing Palestinian fecundity) that they cannot fit in their lands with the water available. Pardon me for being callous, but any solution to the Israeli/Palestinian conflict, short of massive advances in desalination technology, will have to involve the spread of birth control on both sides.