Parshah Commentary

The name of this week’s parashah, Ki Teitzei, is taken from the first two words of our reading’s opening phrase: “when you go out to war.” The verses that follow complete a set of instructions that began last week, in Parshat Shoftim, regulating the Israelites’ wartime behaviors during the conquest and settlement of the Promised Land. But for millennia, these laws had no practical application. This is due in part to a technicality: Halachically, the Jewish people cannot wage a collective war without the approval of the Sanhedrin, the most authoritative ancient Jewish legislative and judicial body whose presumed political authority waned with the destruction of the Second Temple. Without the possibility of halachically sanctioned war, there was no need for various halachic regulations surrounding warfare. Moreover, the early rabbis, in their brief analysis of these verses, established near-impossible criteria for what constitutes a divinely mandated war, which, on a practical level, legislated such laws out of existence. As one scholar describes it, “The rabbinic sages simply avoided engaging in meaningful discussion about holy war, thus effectively removing it from the mainstream rabbinic discourse . . . [and] placing it deeply in the stacks of the library so that it could not be easily removed for detailed scrutiny.”

Several key treatments notwithstanding, halachic material addressing both theoretical and practical war-waging is scant, and, as Michael Walzer, a leading scholar of Jewish just war and political theory, laments, this means that such writing is “never a reflection on actual responsibilities and consequential decisions.” Jewish just war theorists are thus left to emphasize biblical material alone—particularly these verses in Devarim. This approach may be born of necessity, but it is uncharacteristic of, and even antithetical to, Jewish legal discourse, which typically weaves together biblical texts, rabbinic writings, and later codes, commentaries, and responsa, creating an evolving conversation that spans millennia and brings many generations of Jewish practice and thought to bear on a given question.

Walzer sees the dearth of Jewish texts on war and military conduct as a deficiency within halachah. But we might instead view this lacuna as a positive feature of the Jewish legal tradition. Writing at the end of World War I, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook, a towering giant in the development of Religious Zionism, articulates such a position, arguing that Jewish statehood would only be possible once the war was over, since he believed this would usher in a new era of global peace and pacifism. Reflecting on the thousands of years during which Jews were absent from international geopolitics, he notes that “the delay is a necessary one; we were repulsed by the awful sins of conducting a nation in an evil time . . . It is not worthwhile for Jacob [the Jewish people] to engage in statecraft when it must be full of blood, when it requires an ability for wickedness.” Though Rav Kook’s views on war varied—and his teachings elsewhere helped to inspire the messianic militarism of contemporary Religious Zionists, especially in Israel—here he suggests that the reality of nationalist violence necessitated Jewish abstention from statehood. Thus, what Walzer sees as a gap that must be filled, Kook understands as an intentional silence in the face of profound evil.

Theorists who jump to fill in “holes” in the Jewish canon regarding the necessary violence inflicted by statehood should consider the words of the preeminent Modern Orthodox scholar Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, who posited in 1959 that “the pages of history are bloody with the acts of European society—especialy in feudal times. Judaism is not better because we are better than them, but because we never had to face the challenge. A private person cannot do the injustices that can be done by a state. What if our history had been different, with a Jewish state in the Middle Ages? Would we have been just like the feudal law?” We now unequivocally know the answer to Soloveitchik’s question. In Israel’s self-described “defensive” war in Gaza, the idea of just war itself has normalized and made acceptable mass civilian death. Our absence from national warfare—both in our texts and in practice—was neither a failure nor a strength of Jewish life and thought; it was the result of a historical accident. We must work now to make it intentional.

Laynie Soloman is a teacher and associate rosh yeshiva at SVARA.