(based upon a Devar by Rabbi Aryeh Cohen)
According to Maimonides, this week’s Torah reading, Ki Teitzei, contains 72 of the 613 commandments of Judaism—the most of any single weekly portion—touching on virtually every aspect of the social order. At first glance, they seem to be thrown together at random, with no apparent link from one to the next. However, the great commentator Rashi shows that this is not the case. Rashi unifies the opening section, at least, of Ki Teitzei with an underlying narrative whose moral implications are particularly appropriate for us to ponder on the tenth anniversary of 9/11.
Let’s take a closer look. Ki Teitzei begins with a commandment stipulating the proper treatment of female captives in war: “should you go out to battle against your enemies, and Adonai your God delivers him into your hand and you take captives from among him, and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her and take her as a wife, then you shall bring her into your house, and she shall trim her hair, and pare her nails. She shall take off her dress of captivity and she shall sit in your house and weep over her father and mother for a full month. After that, you may come to bed with her, and cohabit with her, and take her as your wife.” (Deuteronomy 21:10-13) Although the commandment does not prohibit the soldier from taking his female victim, the Torah at least acknowledges and validates her feelings of grief. Next we have the following commandment: “should a man have two wives, one who is loved and one who is hated, and both the loved one and the hated one have borne him sons, but the firstborn is the son of the hated one, when it comes time to will his property to his sons, he may not treat the son of the loved one as the firstborn in disregard of the son of the hated one who is actually older; rather, he must accept the son of the hated one as his firstborn, and give him the double portion that is his due.” (Deuteronomy 21:15-17) This commandment reasserts the right of primogeniture, even though in the unhappy polygamous household, the master not only favors the second wife, but rejects the first one. The third commandment in the opening section concerns the so called “rebellious son:” “should a man have a wayward and rebellious son who does not heed his father’s voice or his mother’s voice and disobeys them even after they discipline him, then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the elders of his town to the gates of the community, and they shall declare before the elders of the town: this son of ours is wayward and rebellious and does not heed our voice… Thereupon the men of the town shall stone him to death.” (Deuteronomy 21:18-21) A dire punishment—wouldn’t you say?
Rashi sees the tragic outcome as the culmination of a series of escalating transgressions in a continuous narrative. Here’s what Rashi says: “The only reason why the Torah includes these commandments is in order to combat the yetzer hara, the evil inclination. For, if the Torah didn’t prescribe a legal manner for a soldier to take a female captive, he would do so illegally anyway, as it is written: ‘should you go out to battle… and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her and take her as a wife…’ But if he takes her, then in the end, he will come to hate her, as it is written: ‘should a man have two wives, one who is loved and one who is hated…’ And if he hates his wife, then in end, he will sire a rebellious son, as it is written: ‘should a man have a wayward and rebellious son…’ That is why the Torah the conjoined all of these commandments together.”
Rashi’s linking of the three sets of laws yields a profound insight on the collateral damage of war. The Torah is saying, know that if you decide to engage in battle, you will inevitably unleash a string of unintended consequences over which you will lose control. Conquest will lead soldiers to take women captive, and captive women will lead to unhappy households in which husbands hate their wives, and hated wives will lead to children who don’t obey their parents, and rebellious children will meet a tragic fate. We have only to register the thousands of American soldiers coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan bearing invisible injuries from IEDs, and ponder how undocumented brain damage among them may result in diminished work capacity, impaired relationships, violent behavior, and worse five, ten, twenty years down the road, in order to provide just one modern-day example in the military arena of the law of unintended consequences.
Is going to war an inevitability, or an option? Is it a command, or a choice? If we take one step back to the opening verse of the Torah portion, we read: ki tetze lamilchamah al oyvechah, “should you go out to battle against your enemies…” This is Robert Alter’s translation. The King James Version (and many in its wake) reads: “when you go out to war against your enemies…” The new JPS, the standard Jewish translation, concurs: “when you take the field against your enemies…” On the other hand, the Septuagint, the ancient translation into Greek, reads more like Alter: “now, if you were to go out to battle against your enemies…” The varied translations reflect the inherent ambiguity of the Hebrew word “ki,” a linguistic fact already noted in the Talmud. (Gittin 90a) “If” means something very different from “when.”
Beyond calling into question the obligation to go to war, a close reading of the verse also reveals the psychological condition necessary in order to contemplate war to begin with. “Should you go out to battle against your enemies, and God delivers him into your hand…” Note carefully how the text characterizes the enemy as a faceless, featureless “him,” stripped of all individuality, all identity, all humanity. Indeed, this must be the case before a person can bring herself to kill another. A general must think of his troops as if they were chess pieces on a board before he is ready to command them effectively. A combat soldier must manipulate the mouse on his computer screen as if all he were engaged in was having fun with a videogame instead of directing a predator drone to bomb real targets. Likewise, dehumanization is the necessary precursor for the next step in the Torah’s description: “and you see among the captives a beautiful woman, and you desire her and take her.” Let’s face it, the Torah is not talking about a romantic love affair here, as Rashi clearly recognizes when he states: “if the soldier can’t take her legally, he will take her anyway.” The Torah is talking about rape. Rape and war have always gone together.
The Jewish ethicist Emmanuel Levinas teaches: “a philosophy that allows for war is a philosophy that erases human dignity.” According to my teacher Rabbi Art Green, the most basic of all Jewish doctrines is that every individual is created in the image of God. This week’s Torah portion Ki Teitzei forces us to acknowledge that we cannot wage war without negating the central truth of Judaism. There is really no such thing as “collateral damage.” The murder, rape, and injuries that are inflicted on innocent people are not incidental to war, but are inevitable consequences of any military conflict. I am not saying that we should never go to war. After all, the Torah implicitly allows it. But I am saying that going to war is always a choice. Furthermore, going to war always unleashes a chain of uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence. We live in a complicated world, and sometimes we have to make supremely agonizing choices. But let us never lose sight of our humanity. I can think of no greater way to honor the memory of those who perished on 9/11, as well as those who died in combat in Afghanistan and Iraq during the ten years since, than to uphold the conviction of the immeasurable worth of a single human life.
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