Jeremy Rosen
Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 20, The Ethics of War
Jeremy Rosen | Making Sense of the Bible: Can its Ancient Text be Relevant Today? Deuteronomy 20, The Ethics of War
- So for those of you who are able to hear, the music was “Sibelius: the Karelia Suite,” and it’s titled “The Duke of Lithuania Going Around to Collect Taxes,” which is why it’s so marshal and serious. And that, I suppose, is a way to introduce the subject for today, which starts off with the issue of warfare. Now the Torah does not define the actual options of war, but it gives a range of possibilities, war against the Canaanites, and war in general. Later on, the rabbis differentiated, it’s not mentioned here specifically, but they differentiated between what was called milchemet mitzvah, a war which is an obligation, you must go to war, which is either the war against the Canaanites, or against anybody who is threatening you existentially. So an existential threat is regarded as an obligatory war, and a war in which everybody has to participate, if not fighting, then in support. Then parallel with that, there’s what’s called milchemet reshut, a permissible law, a war, for simply political reasons, either to extend your empire, to protect your empire, to do whatever the government thinks may be necessary, a preemptive war, something of that kind. So you’ve got the two kinds of obligations, in the latter case, people, and we went through last week can be excluded, whether because they’re frightened or don’t have the moral strength to fight, or because they’ve just got married, and things of that kind. It is, of course, dealing with a situation that applied thousands of years ago. But nevertheless, some of the ideas that are mentioned here have been used over the centuries to explore the idea and the nature of warfare. And as you know, we are now in our generation in a situation where we are having to fight in a way that we never did for 2000 years.
So let’s look at some of these laws here, and see what we can learn from them. And so I’m starting with Deuteronomy, and Deuteronomy chapter 20, and Deuteronomy chapter 20, verse 10. So the end of last week, we talked about the leaders telling people whether to fight or not to fight. But here, verse 10, . “When you come close to a city to fight against it, you must always offer peace.” So the first stage is you must always offer peace. You will know that probably the most powerful conqueror of the past in terms of conquests and territory will have been Genghis Khan. Genghis Khan has a reputation for being an incredibly cruel, murderous emperor. But the fact is that Genghis Khan was primarily interested in trade and extending his empire in order to trade. But in order to trade, he would have to get cities to concede that they would accept his authority. And so wherever he approached a city, he would always ask if they’re prepared to join him in his endeavors and trade with him. And if they did, he would open up the city, and that would be the end of the issue, of course, fund his troops. But nevertheless, that was it. But if the city did not, he was absolutely brutal in the way that he destroyed it and every single person within the city. And the aim of this obviously was to act as a deterrent to make sure that people feared him, wouldn’t rebel against him, and would allow him to trade. And that’s how he expanded from China all the way into Europe. Nevertheless, what happens if they agree and don’t agree? In verse 11, . “If they agree to enter into negotiation peace, they don’t want to fight, everybody there in the city will be subject to tax.” In other words, they are your subjects, “And they should serve you.”
Now this serve you doesn’t necessarily mean they become slaves, but they’re subject to you. That is the initial response to peace. We have a peace treaty that we accept that Genghis Khan is the ruler. Accept that he may impose taxes on you, but nevertheless, you’re part of his empire. But in verse 12, what happens in ? What happens if they don’t want to make peace, “And they decide to go to war, you then should lay siege.” Then in verse 13, “God will hand them over to you, and all the fighting men will be put to death.” That’s what happens in war. verse 14, “Only the women and the children and the animals, whatever is in the city, all the booty you can keep for yourselves, and you may eat or use the booty, or whatever it is that you conquer in those cities.” Reward for the soldiers, whatever it is. Verse 15, “This is what you should do to all the cities that are not part of those in the Canaanite area, which you are coming into.” Verse 16. “But when we’re talking about those that you are invading in Canaan, then God is giving that as inheritance to you. You should not keep any soul alive.” In verse 17, “You must destroy them.” Who are you going to destroy specifically? “The Hittites, the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Perizzites, the Hivites, the Jebusites, as you have been commanded.” In verse 18, So that they will not teach you to do all the disgusting, horrible things that they were doing as part of their religious worship of God. And, of course, this sounds very, very disturbing to us, but that was how life was in those days. And if you did not do that to them, they were certainly going to do it to you and worse. So this is the statement and the differentiation between those of the seven Canaanite tribes, and everybody else in the world outside.
You may then find yourself in a position of war. You may go to war as King Solomon did, as King David did to expand the territories. But there are rules. Another law which is not mentioned here, but a very important one is that when you do put a city to siege, you must always allow people to have a way out. So you must leave one route for them to escape. Now that, in effect, contradicts what we’ve said here, that you’re going to destroy everybody in the city. And yet this looks as though it’s saying that those that don’t want to fight are able to find a way out. And now one of the most problematic and argued about verses in the whole of the Torah. Verse 19 of chapter 20. “If you are in a siege situation that takes a long time, you have to find all kinds of food to support the army.” You have to find wood to lay siege to the city, maybe to burn down its gates. So when you are fighting against the city, in verse 19, “For many days you are besieging a city, don’t destroy the trees to chop them down.” Now is this a statement of valuing nature? Is this a statement of valuing trees? What is it a statement about? Then the Torah goes on to say, because these trees are going to provide you with fruit, with food, so you need the fruit, and the olive, and the vines, and the other trees that are there. So don’t destroy those. Does the Torah mean, in general, respect nature? Does it mean don’t cut off your own supply of food? What exactly are they after? And in this verse, it carries on like this. “Human beings are like the trees of the field.” Now that sounds very strange. I’m like, we’re like a tree rooted in the ground, or does it mean we are things that can reproduce? And if you cut something off, you are ending the reproduction cycle. Does it want to say something about the nature of a human being, that a human being can run away, whereas a tree can never run away?
A human being can get involved in fighting, but a tree cannot get involved in fighting. And so the statement goes, “A human being is like the wood, the trees of the field, and therefore, involved with you in the siege. Now that’s so ambiguous, and in fact, many commentators have, as suggested, and possibly the majority, but not all of them by any means, that this is a question mark. And this should ask of this. Are trees like humans? Are trees like humans? But that too can be understood in so many different ways. But it could be understood to suggest that just as there are different humans, there are different trees, and therefore, just as we’re telling you to respect certain trees because of the benefit, so you should respect certain humans because of the benefits that they can make. You can’t blame all humans any more than you can blame all trees. As I say, this is one of the most difficult sentences to understand. But certainly what we have to deduce from this is there is vulnerability, vulnerability in humans, vulnerability in trees. And we have to try to distinguish between those that we can use, those that we can use for food, those that we can use to help build something, create something, and those human beings who unfortunately only seem interested in destroying. So we’re left with, as I say, one of the most difficult lines in the Torah to understand. And you will find, if you do research into it, that there are something like 15 different interpretations of what this line actually means. Verse 20, to try to clarify. "But if there’s a tree that does not produce fruit, this you may cut down and use it to siege the country, besiege the city.”
So those of you who have studied the siege of Caesar in Gaul, when he surrounded the city where Vercingetorix was, and he built fences all around the city, and then generations later, when the Roman army is besieging Jerusalem, it is using wood to build ramps and to build siege machines. So using wood for war certainly has always been an important ingredient. So it says , “You can cut those trees down, and you can besiege the city that is making war with you, and haven’t agreed to peace until you take it down.” Now so much for the idea that we need to qualify in law, not just be totally destructive, that we have to be as careful as we possibly can. And that has always been built into Jewish law of war and, of course, is part of the Tohar Haneshek, the purity of law that is a fundamental principle of the Israel Armed Forces of the Haganah. The fact that there may be accidents, the fact there may be rotten apples, the fact that there may be people in the army who don’t abide by the law. Some people want to justify this by saying under conditions of crisis, people often act in an unhuman and unpredictable way. And that is true, that is absolutely true, and the record of Israel is phenomenal in terms of ratio to any other war that we have records of. But of course, our enemies won’t allow that for us. So here we have the importance of rules of law. We now come to chapter 21, which is, again, one of the most difficult parts of the Torah to understand that don’t seem to make any sense whatsoever, and yet, it is an absolute fundamental. So chapter 21, verse seven. “If a corpse, a body is found, on the ground, in the territory, in the land that God is giving you as an inheritance. So somebody is found dead in your land, has fallen down in the street, in the field, he’s lying there dead, and there’s no evidence, nobody knows who killed that person.”
It can happen, it happens a lot. The vast majority of crimes of murder in the Western world are not solved. Verse two. “The elders and the judges will then go out,” and I assume these are the national elders of the national judges, they will go out, “and they will measure from this corpse, all the towns that live in a,” I was going to say circumlocution, circumference around, “and they shall measure,” in verse three, “and the city that is nearest to this dead person has to go through a strange ceremony.” Now is this ceremony in order to try to discover the murderer? But it’s even if they don’t discover the murderer. And remember, of course, we also need two witnesses, and we can’t rely on circumstantial evidence. So this whole ceremony is going to draw everybody’s attention to the accident that happened, get everybody involved in the hope that somebody will know something, and come up with this evidence. So in verse three of chapter 21. “The city nearest to the corpse, and the elders of that city, they will take a , a young cow, a heifer, that has never been worked, has never done any work, quite innocent, has never pulled a yoke, never been forced to work on the land.” In verse four, “And the elders of that city will then take a calf to ‘atan.” Now 'atan is a strange word. 'Atan can mean something strong, it can mean something powerful, it can mean something that is flowing. It can mean any one of those things. So they’re taking it down to a source of water, and it’s something has never been cultivated or planted. Now this is very strange. What happens if there’s no nearby river or source of water that’s a well, but it doesn’t say a well. And what land has not been cultivated?
The chances of finding something like that indeed of finding a calf that has not been used, reminds one a little bit of the question of the golden heifer, the golden calf that people worshiped, and also of that other law that we’ve come across in the Torah that doesn’t make sense, that a red cow has to be burnt, its ashes are mixed with water, and they are the means of purifying. So clearly this idea of sacrifice, of purity have played a very, very important part in the life of the Israelites 3000 years ago. And this is something which, again, counts as a something which does not make sense. So they take something which is very difficult to find to a place that’s almost impossible to find. And there the animal is killed, but not killed in the normal way that sacrifice is, by using a knife to not imitate what’s going on in the temple, but by breaking its neck, which, again, sounds incredibly cruel to us. And yet if you see what people do to kill animals for food nowadays, it’s relatively minor, and it’s not likely to happen in the same way. I’m not making excuses, I still find this difficult to read. Verse five. “The priests, sons of Levite, they come forward in part of this big ceremony, this huge city ceremony, and everybody’s watching. Those are the people that God has chosen to serve you in a religious manner, and to use the name of God, to create a just society. And they are the ones responsible for dealing with all crimes and difficulties and problems.” It’s their responsibility to try and sort things out, and therefore, to some extent, they share the guilt when things go wrong in society. And so in verse six, “All the elders of that city, close to the corpse, wash their hands.”
You think of Pontius Pilate washing his hands of something. But here you go thousands of years before that, symbolically, to wash their hands over this animal in the wadi, in the riverbed. Verse seven. “And they publicly declare, 'We have not killed this person, we’ve not seen anything, we are not guilty, and yet, we are. Please take this as atonement, and please forgive your people, Israel. You redeem them from slavery, you bought them out to create a just society, but . But if there is innocent blood shed, there’s something wrong with our society, and we have to atone for this shedding of blood.’” In verse nine. “‘Please let us get rid of innocent blood. We have to do the right thing before God.’” What is this whole ceremony about? It’s clear that this is an act of atonement. It’s not so clear, but it seems obvious that it’s a way, a big ceremony of getting everybody to together in order to maximize the publicity, and try and solve this problem. But it also indicates that we have community responsibility for what goes on. And if we are allowing bad things to go on in our community, even though we ourselves didn’t commit the crime, we are, in a way, responsible. So we are responsible for what goes on in our society, and we have to accept that responsibility, even if we might not be the guilty people.
And this is, therefore, a fundamental moral issue that the Torah is making out of this very strange ceremonial, which we have no idea and no evidence that it ever actually took place. And I want to add, as we come to the end of this issue, that the same thing goes, so what we said before about the law to exterminate the Canaanites and the Hittites and the Jebusites, because again, I must repeat, the evidence shows that the Israelites never carried that out, maybe to their own detriment, but they never carried it out. And those other tribes went on coexisting, and, to a large extent, undermining the morality of the governments and the peoples of the two kingdoms, right from the period of Joshua’s invasion until the exiles. So here we end this section, and we come to another highly problematic, very, very problematic issue, when we start at verse 10 of this chapter 21. “When you go to war against your enemy, and God gives them into your hands, and you take a captive.” Now remember when it came to the Canaanites, no captives, nobody survived. So we’re not talking here about a Canaanite war, not a war of, what we say, an existential threat, but a general war. Somebody wants to fight somebody else. Kings get up to it all the time. Countries get up to it all the time, it’s happening all around us all the time. Verse 11. “If you see amongst the captives a beautiful woman.” And notice it doesn’t say it says , which could mean a woman in general. Sometimes it’s used to mean a married woman. “And you fancy her, you desire her, and you want to marry her.” Now some people see this as saying this is a law which validates rape. You capture a city, you want a woman, you take her. But that’s not what the text implies here.
In verse 12, it says, “So you are allowed to bring her home into your house, she must shave her head, and cut of all her fancy long nails that are fashionable nowadays. Very, very long ones. But in those days, that might have been quite a popular thing too, to let your fingernails grow. So in other words, you remove what makes her outwardly very attractive. "And you take off those fancy clothes that she’s wearing when she was captured,” she might have been an aristocrat, and therefore, you might have been attracted by the externalities, “And she should live in your house, and allow her to mourn the loss of her parents, maybe of her children, of her city, for a month.” So she has to be in a state of mourning in which she is not attractive. She’s not looking her best. You are seeing the worst of her, and it’s for a month. So you can see what kind of character she has during that time. “Only then after that, you may have sex with her, and then she becomes your wife.” Not just rape her and walk away. You take her in and she becomes a wife. She’s part of your family. So you have to think of those things before you go any further. And yet, the rabbis say this is a law designed to combat the evil inclination. So ideally this is not the best way to find a wife, it’s not the best way, and you shouldn’t really do it. But we make a concession, given that under conditions of war, this may often happen.
You find captors and you are attracted. What are you going to do? Verse 14. But then what happens if you don’t want her? You’ve changed your mind. “If you don’t want her, you must set her free, and you can’t sell her on as a slave to anybody else. You must not do the bad thing by her.” It’s not the right thing to treat her badly, to deceive her, or to manipulate her in any way. “Since you have taken her.” Now normally means to rape her. But basically what it is saying is that after consideration, and after a month, you can have sex with her, but you are taking her as a wife. And so the question of is this a question of rape, or is it just a question of, you’ve captured this poor woman, you’ve changed her life. You are imposing yourself on her in some way. She may decide not to resist, but nevertheless, this is an imposition, and therefore, is impose, and it’s imposing something, and it’s the same word that is used for the day of atonement. The day of atonement says that on this day, the you should not rape yourselves, but you should suffer. And so she has suffered, and therefore, you have to treat her with respect, bearing that in mind. Now that law then goes on to another law. In verse 15 of chapter 21, What happens when a man has two wives? And remember, in those days, you could have more than one wife. Indeed, it wasn’t until a thousand years ago in Europe that Rabbeinu Gershom, the head of the Ashkenazi community, banned having more than one wife.
He said you cannot have more than one wife. And that has been the law in the Ashkenazi community ever since. In the Sephardi community, the oriental community, they never accepted his authority, and they went on allowing for having more than one wife. And it wasn’t until the migration of Jews living under Islam came to Israel in 1948 that the law of the land in Israel said you may no longer have, you may keep what you’ve got, but you may not have more than one wife, which remains the case to this day. But the issue of whether you could have more than one wife remained an issue. And that was one of the reasons why the rabbis, a thousand years, 2000 years ago, brought in the idea of the marriage certificate, the ketubah, which laid down conditions. And these conditions could include conditions which say that you may not marry a second wife without the approval of the first wife, and other laws like that. But anyway, it was common practice, and it says in verse 15, “If a man has two wives, one he loves, bit like Jacob and Rachel, one he hates, he can’t bear, like Leah, they both produce children, the one he loves and the one he hates.” But it so happens that , the eldest son, is , belongs to the hated wife. So he might not want to give preference to him. And so this raises conflict. Verse 15. “When it comes to inherit his children, he cannot give priority to the son of the loved one over the son of the hated one.” Verse 17. “The firstborn of the hated, he has to recognize as the firstborn.” And in those days, firstborn males always got , a double load. Now, you know, I find this offensive. Many of us do, some of us don’t. But after all, all royal families go this way. And this is still the case in many countries. So he cannot give recognition. He has to stick to the law. or not, the first child he has has to get, well, male in those days, mishpacha parah, the first bonus.
The rabbis point out this comes immediately after talking about a captive woman who comes in and is made a wife, and somebody who only marries for physical reasons can soon lose the interest, if that’s the only reason you got married, just for looks and just for appearance. And therefore there’s every chance that that’s going to lead to a conflict in marriage later on. And so we are talking about consequences. One thing can lead to the next. And so this leads on to the third situation here, in this sequence, verse 18 of 21. “If a person has a rebellious son, he will not listen to what his father says, and to what his mother says, and they try to discipline him, and he will not listen to them.” So here you have a statement, responsibility of parents is to discipline their children. And if you don’t discipline your children, there’s going to be chaos. Verse 19. “So his father and his mother grab hold of him, and they take him before the judges of the city, to the gates, to the courts, wherever they’ll be.” Verse 20. And they will say to the elders, ‘Our son, he’s rebellious, he’s defiant, he does not listen to us. He is a drunk and a glutton or a glutton and a drunkard.’“ Wow, this is a son? At what age? "The whole of the people of that town shall stone him and he will die of the , and you will get rid of this evil, and all Israel will listen and pay attention.” The rabbis say in the Talmud, ben sorer u'moreh .
There never ever was a case of a ben sorer u'moreh. This was not intended to be taken literally. And they go further and they say, and look carefully at the text. First of all, the text says he’s a ben. He’s not a yeled. That means to say he has somebody who, at this moment, is underage. If he’s underage, then he’s not responsible, and only that sort of person can be taken to the judges. But not only that, here is a son who is zolel wesobe’. He’s a drunkard, and in addition, he’s a glutton. Now what kind of underage child is a glutton and drunkard? I think it’s highly unlikely. And not only that, if he’s so rebellious, how come his parents can get hold of him and take him along? And then if on the other hand, he is of age, then he’s independent, the parents can’t take him. They don’t have any responsibility of him once he’s above the age of 13 in that society. And so they said, “Look, much of this is not meant to be taken literally. It’s a matter of consequence.” Look at the thing. Number one, if you marry for the wrong reason, this is going to cause disruption in the house. If it causes disruption in the house, it will also affect the children. If a child feels unwanted, and is not treated the right way, this will lead to a child who is rebellious. And if that child is rebellious, you will be responsible for the consequences, just as we say, the community is responsible for the consequences of when somebody is killed, or when there’s murder. So all these ideas are lumped together. Notice the different chapters or the different verses. They’re part of one important theme. And this theme goes back to the 10 commandments, that , there are consequences.
What the parents do, it has impact on the children right through. Doesn’t mean to say we can’t put it right, it doesn’t mean to say there isn’t room to repent or to change, but these laws which are meant symbolically, rather than literally, all teach us very important moral issues. One final point that I want to mention here is that there is a final law which says, in verse 22, “If a person is put to death,” he does something wrong, and he dies, you must hang him up on a tree or on wood.“ Sounds very, very brutal. But on the hand, remember this is not how you are killing him. He is already dead. There are certain forms of death that are mentioned in the Torah, but again, as I’ve said so many times, to my mind, they are just symbolic of the significance and importance of the crime. There are different penalties, whether it’s stoning or burning, that all have different symbolic significance. But here in verse 23, we have something very important. "Don’t leave the body hanging. You must display the fact that he has been killed. On the very day that he dies and you display the body, you must bury him. It is an affront, it is disgusting to God. It should be disgusting to us to see bodies hanging, decaying, dripping, humiliated, despised. Don’t defile your country by leaving bodies hanging, as people did and do. Your land should be a land which is a holy one, and one in which we don’t do disgusting things.” We may not want to kill somebody, hopefully we never do. We may not want to hang anybody.
But from this, again we get the idea of respect for the human body, which also comes down to the question of respect for human organs. And so human organs that can be used to replace other organs is a mitzvah, an obligation to do, assuming the person has died. And on the other hand, leaving the remains to rot, or throwing them into the rubbish, is not acceptable. And that is also why, in Israel, you have this organization called zakah, which goes to every crime and all the murders that take place, and tries to gather up the pieces of the body, and everything, and as much blood as possible, in order to treat everything with respect, and have it buried. So that’s a sad note to end on, but on that note, I will then turn to the questions. So let’s open up everything. Open up, open up. Stop the share, and question and answer. Where are we? I can’t see my questions. Oh, here we are.
Q&A and Comments:
Mira liked the music. Yes, that was from “Sibelius: the Karelia Suite.”
Richard says, “20:17 seems six tribes rather than seven.” Let me have a look at 20 and 17. Hittites, Amorites, Canaanites, Perizzites, Hivites, Jebusites, and you are right. There’s one missing. Which one is missing? You make a very good, oh, Amaleki. The Amalekites are not mentioned, because they have their own separate mention. That’s the missing one. But thanks for mentioning that. That was very good. I’m glad you counted.
“The context of behaving rationally, humbly, the trees, seems to override all else.” Yes, I mean, I think there is a rationality, and yet, you know, look how people behave irrationally. I mean, I find those people on the West Bank who cut down other people’s olive trees are going against the Torah. I think, unfortunately, people don’t behave rationally. And I find this unnecessary and as unacceptable as going into an Arab village, and torching and killing, because even if it’s known that they are anti-Israel, even if it’s known that they send people out to perform crimes, you can’t apply, and you mustn’t apply this general punishment to everybody killing innocent blood. You can only kill those people who are directly attacking you, and you know, or have already killed. So unfortunately, a lot of us are not abiding by the morals and ethics of the Torah.
Faith says, “Maybe since trees don’t have free choice to flee from violence to acquiesce, it’s not fair for them to destroy them.” Yes indeed, Faith, that’s absolutely true. That is one of the other interpretations I should have mentioned, the question of, can you escape, can you run away? They can’t, poor things. They’re rooted, whereas a human being can, and therefore a human being has free will to choose for better or for worse.
“Trees don’t produce reusable products, are somehow ancillary, and not entitled to clemency. It seems arbitrary.” Well, I don’t think it is arbitrary. You have to use materials in warfare. You have to feed armies. You have to have bridges to cross rivers, so you need to make use of them. But that’s wood that is chopped down all the time, too much of it, even, in Brazil and elsewhere. So I don’t see that as being a problem. Fruit trees, on the other hand, are productive, or you say, “It means the unfortunate hierarchy of life can become necessary to sacrifice these latter trees to the war effort.” That’s also, that’s a brilliant idea. I honestly haven’t thought of that as a possibility. And thank you for putting it down for us to see. I think that’s excellent.
Israel, “I always understood the issue of not destroying fruit trees had to do with valuing the food producing tree and how long it would take the tree to grow.” Well, yes, definitely the value of food-producing trees. Time to grow is not necessarily a factor, although you could apply it, to produce food again.
Q: “It was to prevent the idea of wasting fruit trees, or having to wait years to replace them, or nonbearing. How do you understand this perspective?”
A: Yes, I think that’s absolutely right. So I’m with you there, and glad you pointed that one out too.
Q: “Is there any evidence,” Shelly asks, “that the ceremony with the ashes of the red heifer was ever done?”
A: Yes, apparently it was. Apparently it was. And the question is whether it was done also in the second temple of Irony, in the first temple, but apparently, it was done, so the tradition says.
Q: Romain, “Is it not less problematic when we consider the need for concrete examples to address human issues? Using modern thinking makes it harder.”
A: Hmm, Romain, I’m not certain I understand what the problem is here. “Is it not problematic when we consider the need for concrete examples to address human issues? Using modern thinking makes it harder.” Well, I certainly think modern thinking is much more complex, random, and problematic, and look how many cases there are of false imprisonment, even of putting people to death, where the evidence was overturned. So I do think there is a lot wrong with our current system of justice. Then you say, do I think the Jewish system of justice is any better? In theory, I think it is, but in practice, I’m afraid I know of too many cases where bribery and corruption can pervert the course of justice, even in the Torah.
Susan, “Perhaps one month waiting to see if she’s pregnant.” Well, that’s a good point, and I think that may well be the case, but who knows? But yes, Susan, that’s an excellent point, and I’m sure that’s a factor.
Marion, Marion. “Our soldiers are losing their lives to make a safer place for us Israelis and to annihilate terrorism. Yet ultra-Orthodox men don’t hesitate to stop traffic in the scent of Jerusalem and cause the police to bring out their horses, keep the roads open, keep the public safe. Why? Because they don’t want a young man to serve in the army. That, to my mind, is criminal and a horrid waste of public money. Our soldiers are protecting the ultra-Orthodox equally with everyone else. This is Israel, not 19th century Russia or biblical times. Times have changed. Situations are different. I feel that whatever was relevant thousands of years ago needs to be updated.” Apart from that last line, I would agree with you 100%. I think it is a shocking scandal. I don’t think the taxpayers should fund people who sit on their backsides. And although I do think that a small number of people who are brilliant scholars should be given special treatment, just as I believe certain academics can be given certain special treatment. As a general rule, what started off as applying to some hundreds or so students in Yeshiva in the 1950s, now hundreds of thousands, I think it is a scandal, and I agree with you a hundred percent, but when you talk about updating, that is a generalization. The fact is, Jewish law is constantly updating itself. It’s constantly changing in so many ways to meet new ideas. The problem is, there are some rabbis in the Haredi world who don’t want to change the status quo that exists at this particular moment, and who believe that it would be a cultural shock to their system. And to some extent, I can understand this, although I don’t sympathize with it in any way, and I don’t think it is justified, because even if you don’t want to go and fight in a battle, and remember there are plenty of non-religious people who get out of serving in the army, you should still be serving and helping in some social ancillary way. And this is a battle that has to be faced, and I’m glad there’s a beginning of facing it. But also I want you to know that there are voices within the Haredi world who also demanding change, and more and more of them are joining the army. So it’s not an issue that one can treat as black and white, but in principle, I completely agree with you. Anything else?
Shelly comes up. “If the rebellious son never really happened, as in the Torah, to show what can happen when marrying the wrong reasons, how do you compare the idea of mamzeirut to it? If a woman doesn’t have a ghet, and subsequent children have the disability of being a mamzer forever, how do we deal with that?” And that’s another example of a case where the rabbis go out of their way to deal with it, and find all kinds of ways around it. And the vast majority of rabbis, particularly in Israel, were able, following the example of Chief Rabbi Goren, to make sure that somebody was not declared a mamzer, and there was a way of annulling marriages, and so forth and so on. And therefore, the fact of the matter is this is another case where the halakha can find solutions, and therefore the problem is with the people who don’t want to find the solutions. And those are the people I disagree with on the question of the agunah, on the question of mamzeirut. and on the question of the army.
Glora, “I always learn something. At least some women are more valued these days in some parts of the world. Thank God they are.” And Philip Spain, “What about the Girgashites, the Girgashi?” They’re also mentioned. That’s a very good point as well. Thank you for mentioning the Girgashi. Why they’re left out here, I don’t know. It’s probably just the tradition of the text.
Q: “Didn’t Joshua say not to take the spoils of war at one time?”
A: Yes, most definitely. And there was a ban on taking the spoils of war for Jericho, and the whole of that was dedicated. And you had one man called Achan, who betrayed that, and he was punished as a result of it.
Mira, “And I agree with everyone who say .” Thank you, Mira, thank you very much indeed. Marian, thank you for your opinions, and thank you, everybody, and we will see you, please God, next week.