In trying to make sense of the recent outpouring of Rabbi Warren Goldstein in Johannesburg proclaiming that Israel has won the war against the Palestinians, I struggled to understand his arguments from a Judaic perspective. I assumed that the prescripts of all three Abrahamic faiths on killing are similar but needed to hear from an authoritative Jewish voice. — Zubeida Jaffer
By Steven Friedman
THOSE who want to use their religions to sow hate and violence can always find a verse or a ruling to ‘show’ that their faith support their view. And those of us who want our faiths to spread peace, tolerance and justice can always show that there are teachings which contradict them.
Fortunately, the teachings which tell us to respect others far outweigh those the hatemongers use. These messages are also more likely to reflect mainstream teaching than the messages of hate. This is true of the Jewish faith, just as it is of all others.
Warren Goldstein rejoices in the title ‘Chief Rabbi’ of South Africa. In Jewish tradition, there is no such thing as a ‘Chief Rabbi’ – the term was created by the British government. He was chosen by Rabbis in only one of the three strains of Jewish practice and there are many South African Jews for whom he does not speak. But he likes to project himself as the leader of the country’s Jews.
He is also a rabid Zionist, who has loudly cheered on the genocide which is being inflicted on the Palestinian people. So extreme is his Zionism that he upset some fellow Orthodox Jews by loudly supporting Donald Trump because even Joe Biden’s support for the genocide was not extreme enough for him. And, while most of humanity recoils at the starvation and murder of Palestinians, Goldstein recently addressed a rally at which he hailed this mass killing as a ‘victory.’
Goldstein is not the only Rabbi to claim that his faith requires him to celebrate murder – there is, sadly, no shortage of blood-thirsty statements by some of his colleagues around the world.
But does Jewish teaching support him? He and those who think like him can find ways of claiming that it does. But they can do this only by extreme cherry picking which ignores most of Jewish teaching.
The peddlers of hate usually claim that their position is Jewish by citing the law of the rodef or the pursuer. It holds that, if you are aware that a person is intent on taking the life of another – if they are pursing them to kill them – you must do whatever you can to stop them. Including killing them.
Right-wing religious Zionists use this ruling frequently to insist that anyone who they believe is intent on killing Jews must be killed. They have also used it to justify killing other Jews – when a right-wing zealot murdered Israeli prime minister Yitzchak Rabin, the killing was justified on the religious right by the claim that Rabin was endangering Jewish lives by paving the way for a Palestinian state. Their interpretation of this law enables them to say that they are doing what Jewish teaching instructs.
But they can do this only by taking huge liberties with the law. The text was never meant to deal with groups of people – Jewish teaching does not support collective punishment since it insists that only the perpetrator of crimes should be punished, not other members of the group to which they belong.
It was meant to deal with a very limited and specific circumstance – one in which the only way to stop one individual murdering another was to break the prohibition on taking a life.
Another ‘justification’ for Israeli state violence, trotted out by Benjamin Netanyahu, is the case of Amalek. This refers to a people who, according to the Hebrew Bible, attacked the Jews without provocation after they were freed from slavery. The text insists that Amalek must be wiped off the face of the earth. Since Amalek became, in some Jewish teachings, a symbol of hatred of Jews through the ages, the religious right insists that they are bound by a Biblical command to destroy anyone who is deemed to threaten Jews.
But mainstream Jewish teaching is not based on a literal reading of Scripture – it is a product of the teachings of the Rabbis who interpreted the Bible. According to the Rabbis, no-one knows any longer who Amalek is or even whether it still exists. So Jews cannot use violence against anyone by claiming that they are Amalek. Later Jewish teachings insist that the verse really means that Jews have an obligation to wipe out hate and violence.
In some cases, the right can get Jewish teaching to say what they want to say by changing what it says. A verse in the Talmud, which records the views of the Rabbis, declares that anyone who destroys one human life is regarded as if they had destroyed the whole world just as anyone who saves one life is as if they had saved the whole world. Ethnic nationalists now say that the text refers only to Jewish lives, despite the fact that it clearly refers to all life.
The religious right also, of course, conveniently ignores all the Jewish teachings which obstruct their agenda. The Rabbis were so opposed to capital punishment that they declared that the death sentence could be imposed only in circumstances which were highly unlikely ever to happen. They declared that a court which sentenced one person to death in seven years was blood thirsty. Other Rabbis insisted that one which handed down a death sentence every 70 years was blood thirsty.
What does that teaching say about a state which puts tens of thousands of Palestinians to death?
The religious right also ignores the Jewish prophets, whose teachings are central to Jewish belief and who urged the people to pursue peace and social Justice.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, a very mainstream figure in American Jewish life who still describes himself as a proud Zionist, has been pointing out recently that the prophets would have rejected the violence visited on Palestinians over the past two years – he describes it as a ‘desecration of the Divine Name’ which tarnishes Jewish ethics and has called on Jewish religious leaders to remember the prophetic teachings.
Goldstein, like his fellow Rabbinic champions of violence, claim that Jewish teaching supports their prejudices. But the vast weight of Jewish teaching rejects them and their worship of a state. It is not Jewish teaching which makes them tribalists – it is their tribalism which they impose on Jewish teaching.
