July 16, 2009
Sometimes our Jewish calendar is at odds with the English one. It’s July, isn’t it? Time for vacations, long summer days, and outdoor concerts: “Summertime, and the living is easy.”
Alas, that’s not what my Jewish calendar says. There, I discover we are bein ham’tsarim, “in narrow places,” hemmed in, trapped! Bein ham’tsarim comes from Lamentations 1:3: “Judah found no rest; her pursuers overtook her in all the narrow places.” It is the period from the 17th of Tammuz, when the Temple walls were breached, to the ninth of Av, when the Temple was destroyed, not quite a time of mourning, but of seriousness, certainly, leading up to what is a mourning day, Tisha B’Av, the ninth of Av itself.
We know we are bein ham’tsarim without a single glance at the calendar because the double portions of Matot and Masei fall then. This Shabbat, we are to experience the desperation of being “in all the narrow places.”
Feeling trapped ourselves in the annual reminder of the damage wars have caused us, it comes as a shock to read this week’s account of the military campaign that the Israelites wage against Midian — not because we are unused to wars in the Torah (there are lots of them), but because this is altogether gratuitous, purely vengeful from the start, and brutal to boot! When the soldiers return after killing just the Midianite men, Moses is outraged. He orders the army to go back and kill the adult women, defined as those physically mature enough to have sexual relations. That’s anyone over the age of 12, but a significant strand of interpretation actually stretches it to the ridiculously low age of three.
It is pretty hard to feel trapped ourselves, and, at the same time, get positively worked up about trapping someone else, especially if it entails killing pretty much every last person over the age of three, just to get rid of them! Isn’t that genocide?
Jewish tradition struggles with this, but most of the explanations should leave us cold. The normative midrashic view, for example, is that our enemies elsewhere waged war against Jews, but not Judaism. We call that anti-Semitism. The Midianites, however, targeted Judaism, not Jews. That is anti-Judaism.
Anti-Judaism is said to be worse because it is directed against God, not just the Jewish people. But we know now what the Midrash couldn’t have imagined then: it is anti-Semitism that produces genocide. After the Shoa, it is hard to argue that Midian deserved total obliteration because it targeted what we believed, not “only” what we were.
What do we do with a passage that seems to promote genocide? Granted, we do not act upon it; there are no more Midianites. But that’s just the point. Could God ever have advocated genocide? Even if we do not take this literally, what do we make of it?
The sages allow us to lay siege against a city by surrounding it on all four sides. Rabbi Natan permits an attack from only three sides. The fourth must be left open as an escape route. Normally the majority view prevails, but quite remarkably, Maimonides sides with Rabbi Natan! Nachmanides goes even farther. He calls Rabbi Natan’s position a mitzva. Jewish law refuses to encode the possibility of an all-out massacre.
Hasidic thought dispenses with the problem by treating war in the Bible as just a metaphor for our struggle against sin. The usual wars in Torah are waged against the seven Canaanite nations, where the Torah rules that Levites do not take up arms. But the Midianite campaign is different. Even Levites fight there. The reason, says Likkutei Sichot, is that the seven nations represent commonplace sins. Levites do not fight because they symbolize the attainment of a spiritual condition so elevated that ordinary sins are not even a temptation. Midian, however, stands for a sin to which even Levites are prone: an inflated ego that breeds such intolerance for others that we eventually regard them as evil incarnate. People who boast of high spiritual attainment are precisely the ones who are most apt to dismiss their opposition as so hopeless that they should not even be tolerated.
This period of bein ham’tsarim should turn us inward. The Temple was destroyed, say our sages, because of sins our ancestors committed. We prepare for Tisha B’Av best by admitting our own tendency to fall short of absolute virtue. Especially if we profess high moral standards, we should worry about egotism that paints our opposition as unredeemable.
It may be summertime, but for Jews, the living isn’t supposed to be easy.
Rabbi Lawrence Hoffman, cofounder of Synagogue 3000, is the Barbara and Stephen Friedman Professor of Liturgy, Worship, and Ritual at the Hebrew Union College in New York. He is the coeditor, with David Arnow, of My People’s Passover Haggadah: Traditional Texts, Modern Commentaries (Jewish Lights).
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