The Torah’s authority is bound up with the moral stature of those who teach it. Consider a well-known passage from the Talmud (Yoma 86a) on the verse “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart.” The Sages understand this to mean you should not only love God with your own heart, but that you should “make the name of God lovable through your actions.”
A sage who does business honorably and behaves like a gentleman (or woman) inspires people to say: “how fortunate are his parents and teachers for having imparted Torah to him (or her). Woe to those who lack this Torah! For behold, this person studied Torah and his ways are so pleasant and his deeds are so virtuous!” But if a Torah student behaves dishonorably in business and rudely with others, then people will say: “woe to that person for studying Torah and woe to his teachers! This person studied Torah, and see how ugly are his deeds and how perversely he behaves!”
People inevitably evaluate the Torah by what kind of people it shapes. Not such a bad thing. It imposes a burden on religious people not only to fulfill the Torah’s rules, but to exemplify moral virtues. Those who falter under such responsibility reflect badly on themselves, yes, but also on the religious culture that produced them. And ultimately, unethical religious Jews make people hate God, for people intuitively understand that only a bad divinity would be served through an evil community.
I have been thinking about this passage during the recent ugliness going on in Israel surrounding the book Torat HaMelekh (“The King’s Torah”). This book, published last year, was composed by two rabbis associated with an extremist yeshiva in the West Bank, and it articulates a merciless, violent ethos toward the enemies of the Jewish people. I myself have not read the book (I have no desire to buy a copy to support its authors), but I have seen copious quotations in the press and in other works.
The book takes, shall we say gently, a maximalist approach to the principle of self-defense. It argues, for instance, that vigilantism – not governmental police power – is the proper mode of Jewish self-defense (p.127). It also claims that if one is certain that children will grow up to be terrorists, the proper Jewish response is to kill them now (p. 207). The authors don’t mention exactly who they refer to with such a teaching, but one can only assume they mean that religious Jews should take matters into their own hands and kill Palestinian children studying in Hamas schools.
Now, there can be no doubt that such a work represents only an extremist fringe, even of radicalized settler Jewry. Nearly all prominent rabbis in Israel have condemned the book. Nearly all, but not exactly all. Most importantly, the chief rabbi of Kiryat Arba, R. Dov Lior, and R. Yaakov Yosef, son of R. Ovadya Yosef, the leading halakhic authority among Mizrahi Jews, have endorsed it and stick by their endorsement. Lior in particular is a problematic figure. His students were central figures in terrorist Jewish Underground of the 1980s. The murderer Barukh Goldstein was his acolyte, as was Yigal Amir, Yitzhak Rabin’s assassin. In short, R. Lior’s teachings have consistently been close to circles of violent Jewish extremism.
The controversy over the last couple of weeks has roiled around a criminal investigation of the authors for incitement to violence. (Especially since Rabin’s 1995 murder, Israeli officials have taken a much harder line on quashing potentially dangerous speech. Out of place in America, perhaps, but more apposite in Israel.) For months, Rabbis Lior and Yosef refused to answer police summonses. In the last 10 days, they were picked up and brought in for brief questioning. This prompted widespread protests among Zionist religious Jews, whose public line has often been that rabbis should not be made to respond to something so petty as the law.
Admittedly, one should recoil at the prospect of the state passing judgment on the legality of religious teaching. Religion and the state are already too closely enmeshed in Israel. But you’re living in fantasy land if you think it is merely a hypothetical abstraction when R. Dov Lior endorses a call for vigilante pre-emptive strikes against Palestinian children.
The stakes are unspeakably high, both for individual lives, as well as for politics and the prospect for peace.
But the stakes are also high for the Torah. The authors of Torat HaMelekh, and Rabbis Lior and Yosef are not ignoramuses, to say the least. They know lots of Torah and Jewish sources, and quote them relevantly to make their arguments. As Spinoza said: Every heretic has proof texts.
And that should remind us that God and God’s Torah sometimes need defense from those who would make them detestable in the eyes of the human community. When a sage behaves in revolting ways, people will naturally say: woe to the students of Torah! See the kind of behavior the Torah produces!
The plain and ugly truth is al-Qaeda and Hamas are not the only murderous religious ideologies out there. I sincerely believe that our extremists are not nearly as bad as their extremists. But an honest Jew has to admit that there are sources in our tradition which can support monstrous conclusions. I hope the controversy over Torat HaMelekh forces us to confront those elements. You cannot just wish them away or pretend they don’t exist. We need to lay them bare, and understand the threat of perversion they pose, so that we can teach a more profound Torah, whose paths are pleasant and ethical, and all whose ways are peaceful. (Rabbi Ariel Finkelstain, based in Netivot, has done just this with a work called “Derekh HaMelekh,” the “King’s Way,” countering Torat HaMelekh and presenting a better vision. I am reading it now and may report on it later in this space.)
Despite their erudition in Torah, the writers of Torat HaMelekh and their supporters clearly have lost their moral compass. That’s the mildest thing I can say. Spicier guidance for Torah students can be found in Nietzsche’s trenchant observation: “When going out to fight monsters, take care that you not become a monster.”
- Nedarim, Daf 79 - January 12, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 78 - January 11, 2023
- Nedarim, Daf 77 - January 10, 2023