“God is a Warrior”
Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger and Rev. Dr. Fritz Ritsch
Sisterhood Interfaith Shabbat, Jan. 30, 2015
Exodus 14: 3-15: 6, 11
Rev. Dr. Ritsch was invited to do a dialogue sermon with Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger of Temple Beth El in Fort Worth. Each contributed a portion, to which the other responds. The Temple graciously hosted the event, at which many St. Stephen members were present.
Rabbi Ralph Mecklenburger:
That is quite a Torah portion from which we just read! The exultation which Moses, Miriam and the Israelites felt is understandable and very human. They had been slaves. They finally escaped. And then suddenly they saw the Egyptian armies chasing them–to kill them, or return them to slavery. But (we all know the story) they escape on dry land through the sea. The Egyptian armies chase after them. Just as they (we!) reach safety on the far shore, God commands the waters to return, drowning Pharaoh’s legions. So the Israelites break out in songs of jubilation.
Pharaoh’s chariots and his army
(God) has cast into the sea! . . .
They went down to the bottom like a stone! (Exodus 15:4-5)
Our God is the mightiest!, they sang. In the polytheist world when one people defeated another it was experienced as a victory of “our” gods over “yours.” Adonai ish milchamah, “Adonai is a warrior” (Exodus 15:3), the people no doubt felt; God has bested the fabled gods of Egypt!
But is that how we want to think of God, God the ultimate role-model, the exemplar of righteous behavior? Are we not, as a matter of fact, pretty upset these days over zealots who claim to be inflicting murder and mayhem on the world in the name of God? Shalom, peace, is what we yearn for. Still in a week when we have observed the 70th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, how many of us want to be pacifists? Surely there are and have always been wars which exemplify human greed, pride and sinfulness. But also justifiable wars. Both Judaism and Christianity have “just war” traditions. The Pharaohs and Hitlers of history need to be opposed. If, unavoidably, you do get dragged into a war, we all understand that there is no substitute for victory.
The Jewish version of “just war theory” speaks of the milchemet mitzvah, the obligatory war, of which there are two varieties. The Hebrew Bible says that God specifically mandated that the Israelites defeat the Canaanites and take over the Promised Land. Even in antiquity the classic rabbis (shortly after the biblical period) found those genocidal passages embarrassing. They did not feel entitled to say the Bible was wrong. But in practice they reversed the biblical logic. The conquest was a one-time event. From now on, they said, only defensive wars, not wars of aggression, are legitimate. In effect–-passages like this one, and many in Joshua, notwithstanding–-they said the only milchemet mitzvah, the only obligatory, righteous war in the post-biblical world, is the defensive one.
In classic Jewish (and I dare say Judeo-Christian) ethics, if someone is actively trying to kill you, you may kill him first. So it is but a short step logically to say to nations (Israel certainly comes to mind) that if another nation is attacking you, or (this happened) is massing troops on your border almost certainly to attack, you may fight back, or even attack first. But the highest value is always peace. You may not attack to steal property or project power.
Adonai ish milchamah is, understandably, the hope of those who are threatened: God should protect us, please! But for more normal times we remember that “peace is the blessing without which all others are hollow.”
FRITZ:
Which of course reminds us that a war is useless if it is an end in itself. The ultimate goal is peace—shalom. Shalom is more than the absence of violence. It is the presence of wholeness. The wholeness for which we strive leads us to seek harmony—with nature and the world around us, with God, and with each other. In war it is natural and even necessary to put the welfare of you and yours first—but war is useless if the victory we achieve is simply the shoring up of our fortifications for the next attack, or the successful building of a barrier that keeps us safe, but at the cost of isolation from the rest of the world. In fact, as Martin Goodman in Rome and Jerusalem says, one of the main distinctions between the ancient Greco-Roman mindset and the Jewish mindset was that “Jews did not ascribe glamour to war, as Romans did.” While the Roman mindset glorified war and considered it the pinnacle of human achievement, the Jewish scriptures viewed war as at best a necessary evil, and envisioned that in God’s world true peace would reign, and not simply for those who worship the One True God, but for all the nations, for all the peoples, for all the world.
So, if we are to go to war, it should be viewed as grim necessity, always with the awareness that God’s people are not only on one side—but on both sides. Ralph told me of a midrash—a rabbinic interpretation–of the drowning of the Egyptians in which God looks down on the celebrating ex-slaves with disgust, and says, “My children are drowning, and you sing praises?”
Ultimately, peace is not simply for us. It is for our enemies, as well. God loves both sides, and all people; we are all God’s children. When we are at our best we understand that. The goal of our wars should be peace for all involved and the building of bridges of understanding, respect, and mutuality. I think of The Marshall Plan that the US instituted following World War II, meant to build up not only our allies, but our enemies, Germany, Italy, and Japan. To this day, the fruit of that initiative of peace lives on, to the benefit of all.
So it must be understood that war is not an end in itself—war is but a tool of peace. Sadly, we don’t need to look too far back in our own recent history to see that often war fails at that lofty goal—and worse, that there are times when our own leaders do a much better job of planning for war than for peace, as if they believe that wars will actually create peace.
But what is peace? One reason that we often fail at peace is that it exists as an abstraction, whereas war seems much more concrete and measurable. But scripture gives us concrete examples of peace, often in the most surprising places. For instance, what is the peace that the Children of Israel achieve from their very brief and one-sided war with Egypt? It is what Thomas Jefferson might have called “the pursuit of happiness,” as they wander for forty years in the desert, pursuing, often with great frustration and angst, The Promised Land. It was a time they may not have viewed as either happy or peaceful, as they struggled over doubt and faith, the nature of God, what it means to be a people, and what to expect from their leaders. It wasn’t a time of contentment, not at all. But it was a time of freedom, freedom to try and to fail, freedom to complain and to learn and grow, freedom to tear down community or to build it up, freedom to choose God… freedom to choose life. They could pursue their dreams, but always in the dynamic tension of community. That sort of peace, with all its frustrations and difficulties, may be the best we can attain until the Messiah comes—but it is a situation where differences are not resolved by violence, but by the hard work of building relationships.
RALPH:
I trust no one will be surprised to find that we are in agreement. The conflict between reality and ideals, for all peoples, is unavoidable. And it is so frustrating! This is the ambiguity of life and history. In the Middle East, Africa–-lots of places ‘round the world!–-lots of people do know that peace is the ideal. But the path to it is elusive. Gandhi once said that “there are some people who are so poor than God can only appear to them in the form of bread.” It strikes me that there are also some people so threatened, so fearful, so genuinely endangered, that God can only appear to them as a warrior. That was the Israelites escaping through the Red Sea. The great thing about participating in religions that have been around for thousands of years is that we can also see events in broader context (or at least once the immediate crisis is past we should be able to do so). Persians–-Iranians!–-have been allies of America in recent memory, and friends of Jews back to biblical times! In our day thousands of Israelis are moving to Germany, of all places! I wish history were a straight line from conflict and war to redemption. Clearly it is not. But there is a God in the world. If we open our eyes, and open our hearts, there are ideals goading us and pulling us forward towards shalom.
FRITZ:
Ultimately, God is not interested in being honored as a warrior. Scripture directs us to God who is the Shepherd King—a king, yes, but a king of gentleness and firmness; a shepherd who protects us and fights for us, yes, but who mainly simply takes care of us; who leads us on the paths of Shalom when we go astray, a shepherd whose rod and staff comfort us; and a shepherd who gathers His flock from the four corners of the earth and embraces them in His care. In Eden, recall that God once walked in the Garden with the humans, Adam and Eve, the three of them, united to one another, and to creation itself. When the creation story was first written down during the Babylonian Exile, it was meant as anti-myth to the Babylonian Creation story, which told of the cosmos being created from the carcass of a god killed in battle. The Babylonian myth embodied what theologian Walter Wink calls “the myth of Redemptive Violence,” that somehow the world is created and saved through violence. No, the early writers of the Torah said, that is not the way of the true God. Violence is not creative. The true God creates beauty and order out of His very nature and does not intend for His creatures to live by violence, but by harmony and cooperation, by mutuality. That sort of peace, that shalom, is the ultimate Biblical goal. It is what God intends. We show it in a small way, in wonderful events like this your synagogue is hosting, where we cross the boundaries of faith and celebrate the oneness, unity, and harmony that God intends.
May God bless this harmony so that it grows ever outward, to embrace all of humankind.