Standing up for what is right and true

A peaceful stretch of road on a quiet summer’s night; a young couple with a four month old baby in an infant seat is driving home; nothing out if the ordinary.

Except that they were driving up from Beer Sheva. As an IDF officer in the Paratrooper reserves, our son-in-law Eliel might be called up at any moment. And it seemed prudent for Maayan, our daughter, in the midst of her medical school finals, not to have to negotiate the air raid sirens alone. As such, they were driving up from Beer Sheva with our grandson Amitai to stay with us.

And then there were the three teenagers standing alongside the road. A five-minute drive from the Green line and Beit Shemesh, our daughter, sitting in the front passenger seat, saw them first. In unison, they lifted their arms and threw their rocks, baseball style, smashing the windshield in front of Maayan and exploding the passenger window next to the baby. By some miracle, noone was hurt, but it would be another 10 to 15 minutes of driving, with the back seat passenger picking glass off the baby, before they could stop in a safe place and be sure.

It is one thing to see violence on the news, and even in the form of missiles aimed at our cities and towns. It is quite another to have such violence directed at your person, and especially at your four-month-old baby. Maayan served as an officer in the IDF’s elite 8200 unit, and has experienced her share of intense pressure; it takes a lot to rattle her. But when the full implication of what might have been hit her, she was quite shaken. Emotions of gratitude and helplessness, fear and sadness mixed with joy of being blessed and, yes, anger.

What kind of human beings throw rocks at cars with four-month-old babies? It would be only natural for such experiences as we are having here in Israel to kindle a deep sense of anger and a desire for revenge. After all, if they shoot missiles indiscriminately at our children, maybe we should just shoot our missiles indiscriminately at theirs? And yet, nothing could be further from the Jewish response we are seeing. (In fact one of the leaders of a well know youth movement here in Israel has been taken to task for his Facebook post calling for revenge against those who murdered the three kidnapped teenagers whose bodies were found last week.)

Is revenge sometimes appropriate?

I still remember how challenging the beginning of the (first) intifada was, back in 1987-88. Arabs were rioting all over the country, and the IDF needed to develop effective strategies to quell and deter the violence, while protecting civilian lives, even the lives of the rioters throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails. It took nearly seven years to stem the tide of the intifada with an estimated 600 Arab civilians killed in the process.

It is worth noting that the intifada started in Egyptian territory as well, in the southern Gaza city of Rafiach. But the Egyptians had a very different response. One armored personnel carrier drove into the rioting crowds with live ammunition and killed 30 or so rioters, and that was the end of the Egyptian intifada.

So who was right? Are we completely mistaken? Should we be paying attention to those who are suggesting we meet fire with fire and bomb them all back to the Stone Age?

This week, in the portion of Matot comes a very rare moment in Jewish history: we are called upon to take revenge against the Midianites.

G-d tells us, “Nekom nikmat B’nei Yisrael me’et haMidyanim” (Take vengeance for the children of Israel against the Midianites “ (Numbers 31:2).

It is understandable that the Jewish people might need to do battle against the Midianites who had just sent their daughters, even their princesses, to entice the Jewish men into an orgy of idolatry. But why the need for revenge?

There is actually a specific injunction (Leviticus 19) against taking revenge: “Lo tikom ve’lo Titor” (“Thou shalt neither take revenge nor bear a grudge” (Vayikra 19:18 ).

Maimonides elaborates (Hilchot Deot 7:7) on revenge, calling it “an excessively evil trait,” and explaining it as a refusal to render a service or favor for another that they would not do for you the day before, from which one might extrapolate harming, hurting or damaging someone in response to the damage, hurt or harm they previously caused you.

If the Midianites wanted to destroy us, then we should destroy them. And so perhaps if Hamas wants to destroy us, we should destroy them.

Except for this: When Mos-he repeats the command he has been given, he changes one word: “latet nikmat Hashem be’Midyan” (“to inflict the vengeance of G-d against the Midianites” (Numbers 31:3). So is this the vengeance of G-d or the Jewish people?

Onkelos actually translates the vengeance of G-d as the revenge of the People of G-d, and Rashi explains that he who stands against the Jewish people is taking a stand against G-d Himself.

But the Torah is implying that there is a difference between our vengeance and G-d’s, which makes a lot of sense.

Maimonides concludes his laws of character traits (Hilchot Deot) with the prohibition against taking revenge. He begins Hilchot Deot with the dangers of anger and arrogance. These are the bookends of character development according to Maimonides. Anger is all about expectations; we get angry because we think we deserve better, and that is a form of arrogance; it’s all about me.

When we realize it’s not about us, it’s about something much bigger than us, it becomes more difficult to get angry. And revenge is very much related to anger.

When something happens to us, it’s because Hashem wanted that to happen to us, and we have to do our best to make sense of it, or at last learn from it (though often we will never understand it). Thus there is no place for anger, only for action.

Nikmat Hashem by definition does not involve anger at all. We are acting because the honor of something much greater than ourselves demands it, but not because we have expectations and feel hurt. We are standing up for what is right and true.

Iremember in many instances in the Israeli army how difficult it was during war, when we were sometimes forced to fight, to avoid anger. Anger was a great way to get up the hill, or through the door behind which the terrorist enemy lay waiting. But then, when the dust settled, you were left with all that anger.

Far better to be filled with purpose, and a sense of mission, and the belief that we do what we do because we have to, and are even privileged to be a part of something so much greater than ourselves.

When men such as Ahmadinejad (former Iranian president) or Khomeini, Bin Laden, or Nasrallah, Khaled Mashal or Ismail Haniyeh publicly declare that Israel, the state of the Jews, should be wiped out, everyone with a strand of decency should be prepared to make war on such statements because, as human beings, we are responsible to stand up for truth, justice and righteousness. But taking out every last terrorist who would fire missiles at babies in highchairs and the elderly in their hospital beds should not be done in anger; it should be done with determination, while cool heads prevail.

And this is nikmat Hashem. If the Torah tells us we must fight evil, then war with such evil is actually a step towards helping build a more G-d-filled world.

Make no mistake about it — we are at war, and have been for a long time. But while we fight our enemies on the physical battlefield, we must also take care not to allow them to cause us to fall in the battlefield of our hearts and minds.

Shabbat Shalom from Efrat and Jerusalem.

Columnist@TheJewishStar.com