Jewish World
Like any literary work, the Bible demands close attention to human psychology, politics and language.
This isn’t a topic I ever imagined myself writing about. But the unusual volume of mail I received questioning my interpretation of the Book of Esther shows that many readers, religious and secular alike, are keenly interested in traditional Jewish texts. And since my readers’ questions bear on two issues I care about – Israel and Biblical interpretation – I’d like to expand on last week’s cursory analysis by addressing them at greater length.
Readers raised three main objections to my claim that Esther culminates not in a massacre by Jews, but in a Jewish war of self-defense: The text doesn’t mention any fighting or Jewish casualties; war would have been unnecessary, because once Haman’s edict ordering the Jews’ annihilation had been balanced by Mordecai’s edict authorizing the Jews to kill their enemies, mutual deterrence was created; and Mordecai’s edict explicitly ordered the Jews to kill women and children.
Regarding the first issue, remember that the Jew-haters (as the text calls them) were prepared to execute Haman’s edict; these are people willing to kill. Moreover, Haman’s edict predated Mordecai’s by two months, during which they’d at least have started arming and training. And since Haman’s edict remained valid, killing Jews would entail no legal repercussions. Under these circumstances, it beggars belief to think they would let themselves be slaughtered without even raising a sword in self-defense. Even if the Jews attacked unprovoked, their enemies would have fought back.
So why no mention of battles or Jewish casualties? For the same reason you never hear about Israeli casualties in the Six-Day War or American casualties in World War II: After winning a sweeping victory in a war perceived as just, it’s human nature to celebrate the triumph and downplay the casualties. And like any great work of literature – which, until very recently, the Bible was widely acknowledged to be – Biblical texts usually strive for psychological realism.
American deaths were seven times higher in World War II than in the Vietnam War. Similarly, the 1967 Six-Day War killed more Israelis than the 1982 Lebanon War. Yet while remembrances of Vietnam and Lebanon usually highlight the casualties, remembrances of World War II and 1967 generally focus on the victories. Why? Because the first two were perceived as both unsuccessful and unjust, while the latter two were both successful and just: America defeated the genocidal Nazis; Israel vanquished three Arab armies that openly sought its eradication.
Purim, too, was a decisive victory over enemies who had threatened the Jews with annihilation. And therefore, what the text recalls is the victory – not the inevitable casualties of war.
Yet why was any fighting even necessary? After all, as the text tells us, the new edict allowing Jews to defend themselves, coupled with Mordecai’s appointment as vizier, made the Jews rejoice and other Persians fear them. In that situation, wouldn’t deterrence have sufficed?
Perhaps. But as Israel’s experience amply shows, deterrence doesn’t always work. If it did, two Arab armies wouldn’t have attacked Israel in 1973, just six years after it decisively demonstrated its military superiority. Nor would low-intensity conflict have persisted for decades.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the rocket fire from Gaza. Palestinian casualties from Israeli retaliatory strikes far outnumber Israeli casualties from rocket launches – inevitably, given the parties’ relative firepower. And every Palestinian knows it. Yet this hasn’t deterred Palestinian terrorists from launching almost daily rocket attacks for most of the last decade.
Esther doesn’t tell us exactly what happened 2,500 years ago. Perhaps the Jews simply attacked unprovoked. Perhaps they feared a devastating attack by the Jew-haters (rightly or wrongly) and attacked preemptively, as Israel did when Arab armies massed on its borders in 1967. Perhaps the Jew-haters attacked, because, like the Arabs in 1967 and 1973, they mistakenly thought they could win. Or perhaps, like the Palestinian rocket-launchers, they knew they would lose, and didn’t care. Based on the text, any of these is possible.
But based on 65 years of Israeli history, I find the first the least plausible. Human nature hasn’t changed much in 2,500 years, and neither has the nature of Jew-hatred. Thus there’s no reason to think Persia’s Jew-haters behaved much differently from those of Hamas and Islamic Jihad.
Finally, there’s Mordecai’s edict explicitly ordering the Jews to kill not only armed men, but also “children and women.” The language of this edict was copied word for word from Haman’s edict against the Jews – possibly in order to sow fear among the Jew-haters, or possibly (as the commentator Ibn Ezra argues) because the parallelism was legally necessary to counter Haman’s edict. But today, threatening to kill women and children for any reason is unacceptable; so in this, Esther indeed violates modern moral standards.
Nevertheless, it’s far from clear that the Jews actually slaughtered women and children. The text doesn’t identify the casualties, but it does give some clues.
First, Mordecai’s edict definitely wasn’t followed to the letter: The edict also told the Jews to plunder their enemies’ property, yet the text explicitly tells us they didn’t. This also implies that the slain had families left alive to inherit.
Moreover, the word the text repeatedly uses to describe the casualties is ish. In Shushan, the capital, for instance, Jews killed 500 ish, plus another 300 ish the next day. Ish is ambiguous; it can mean either “men” or “people.” But usually, the Bible uses ish to describe conflicts between armies, while broader terms are employed to describe massacres of noncombatants. Thus when God orders King Saul to kill every Amalekite man, woman and child, the text reports that Saul’s army killed “kol ha’am” – “all the people” (I Samuel 15:8) Similarly, when Jews massacre the entire household of the (Jewish) Babylonian-appointed governor of Judea, the text says they killed Gedaliah and “all the Jews that were with him” (Jeremiah 41:1-3).
Readers can disagree with my specific interpretations, but the larger point remains valid: Divinely authored or not, the Bible resembles any other great work of literature in that reading it requires close attention to the nuances of human psychology, history, politics and language. Otherwise, you’ll miss half of what it says.
It’s no accident that “Israel Apartheid Week,” an annual two-week extravaganza that began this week, focuses on Western college campuses. It’s not just because that’s where young, impressionable future leaders can be found. It’s also because, as a new study reveals, the educated mainstream is the mainstay of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism in today’s West. That counterintuitive finding explains why college campuses are such fertile ground for attacks on the Jewish state.
Prof. Monika Schwarz-Friesel of the Technical University of Berlin reached this conclusion after studying 10 years’ worth of hate mail–14,000 letters, emails, and faxes in all–sent to the Central Council of Jews in Germany and the Israeli embassy in Berlin. In an interview published in Haaretz yesterday, she said she fully expected to discover that most of it came from right-wing extremists. But in fact, right-wing extremists accounted for a mere 3 percent, while over 60 percent came from educated members of “the social mainstream – professors, Ph.Ds, lawyers, priests, university and high-school students,” she said. Nor were there any significant differences between right-wing extremists’ letters and those of the educated mainstream, Schwarz-Friesel said: “The difference is only in the style and the rhetoric, but the ideas are the same.”
To be clear, these letters weren’t just criticizing Israel’s treatment of the Palestinians; we’re talking about classic anti-Semitism–as evident from the samples Haaretz cited:
“It is possible that the murder of innocent children suits your long tradition?” one letter said.
“For the last 2,000 years, you’ve been stealing land and committing genocide,” said another.
“You Israelis … shoot cluster bombs over populated areas and accuse people who criticize such actions of anti-Semitism. That’s typical of the Jews!”
That modern anti-Semitism is propagated mainly by mainstream intellectuals shouldn’t actually be surprising, as Schwarz-Friesel noted in the original Hebrew interview: “Throughout history, anti-Semitism and Jew-hatred never began in the street, but with educated people – in the writings of the Church, in poems, in novels and fairy tales” (a quote regrettably omitted from the abridged English version). Yet this fact has been forgotten – or deliberately obscured – in the modern West, which still sees anti-Semitism as the province of the far right.
Her research, originally published in German but due out in English next year, also led Schwarz-Friesel to another unambiguous conclusion: “Today, it’s already impossible to distinguish between anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism. Modern anti-Semites have turned ‘the Jewish problem’ into ‘the Israeli problem.’ They have redirected the ‘final solution’ from the Jews to the State of Israel, which they see as the embodiment of evil.”
This conclusion is borne out by the samples Haaretz quoted. It’s obviously easy to believe Israel murders innocent children if you think “the murder of innocent children suits [the Jews’] long tradition”; easy to believe Israel steals land and commits genocide if you think Jews have been doing this “for the last 2,000 years”; easy to believe Israel shoots cluster bombs indiscriminately if you think “that’s typical of the Jews.” Modern-day anti-Semites simply assume the Jewish state commits all the evils they deem it “natural” for Jews to commit, and no evidence will persuade them otherwise–just as no evidence will persuade them that child-murder isn’t part of the Jewish tradition.
Hence the genius of Israel Apartheid Week’s organizers: They’re hawking a blood libel against the Jewish state (the apartheid canard) precisely where it will sell most easily, because the educated mainstream found on college campuses contains a reservoir of people primed to believe blood libels against Jews. Then, thanks to the myth that modern-day anti-Semitism exists only on the far-right fringes, these people can in turn market it to their peers–the decent folk who would never knowingly traffic in anti-Semitism–secure in the knowledge that the libel’s anti-Semitic roots will never be suspected.
Thus to counter such libels, we must start by countering this myth. That means we must start challenging anti-Semitism in the places where it primarily lives: not in the far-right fever swamps, but among the educated mainstream.
A new edition of the Book of Esther does much to explain liberal Jewish attitudes toward Israel.
It’s become fashionable in certain circles to say “the occupation” and Israel’s “right-wing” government are distancing liberal Jews from Israel. But a new edition of the Book of Esther published by the Conservative Movement’s Israeli wing offers a truer explanation for liberal discomfort with Israel.
The new edition includes an introduction that seeks to explain parts of the story liberal Jews find problematic – first and foremost, the killing at the end. “We felt it was important to explain what happened in the context of that period,” the Israeli movement’s executive director, Yizhar Hess, said in a media interview last week. “For that reason, the introduction we’ve written takes both a loving and critical approach.” In short, such bloodshed would be unacceptable today, but norms were different then.
Yet what Esther unambiguously describes is a war of self-defense against people seeking to annihilate the Jews, undertaken only after repeated efforts to avert the threat non-militarily failed. So if liberal Jews find the text problematic, either they’re not paying attention to what it actually says, or they’ve become so pacifist that any war, even one to preserve the Jews from annihilation, is unacceptable.
To understand the parallels to Israel’s situation today, a closer look at Esther is instructive. In the popular imagination, Haman’s plot to kill the Jews is foiled when Queen Esther reveals herself as a Jew to King Ahasuerus. But then, “the reveling Jews embark on a massacre,” as Hess’s liberal Jewish interviewer put it.
In the actual text, however, Esther’s dramatic revelation doesn’t save the Jews: Ahasuerus kills Haman, but ignores Haman’s edict that every Jewish man, woman and child be killed on the 13th of Adar. So two months later, Esther again risks her life by visiting him uninvited and reiterates her plea for the edict’s repeal. This time, Ahasuerus refuses point-blank. Do anything else you please for the Jews, he tells her, but “An edict written in the king’s name and sealed with the king’s ring cannot be revoked.”
Only then, lacking any other option, do Esther and her cousin Mordechai resort to war: They order the Jews “to gather and defend themselves” on the 13th of Adar and kill “all the forces of every hostile people and province.” The enemy casualties ultimately total 75,800 – a fairly modest number for multiple battles spanning 127 provinces “from India to Ethiopia.”
How is this relevant to modern-day Israel? Because on Israel, too, it often seems liberal Jews either pay no attention to actual events – just as they ignore Esther’s actual text – or simply oppose any defensive measures that involve harm to others.
Take, for instance, their insistent demand that Israel just make peace with the Palestinians already. Israel has thrice offered the Palestinians a state – in 2000, 2001 and 2008, the latter an offer so far-reaching US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice couldn’t believe she was hearing it – only to have them reject it without even a counteroffer. Yet to liberal Jews, it’s as if this never happened: They still blame Israel for the lack of peace.
Ditto for senior Palestinian officials’ persistent refusal to recognize Israel as a Jewish state or acknowledge any historic Jewish connection to this land; their insistence on flooding Israel with millions of descendants of Palestinian refugees (just last month, Palestinian Authority President Mahmoud Abbas declared the “right of return” a “personal decision” that “neither the PA, nor the state, nor the PLO, nor Abu-Mazen [Abbas], nor any Palestinian or Arab leader has the right” to concede); their glorification of anti-Israel terror, repeated threats to resume it and payment of salaries to terrorists; their indoctrination of children to view Israel as the enemy who must someday be destroyed; their grotesque anti-Israel incitement (like accusing Israel of infecting Palestinians with AIDS). To liberal Jews, either none of this exists, or it’s dismissed as unimportant. The absence of peace is still always and only Israel’s fault.
Or take the fact that every previous Israeli withdrawal of the last 20 years – from part of the West Bank in 1993-95, Lebanon in 2000 and Gaza in 2005 – produced not peace, but suicide bombings and rockets targeting Israeli cities. Indeed, 20 years of “peace process” have produced twice as many Israeli deaths from terrorism as the 45 preceding years. But liberal Jews, if they know this at all, certainly don’t see it as justifying Israeli qualms about ceding even more sensitive territory, from which rocket fire could shut down all of Israel’s major cities and its only international airport. They’re sure this time will be different. Or perhaps “ending the occupation” is simply more important than protecting Israeli lives.
Then there’s the “siege” of Gaza, the “wall,” the checkpoints and military operations – measures that have saved countless Israeli lives. The security barrier and the reoccupation of the West Bank in 2002 together reduced Israeli deaths by Palestinian terror from about 450 a year to a handful. Similarly, military operations in Gaza reduced rocket launches from thousands per year to dozens (if only temporarily). Defending yourself against people who are trying to kill you inevitably causes harm: Even nonviolent measures like checkpoints cause hardship, and military operations kill. But to liberal Jews, harming others isn’t acceptable, even in self-defense. There must be a better way, they insist: Just make peace – whether the other side wants to or not.
Because Israelis have paid attention to events of the past 20 years, an overwhelming majority don’t believe peace is achievable anytime soon. Nor are they willing to take egregious risks on the off chance that it is, because if the effort fails, it’s their children – not those of liberal Jews overseas – who will pay the price in blood.
But liberal Jews don’t want to see these unpleasant truths or cope with their unpleasant consequences: They want to cling to their faith that all problems can be solved peacefully if we just try hard enough. So instead, they “distance” themselves from the pesky country whose experiences, if taken seriously, would undermine that faith – just as they distance themselves from the Book of Esther’s description of another time when that faith proved unfounded.
At key junctures, Israelis have made choices that averted problems suffered by other countries.
The news of the last few weeks hasn’t exactly been encouraging. The interim agreement with Iran has given it major sanctions relief in exchange for minuscule concessions that delay its nuclear breakout time by at most a month. Rocket attacks are once again occurring almost daily, which, as one analyst noted, means another military operation in Gaza probably isn’t far off. America is demanding dangerous concessions to the Palestinian Authority, while Europe is threatening boycotts.
Yet looking around the world, my overwhelming feeling these past few weeks has been one of gratitude. For many problems now bedeviling other countries could easily have been Israel’s as well, had certain Israelis not made different choices at critical junctures.
Take, for instance, the three-year-old nation of South Sudan, where bitter political rivals who cooperated uneasily to win independence have now turned on each other, killing thousands and displacing over half a million. Such a civil war could easily have erupted in Israel, too: Barely a month after declaring independence, Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion ordered his Haganah militia to fire on an arms ship belonging to the rival Irgun militia, killing 16 people.
But Irgun leader Menachem Begin rejected his members’ demand for vengeance, recognizing that civil war would destroy the new state. And the Irgun obeyed, sparing Israel South Sudan’s bloody fate.
Nor do the parallels end there. In South Sudan, as in many other countries, the civil war stemmed from a winner-take-all mentality that made the opposition fear discrimination and exclusion. In Israel, Begin’s Herut party indeed suffered such exclusion: For almost 30 years, until it won its first election, Herut’s members were barred from the civil service, discriminated against throughout the large swathes of the economy controlled by the state and publicly vilified as “fascists.” Like the Communists, Herut was branded beyond the pale by Ben-Gurion.
Yet throughout this time, Begin’s commitment to democracy never wavered: He insisted that his followers uphold the democratic rules despite the tilted playing field, thereby sparing Israel South Sudan’s fate.
But if Begin was the unsung hero of the state’s first three decades, no less noteworthy was the Left’s behavior after his party, by then renamed Likud, won the 1977 election. To understand why, consider Thailand.
In Thailand, as in Israel, the old elites controlled the state for decades – until suddenly, they didn’t. Begin gained power when Sephardi immigrants, scorned by the old elites, grew numerous enough to swing an election; Thaksin Shinawatra’s party gained power by winning over the rural poor whom the old elites had scorned. In both cases, this demographic factor made the shock doubly severe: Not only had the elites, who thought the state was theirs by right, suddenly been ousted, but the demographics meant their ouster could easily be permanent.
In Thailand, however, the old elites refused to accept democracy’s verdict. After Shinawatra was reelected in 2005, tens of thousands of demonstrators virtually shut down Bangkok. New elections were called, but when Shinawatra won again, the Constitutional Court, aligned with the old elites, invalidated the results. Then, before repeat elections could be held in October 2006, the army intervened to “save the country”: It deposed Thaksin’s government and installed one comprised of the old elites.
The following year, the Constitutional Court outlawed Shinawatra’s party and slapped an electoral ban on its leaders. When a successor party nevertheless won the 2007 election, the demonstrations resumed, even shutting down Bangkok’s international airport. The court then ousted the new premier and dissolved the successor party, along with two of its coalition partners, enabling the old elites to finally form another government. Unsurprisingly, Shinawatra’s supporters then paralyzed the capital with their own mass demonstrations.
Eventually, in 2011, new elections were held, and yet another Shinawatra successor party, headed by his sister, won. Now, the old elites are once again paralyzing the capital with mass demonstrations – to demand that democracy be abolished and replaced by an unelected “people’s council.” The government tried to pacify the demonstrators by cutting short its term and calling new elections, but the demonstrators have vowed to stop the vote from taking place. And the courts, once again, are supporting them.
Israel’s old elites never attempted anything remotely comparable. Granted, they have sometimes used the courts, or international pressure, to impose their agenda on the country in ways I find problematic and anti-democratic. But Likud victories never prompted a military coup, even though the old elites dominated the army. The courts, another bastion of the old elites, never dreamed of outlawing Likud or its coalition partners. And despite loudly mourning the loss of “their” country and voicing existential fears that demographic changes make the loss irreversible, the old elites have never suggested abolishing democracy. Instead, their parties diligently compete in every election – and sometimes win. Like Begin, at the moment of truth, they put the
good of the country first.
Then, finally, there’s the problem now preoccupying most of Europe and Asia, and even many Muslim countries, like Iran and Turkey: the dearth of children. Steep declines in birthrates, to below replacement levels, mean all these countries face a future where too few workers must support too many retirees, and they are wondering, desperately, how to cope. This issue is now “front and center” in Germany, as the New York Times reported last year, while Asia’s aging even made the agenda of the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Israel is one of very few developed countries to have no such problem: The Israeli Jewish fertility rate is 2.99 children per woman, and even excluding Haredim, it’s 2.6 – far above the replacement rate of 2.1 (the Israeli Muslim rate is currently 3.37, but is expected to fall well below the Jewish rate by 2035). Unlike their peers in other developed countries, Israelis of every stripe – left and right, religious and secular – are still choosing to have children.
Thus not only has Israel successfully navigated many pitfalls in the past, but unlike much of the developed world, it also has a future. And amid all the very real problems it faces, that, surely, is reason to be grateful.
A major topic of this year’s General Assembly of the Jewish Federations of North America is how to combat assimilation. At the conference, which is being held in Jerusalem this week, JFNA leaders have unveiled various ambitious ideas, including free universal Jewish preschool. I’d like to offer a much simpler proposal: Just stop dumbing down Judaism. American Jews overwhelmingly receive excellent secular educations; they are exposed to the most challenging, rigorous, thought-provoking material available in science, philosophy, history, and literature. Yet they rarely encounter Judaism at a level more intellectually challenging than a kindergarten class. And as long as that’s true, Judaism will never be able to compete with the secular world for their attention.
Ironically, the Orthodox were way ahead of the non-Orthodox in grasping this, and it’s one reason why Orthodox retention rates are currently much higher than non-Orthodox ones. As far back as 1917, one of Poland’s leading Orthodox rabbis, the Chofetz Chaim, approved the opening of Bais Yaakov, the first school to teach Torah to girls. His reasoning was simple: It had become normal for girls to attend secular schools, and if they didn’t obtain a comparable Jewish education, they wouldn’t stay Jewish. The same understanding fueled the opening of numerous high-level women’s yeshivas in recent decades: Today, girls routinely attend not just secondary school, but college and graduate school; hence their Jewish learning must also be on a higher level.
But in the non-Orthodox community, Jewish education never comes close to the intellectual rigor of secular studies. Almost every American Jew who has attended a non-Orthodox Hebrew school can attest to this; just last week, the Forward ran a piece by an associate professor, Michah Gottlieb, deploring the lack of opportunities for serious Torah study at his childhood synagogue. My own experience is equally typical: During 12 years of Hebrew school, the numbing boredom was punctured by only two classes that offered comparable intellectual stimulation to my secular public schools–and both were taught by Orthodox rabbis. The difference was that they took classic Jewish texts seriously, insisting that we read, analyze, and debate them with the same rigor I encountered in secular history or literature classes.
The good news is that, given a chance, Judaism can easily compete with the best secular thought has to offer. There’s a reason why Jewish sources have inspired some of the greatest non-Jewish writers and thinkers throughout the ages–including many of the 17th-century political theorists who laid the foundations of modern democracy. As Herzl Institute President Yoram Hazony noted in a 2005 essay, “Hobbes was learned in Hebrew, and his magnum opus Leviathan devotes over three hundred pages to the political teachings of Scripture. Locke knew Hebrew as well, and the first of his Two Treatises on Government is devoted to biblical interpretation … [John Selden’s] 1635 treatise on the law of the sea, Mare Clausum—one of the founding texts of international law—argued for the concept of national sovereignty on both land and sea on the basis of the Hebrew Bible and the Talmud.”
In Israel, serious study of classic Jewish sources has exploded in recent years–not because secular Jews are becoming Orthodox, but because they’ve understood that these texts are their heritage, too. American Jews need to offer their children similar opportunities. For without being exposed to Judaism’s intellectual riches, they will never consider it worth a lifetime’s commitment.