Read an Excerpt

A Prophetic Peace

Judaism, Religion, and Politics

Indiana University Press

Politics, Anti-Politics, and Religion

Self-justification is the heavy burden because there is no end to carrying it; there will always be some new situation where we need to establish our position, dig the trench for the ego to defend. ... Self-accusation, honesty about our failings, is a light burden because whatever we have to face in ourselves, however painful is the recognition, however hard it is to feel at times that we have to start all over again, we know that the burden is already known and accepted by God's mercy. We do not have to create, sustain and save ourselves; God has done, is doing and will do all. We have only to be still, as Moses says to the people of Israel on the shore of the Red Sea.

— Rowan Williams, Silence and Honey Cakes

The Temptations of Political Discourse

The walk back over the Lebanese border was no easy hike. We retraced our steps through the ruined villages and finally approached the border along a very steep uphill path. The war was over. Our journey home was supposed to be safe. But, of course, we knew that nothing was over, and the atmosphere was still tense. The feelings that accompanied me as we crossed the border on the way into Lebanon are well expressed by Hegel's assertion that war "seems to be more mechanical and not so much the deed of a particular person as that of a member of a whole." When the war was over I felt again how arbitrary the participation of an individual in a war is. We all pulled out as mechanically as we had pushed in. With nothing resolved and nothing accomplished, the decision to bring us home was welcome, but not satisfying. We carried no trophies of a great victory and no new hopes of peace. All the same, when we reached the Israeli side of the border we began to rejoice. Our fear was lifted. Our minds were free to make plans.

The thought of political protest entered my head almost as soon as the bullets had been safely removed from my M-16. I felt entitled to express my grievances. My unit had been cut off without food or water for days. Our orders had been confusing and contradictory. It was clear that the war had not been handled well, and I will not deny concluding that there was a political opportunity here to be seized. Many of the men who crossed the border with me in the first days after the war were filled with the prospect of appearing on the news, rallying a popular movement, and trying to bring down the government!

As we headed home and the wheels in my head started to turn, I wondered: what difference would it make if the government caved or not? A change of government is just a change of government. Nothing more. In Israel, where the same politicians are recycled election after election, it is often a great deal less. Why would another government be different or better? Is there nothing deeper to pursue? I avoided the eager conversations that ensued among the protesting war veterans. I felt that their protest — successful or not — had no real purpose or desirable outcome. I shrank away from those who stood outside the prime minister's office for months on end, signing petitions and giving TV interviews. I distrusted their political opportunism. I felt that demanding the prime minister's resignation was too indelicate a response to the complexity and shamefulness of what we had experienced.

It took more than a year for the Winograd Inquiry Commission to publish its findings about the mishandling of the war. The findings were indelicate too. The interim report, published in April 2007, had censured the prime minister, the minister of defense, and the chief of staff. Amir Peretz (minister of defense) and Dan Halutz (military chief of staff) had both resigned by the time the findings of the final report were made public. And so when the publication date of the report drew near, the atmosphere among the Miluimnikim (military reserves) surged with anticipation. Rumors about the political upheaval the report would cause started to circulate. "The prime minister must take responsibility for his actions!" the Miluimnikim declared. Responsibility, so it would seem, has more than one meaning. To the prime minister, it meant staying in his job for as long as possible.

The Winograd report was a great disappointment to many. The members of the commission were accused of serving the interests of the government that appointed them. Most of the critics had hoped for an explicit call for the prime minister to resign. Since the members of the commission avoided this issue, their report — though severely critical of the military and political leadership — was perceived as dull and toothless. I was also disappointed — but for different reasons. I had been waiting expectantly for the report to precipitate some deep and collective national soul-searching. I hoped — somewhat naively — that it would provide an opportunity for the citizens of the Jewish state to take stock of themselves and debate the ultimate purpose and historical significance of Israel's military conflicts. This was not the report's effect.

After the publication of the Winograd report, I was finally moved to write a letter to the Haaretz newspaper. I identified myself as a reservist who had served in the war and who had chosen not to join the campaign to overthrow the government. I shared my feeling that Israeli society had been forced to confront itself in southern Lebanon. In my view, the war backfired because the people who fought it discovered they were not committed to winning it for the government that declared it. There can be no doubt that Israeli soldiers showed remarkable bravery under fire. Men fought to protect their injured comrades and sacrificed their lives to save the lives of the soldiers around them. But in my experience, few were willing to risk their lives for the sake of tactical, strategic, or political gains. The members of the Winograd commission briefly acknowledged the changes that had taken place in Israeli society since the country last fought a full-scale war, but did not make detailed observations about these changes and their implications in their final report. I believed that a careful analysis of how men behaved in Lebanon in 2006 would show that Israeli civilians as reservists (on whom the army must depend) had demonstrated that they were no longer ready to fight with the kind of unflinching reckless bravery that is needed to win full-scale wars. Israel had changed and its society had changed. In the minds of Israel's citizens, military combat was no longer synonymous with ensuring Israel's survival. It seemed clear to me that, whatever the idea of sovereign Jewish life in the Holy Land meant today, for many (including myself) it did not automatically demand the personal sacrifices that combat soldiers are called upon to make on battlefields. Given that the political and strategic aims were not perceived by many of the men who went to war in 2006 as ideals worth dying for, surely the time had come to give much more attention to evaluating war's alternatives even in times of crisis. For nothing other than these most pragmatic of reasons, I expressed my view that the Winograd commission would have done better to question how we ended up at war in the first place instead of devoting all its time and energy to examining why we didn't win.

Taking Responsibility

Reality possesses two faces. On the one hand she presents us with a bright, happy smiling face; she greets us with a cheerful countenance and reveals to us something of her essence.

... She shows us a bit of her lawful structure and the order of her actions. ... On the other hand, however, reality is pos sessed of an extreme modesty; at times she conceals herself in her innermost chamber and disappears from the view of the scholar and investigator. Everything bespeaks secrets and enigmas, everything — wonders and miracles. And reality is characterized by a strange feature. For, at the very moment when she treats us generously and reveals to us a bit of her form, she covers much more. The problem increases as the cognition progresses.

— Joseph B. Soloveitchik, Halakhic Man

The pragmatic point of view I expressed in my letter to the press was not really a full expression of how I felt about the implications of the war. After the war I felt dissatisfied with the almost exclusively political and strategic public reckoning that ensued. In truth, I found both pragmatism and politics unequal to the task of absorbing the implications of this war and — for that matter — of the perpetual state of war that has been part of life in the Jewish state since its inception. I came home from Lebanon feeling how much more than politics is disputed in the Middle East and how ill suited the problem-solving mechanisms of political reaction are to the complexities of the fears, the doubts, the moral compromises, the friendships, the bickering, the physical hardships, the pain, the prayers, the paradoxes, and the absurdities of conflict. I felt almost ashamed to draw political conclusions from the war. After all, I had sustained no heroic injuries, sacrificed no brothers in arms. I suppose I felt too grateful to complain, too unsure of why I had been so lucky to emerge unhurt, too imposed upon by my good fortune to demystify it. I found the idea of political change irrelevant and distracting.

At the core of all this political inhibition lay the sense that some problems have implications that transcend their solutions. Some problems are belittled by the attempt to solve them. Certain circumstances cannot endure the simplification that follows attempts to distill their meaning into policy. The deeper significance of the political reality in the Middle East, so it seemed to me, would be lost were I to think of the Arab-Israeli conflict as a problem that could be forgotten once a way to make it go away had been found. It struck me that the alluring (and perhaps illusory) model of peace among Western democracies after the Second World War should not serve as a precedent for the imagined solution of a conflict that touches on such ultimate things as the return of Abraham's sons to the promised land, the construction and destruction of the Temple Mount/Haram-esh-Sharif, and the final boundaries of the Dar-el-Salaam. The Middle East conflict is about more than territory, economics, limited resources, nationalism, sovereignty, and power. The prophecies of Isaiah, Jesus, and Muhammad are at stake here. These ultimate visions that lurk behind the scenes of the conflict are blocked from emerging onto the stage of political reality by each other and by any number of intractable difficulties and obstacles that lie in the way of their realization. It is perhaps a dangerous thing to force an illusion of clarity on a situation filled with such enigmas, but this is what politicians and diplomats must do to reach agreements. How else can one respond? What else can be done to alleviate the terrible suffering of so many people locked in an incomprehensible clash of ancient enmities? Are there responsible reactions to political conflicts other than the attempts to use diplomatic, economic, and military means to resolve them? Can a responsible case be made for allaying the temptation to solve things?

In Silence and Honey Cakes, Rowan Williams collects the wisdom and insight of the church fathers of the desert on the impulse to flee. He cites Abba Macarius: "Abba Isaiah asked Abba Macarius to give him a word. The old man said, 'Flee from human company.' Abba Isaiah said, 'But what does it mean to flee from human company?' The old man said, 'It means sitting in your cell and weeping for your sins.'" On this slightly elusive and counterintuitive passage, Williams comments, "Flight as this saying of Macarius suggests, is about denying yourself the luxury of solving your problems by running away literally or physically from them (sitting in your cell) and about taking responsibility for your sins (weeping)." It is perhaps curious that Williams proposes weeping for sins and fleeing from society as a model for taking responsibility. This is certainly not a typical modern response to adversity. Even in religious circles where faith in God is a given and reliance on his mercy is axiomatic, God's role in our struggles with adversity is most commonly tied to the popular notion that God helps those who help themselves. We tend to censure the phlegmatic indifference that religious submissiveness can engender. People who refuse medical care for their children because they prefer to pray for them are more likely to face charges of child abuse than they are to earn the respect of society (even religious society). Nothing seems more responsible than facing up to a problem and trying to solve it. It is hardly a luxury.

Macarius's point (at least according to Williams's interpretation of it) should not be confused for phlegmatism. The idea here is different and much more subtle. On one level, through his reading of Macarius, Williams is suggesting that praying and repenting before acting can have clear practical advantages. After giving an account to God, we approach the world with a religious sense of sobriety and proportion. We recognize that God created a world full of adversity and that it is beyond our power to change that. We realize that even after a particular problem has been solved another one will always follow. This realization prevents our acting rashly and irresponsibly. The slow consideration of a problem — divorced from the attempt to diagnose and treat it — forces us to take the complexity of the world seriously. While it is possible to shy away from this reality and jump straight to the problem-solving stage, this would be an evasion of responsibility. It is this evasion that Macarius sees as an unaffordable luxury.

On a second level, Williams's reading of Macarius runs deeper, culminating in the suggestion that fleeing is the way to find religious meaning in adversity. His version of what it means to face an obstacle religiously involves resisting the temptation to ignore the enduring theological significance of a problem. "Sitting in your cell" and "weeping" are reactions that acknowledge the complexity of the human condition in a world created by God, whose design for it defies our understanding. Adversity and difficulty are too fundamental to life — too central to the experiences of too many people on earth — to be brushed aside as if they were not supposed to be there. Recognizing the divine origins of the world through its complexity converts our attempts to fix things in the world into humble acts of faith rather than cocky displays of human capability. Problem solving leads people to believe in themselves; fleeing turns their attention toward God.

For Macarius, the broken design of creation is a standing invitation to contemplate the mysterious perfection of God. One must flee the temptation of thinking that all adversity is only a challenge to human ingenuity in order to solve a problem in his service. The conviction that the world is irreparably flawed is there to remind us that there will always be something urgent to pray for even after some of our present goals have been accomplished. Similarly, Rabbi Tarfon teaches, "The work is not ours to complete, neither are we free to shrink away from it." We are not absolved of our duty to act. But at the same time, we are blocked from thinking that our actions might lead to completion and absolute resolution. There will always be more work to do. When Rabbi Tarfon says that the work is not ours to complete, it is because the role of humanity is to work in an incomplete and irreparably broken world forever. The ultimate purpose of this endless work transcends its more direct results. However, lest we think that endless work is pointless, Rabbi Tarfon insists that we are not free to shrink away from it. The hopeless task of partial repair is our perpetual obligation because it is the partiality of our successes in a broken and incomplete world that we must observe in order for our work to effectively draw our attention to God. The distinction between fleeing and problem solving, between technology and religion, between those who strive for completion and those who draw meaning from the mystery of brokenness is perhaps epitomized by the difference between those who speak of tikkun olam (fixing the world) and those who speak of tikkun olam bemalchut shaddai (fixing the world in the dominion of God). This too is the distinction between Soloveitchik's two typologies in the opening chapter of his essay Halakhic Man: homo religiosus and cognitive man.

---

Excerpted from A Prophetic Peace by Alick Isaacs. Copyright © 2011 Alick Isaacs. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---