Lebanon Our Land: Obligatory War
“When you go out to battle against your enemy, and you see horse and chariot, a people more numerous than you, you shall not fear them for Hashem your G-d is with you…” (Deut. 20:1)
All the failures of the recent conflict with Iran – Hezbollah reflect ignorance and rejection of the core principle of milchemet mitzvah, mandatory war. This key concept of Judaism is inextricable from Israel’s failure to recognize and assert its boundaries and thus to settle its land.
Judaism is not an abstract ideological system. If it does not know where it is, literally, it cannot know or be who it is. Similarly, its integrity and relationship to the Holy One is impaired. Alienation of the land is a grave sin not mainly in a personal moral sense but in a failure of the wholeness of the people in every facet of their lives and relationships. It is not a tactic, aspect or bargaining chip but a root that pervades Judaism in it entirety.
The coming of the messiah and his era is delayed and torturous because of this ignorance, these failures of will, intellect and heart. But terrible as are the consequences and experience of these shortcomings they are no surprise; they are inevitable and should not be the cause for undue dismay. The exile imposed by Edom has been long and dark and the sparks of the nation of Israel everywhere have been encrusted with thick, nearly opaque layers. The survival of these sparks reflect the supreme courage and faith of the Jewish people and the Creator’s unshakeable love for them. Despite every variety of assault and seduction, they have survived while the klippot of Hellenism spread and enforced by Rome are breaking up. We see this in the decay of the west for centuries from popular to high culture, to corruption of its dominant, Jewish-informed law and morality to the suicidal squandering of its military might, to the giddy treachery of its elites.
The breaking husk of Hellenism-Edom is part and parcel of the liberation of the light of Judaism and the nation of Israel. Its increasing restoration is restoring the light of the creation and the Creator into the world. In this transitional period, the birth pangs of messiah, we have convulsions, confusion, distress and bewildering terrors. The disintegration in bungling, waste, fraud and delusion of labor Zionism is part of this process of decaying husks. The light that was in it will go forth with the settlers on whom it warred.
Israeli Hellenism is epitomized in Ehud Olmert’s goal that Israel “be a normal country that is fun to live in.” In this the overseer of collapse adopts the post-Zionism (anti-Judaism) of writer A.B. Yehoshua whose book, In Praise of Normalcy was another of the last bursts of the husk of Hellenism, a collapsed star now exploding into a cold red giant, dead and deadly… lashing out as it goes down.
There were many confusions and failures of preparation, of intent and of spirit in the recent response by Israel to the attack on it by Iran – Hezbollah. To list only a few: for six years the intelligence and military services watched while Hezbollah built fortifications and imported armaments into the areas south of the Litani. Deputy Chief of Staff Ya’akov Amidror admitted this in a July briefing: as a result of “political arrangements with the international community it was that decided Israel would be hit first.” This was a startling confession of long-term betrayal of the nation in service to foreign powers.
The self-hating, suicidal propaganda of post-Zionism and their ashen-fruit, “Oslo” has produced a generation of Generals conditioned to fear victory, to fear advancing across and conquering land and to detach themselves from the sources of Israel’s strength, the Land itself and its settlement. This perversion stems from the same source that drives the ruling cadres to demonize and grind down the settlers. The army, immobilized in many ways embodied this paralysis of Judaism.
It is thus no wonder that this regime, including the entire Foreign Ministry and Court system had stopped production of Israel’s battle tanks, the armaments that enable land to be taken and held. Having internalized and promoted the idea that Israel “illegally occupies” land it was logical that post-Zionists would undermine tank forces and infantry activities and try to fight a “surgical-precision,’ highly limited air war. Alien ideologies have made them land-phobic. For them, Israel is becoming a virtual state; Judaism, a way of life based on embracing the land is becoming a high tech virtual reality, de-contextualized, cut off from its roots; retreating ever further from identifying or returning to its borders as its Scriptures promises.
This was epitomized by Olmert’s arrogant declaration in the midst of the rocket barrages that the “success” of the war would facilitate expulsion of more thousands of Jews from their homes, — by the IDF. “It is a generation of perverts and reversals” and duly afflicted by the nations, as the Eternal One stated through Moshe’s last song. The nations dominance of Israel enflames their pride and designs, but they are rushing to ruin for “He will avenge the blood of His servants” (Deuteronomy 32:40-3). Bristling, expanding in size, the husks are breaking. As they disintegrate into the light, they yet will “sing the praises of his people.”
In Israel the generation of reversals failed to completely and promptly mobilize the reserves; there was the failure to commit decisively and purposefully even that small fraction of the reserves that was mobilized so that they sat in vulnerable groups, waited, and were killed; or they went back and forth with a lack of purpose clear to the simplest soldiers. All the contradictions were there: for a war cannot be won without attacking the aggressor, or by advancing only to quickly retreat. There was failure to apply the military’s plans for an integrated multi-force, deep penetration into the Lebanon to allow strangling the “army of Allah” and methodical rooting out, with massive air strikes and overwhelming ground force its entrenched positions.
There was the strategic failure to eradicate the regime and forces of the artificial state of Syria, patron of Hizbollah and junior partner of Iran, head of the assault. There was the greater failure, ongoing for years, to use elite units to begin neutralizing Iran’s long-range missile and nuclear capabilities wherever their assets are located.
But the worst failures are the meta-strategic ones, more properly called failures of national identity, knowledge and drill or study (telem, root of Talmud). The furrow Israel has failed to identify and plow is its land, and not only in Judea and Samaria. The drill that Israel has failed to know and do is failure to identify and embrace the land including the laws of milchemet mitzvah. When and if, and only when and if this is done will Israel be able to fight with the full blessing and protection of Hashem. Specifically, only then will Israel be able to distinguish between mandatory and other wars and to fight each accordingly.
The Tanach specifies repeatedly that the Lebanon is part of the Promised Land. So is the entire “approach to Hamath to the Euphrates River.” Tanach specifies that Canaanites lived in these regions, for example, greater Sidon, and archaeologists have found Canaanite ruins north of Beirut. (Torah calls Sidon “the first born of Canaan,” Genesis 10:15). The topography of the Land, “the foundations of the earth” further emphasize the area of Israel’s inheritance.
Any fighting necessary within this inheritance for the Jewish people to be fully sovereign and secure in it, to expel hostile aliens is a Milchemet Mitzvah, a mandatory war. In such a war, “unlike one with cities that are very distant from you,” no terms are to be offered to the enemy. The more Israel forgets this, the more the nations inadvertently seek to remind them with fantastically unjust claims about “disproportionate response” and the “humanitarian crisis” of the aliens. “From the cities of these peoples that Hashem, your God gives you as an inheritance, you shall not allow any person to live. Rather, you shall utterly destroy them…” (Deut. 20:15-16).
That is how to put an end to the global humanitarian crisis caused by incessant contention about and grabbing for Israel’s land, all of them obscuring Israel’s saving light.
The Rambam (Maimonides, Rav Moshe ben Maimon) specifies that “wars against Amalek” and ones prompted by “troubles that befall the Jewish people” fall in the category of Milchemet Mitzvah. Troubles have surged over Israel since the Roman invasions and the aggression of Islam increased the flood. By describing Jews as “the descendants of apes and pigs” and insisting that Muslims “arise and kill every Jew” it is plain that Islam has incorporated the nature of Amalek. In Scriptures, Amalek is a descendant (a grandson) of Esau he is Edom, who took mostly Canaanite wives (26:34-5, 28:8-9, 36:1-14) that were a “bitterness of spirit” to his righteous parents. He also took wives from Ishmael, descended partly from Egypt (Mitzrayim); Egypt and Canaan were brothers and their offspring cousins. Esau and Ishmael combine through Amalek as is clear in the genealogy of Haman of Persia. Just as the murderous hostility toward Jews of these peoples is clear today, Scriptures specifies that their hostile presence and assaults require mandatory war. Israel must “utterly destroy them” to live and inherit its Promise and unfold its radiance and streams of sanctification to the world.
Proof of this hard fact piles higher every day…
The same is demonstrably true of the Arabs that have been dubbed “Palestinians” these past forty years, — the years since the leaders of Israel spurned its birthright.* With every year that passes without Israel fulfilling this mitzvah of life, the “Palestinians” become more blatantly genocidal in their intentions toward Israel: from their schoolbooks (paid for by Esau-Edom) to their street riots, terrorists-militias and politicians they proclaim their alliance with the states and peoples whose avowed purpose is to annihilate Israel. And in so far as they are Muslims, as noted above, they partake the essence of Amalek and it is required that Israel blot them out without exception. Otherwise the land is abandoned and filled with Hamas and if the Scripture and other experience have not made a believer of you, than the existential situation surely must.
Rambam further stipulates that any people “who come to wage war against Israel…to steal land from them or to force a decree upon them” are considered like Amalek and the prompt for Milchemet mitzvah. The British betrayals of the Mandate, their incitement and arming of the Arabs, their shutting of Jews into Hitler’s ‘Fortress Europe,’ the “peace processes” and UN “peacekeepers” to this very day show that Milchemet Mitzvah and the knowledge of its life-saving purpose is being forced repeatedly upon Israel that will not survive without it. Hashem will continue to bring the Big Picture closer and closer until Israel and its leaders read the writing on the wall, — and in the Book.
All the talk about “disproportionate response” and Israeli strikes on “innocent civilian targets,” as maliciously dishonest and hypocritical as it was actually sub served Hashem’s attempts to awaken Israel to its solitary position, obligations and true boundaries. The more it pretends, or even worse, believes that most of its enemies are “innocent civilians” and that the lands to the north and east are “other states” the more the nations despise, condemn and press in upon it. All the peoples in “the Lebanon” and northwestern “Syria” that do not fully accept Israeli sovereignty there are equivalent to Iran-Hizbollah, hostile aliens that “that come to wage war against Israel and to steal its land” as they themselves proclaim. Any delay in fighting them, according to Rambam, is considered as part of the bloodshed that their invasion (Plisha) and trespassing (Palash). They functionally and in fact are descendants of Canaan and Mitzrayim, Philistines, enemies and invaders of the nation and land of Israel.
“Any delay in fighting them is part of the bloodshed” their invasion and trespass entails. Thus the government’s and leadership’s failures all are related: operational, motivational, strategic, spiritual – all are matters of ignorance and denial of Israel’s obligations for life.
We see in the multi-layered disasters of the Iran-Hezbollah war in “the Lebanon” the Hellenizing of the Israeli elites and, tragically, of many of the people’s thinking too, of the categories of ‘ideas’ or slogans in which their minds and vocabularies are enchained. Specifically, we may observe the displacement of the Jewish concept of telem, to make a furrow, to drill, to go straight, to learn and to study, a Jewish word-concept that integrates the land, behavior, and Torah by the Greek word-concept, thelemos, “will.”
Like so many Greek borrowings from Hebrew, the fundamental understanding has been deformed with the de-contextualization; the light encased within the stone of the husk. “Will” in western civilization has a strong erotic and coercive-intellectual denotation. In the famed novels of 16th century humanist, Francois Rabelais, the “Abbey of Theleme” was a place for the elite who lived under the motto, “fait ce que vous voudrais” (“do as you will”; “take your pleasure” one might say in simpler American English). In the Germanic philosophies of the 19th century (Schopenhauer and Hegel, particularly) “Will” acquired an impersonal, superhuman and pitiless force suited to a theory of “survival of the fittest” and the concept of the “Superman” or super race. In the New Age cults and philosophies that grew up with them, the term “Telemma” (as for example in the works and life of Alistair Crowley) fused the exaltation of an impersonal evolutionary power with a polymorphous sexual aspect that privileged unnatural behaviors and idealized the pagan theologies and practices of ancient Babylon, Egypt and Greece. All of these Hellenist distortions shared an intense and essential hostility to Judaism and the Jews. All are intrinsic to the war of Esau-Edom and his offspring Amalek upon Israel to this day.
The task becomes more difficult, the pangs more intense and painful because as the husk disintegrates it refracts and seems imbued with the light it buried and still would hoard.
For Israel to live it need recognize itself, look into the great text whose words are in its mouth and know its land, rejoicing like a bridegroom over his bride. Then the enemy and the nature of the battle will become clear; so too, the path to victory, integrity and peace, an era of joy for seven thousand years, “like a bridegroom rejoicing over his bride [for a week] so will Hashem your God rejoice over you” (Sanhedrin 99a on Isaiah 62:5). Friend and family will no longer be confused with the enemy and Israel will dwell secure, no abductions, no terror, no stealing, within its true borders, whole and intact; each person’s life “fulfilled of days, mature and content” (Genesis 25:8; 35:28-9), each wife like a fruitful vine and with children’s children like olive shoots surrounding their table…
Jews are fully capable of fighting and winning, they are destined to conquer in this Milchemet Mitzvah, to inherit this glorious promise and reflect its joys to the world; they must first recognize what that means, where and who they are: “sons of the Most High,” and “Yeshurun [“the upright”], My chosen one,” the measure and inheritance of the Creator. As the husks disintegrate, this light will increasingly enlighten and illumine. Only be strong and of good courage; keep faith and endure.
*See Rabbi Eliezer’s comments (Sanhedrin 99a) on Deuteronomy 8:3 and tehillim 90:15. “Gladden us according to the days You afflicted us, the years when we saw harm.”