Two ways – Nitzavim
Moses’ farewell message builds up to a dramatic climax: “I call heaven and earth to witness against you this day that I set before you life and death, blessing and curse: therefore choose life!”
But surely a leader who loves his people wants only one thing for them – life and blessing. How can Moses even contemplate the possibility that they would choose death? Would anyone in their right mind prefer death?
Yet life is stranger than fiction. The tragic fact is that, right down the ages, there have been people who chose death and destruction. Usually it was the death and destruction of others. For themselves, whatever they unleashed on other people, the choice was to live, prosper, and boast of their wickedness.
But the horrendous bus bombings in Israel have shown that for some it is somehow noble to be like Samson and willingly choose death for themselves in the midst of wreaking carnage upon others, innocent men, women and children doing the ordinary things of life which ought to be safe, uneventful and routine parts of a person’s day.
That Judaism condemns murder is beyond question. People have to be free to live their lives without threat or attack.
A Shavu’ot poem points out that on the two tablets of the Decalogue, the first commandment faces the sixth, the second faces the seventh, and so on. As there is a vertical link binding each group of dib’rot, so there is a horizontal link. The commandment about the existence of God faces the law that says, “Do not murder”. For he who murders not only destroys a human life; he also diminishes God, in whose image each of us is created.
Every system of morality has a prohibition of murder. For Judaism, but apparently not for those who spawn suicide bombers, suicide is also against the will of God. True, there is a debate about whether Judaism agrees with the Christian dictum, “Greater love has no man than this, that a person lay down his life for his fellow”. But self-sacrifice for the sake of others is in Judaism middat chassidut, extra piety, at most, but it is not the rule.
However, it is not self-sacrifice to save others that apparently motivated the perpetrators of the Israeli bus murders. They did not choose death so that others could live. Death for themselves was their way of destroying others and the peace process too. If that is supposed to be morality, we, the trailblazers of morality, shudder at the thought.
Clearly, the peace process has a long way to go. Rabin is right not to be derailed by those who kill innocent people in order to abort the passage to peace. But Jewish morality says a leader’s role is to protect his people. Israelis, like Jews everywhere, now insist on a say in the time-table of peace.
After all, even God’s time-table comes under constant questioning in the Bible; we do not question the Almighty’s right to run His world, but because we are involved we seek a say in whether He should work faster or more slowly. Can we ask any less of Rabin than that he make haste more slowly and ensure it is safe to venture ahead to the next step?
