April 2, 2004

Fighting for Life

Protecting the lives of Jews everywhere was all that mattered after the Holocaust. In speech after speech, the early founders of Israel swore that no Jews would be left alone again. Israel would be there to protect them. And Israel never broke that promise. In 1976, it stretched its long arm into black Africa, to Uganda at its Entebbe airport, where it rescued over a hundred people taken hostage by German and Arab terrorists. Israel became the shield for Jews all over the world, and most especially within its own borders.

Sheik Yassin, the founder and ruler of Hamas, deserved a punishment worse than death. He was bereft of compassion and justice. Hundreds died by his order. But will Yassin's assassination decrease the number of Jewish victims of Hamas terror, or increase them, heaven forbid?

Abdul Nasser, Egypt’s late dictator, observed on television the funeral of an Israeli soldier. Parents, family, and friends wept bitterly. Nasser’s comments appeared in the Egyptian press. "A people," Nasser said, "who emote so passionately at the death of one soldier will not survive the wars against them." Nasser was wrong. The opposite is true. Israel won war after war in the course of its relatively short history because it valued the lives of its soldiers. Israel’s commanders and soldiers, believers and nonbelievers, shared a common belief in the primacy of life.

I hope Prime Minister Sharon and Defense Minister Mofaz and other members of the Cabinet who approved the action against Yassin carefully considered the preservation of Jewish lives as the sole motive for killing him. I also hope that every member of the Knesset and every voting Jew in Israel make life the prime motivation behind their military and political decisions. Jewish lives are not expendable, and although Israel has suffered the loss of almost one thousand lives since the intifada began, we must make every effort not to grow accustomed to the murder of our people. A commitment to preserve life is an essential prerequisite to victory in battle.

Long ago the difference between Jew and Arab was defined this way: Jews fight for life and Arabs fight for land. Jews needed a land of their own because Europe and the Middle Eastern countries where Jews had lived for hundreds, even thousands of years persecuted and abused them. After the murder of six million, the lives of Jews could only be entrusted to a Jewish State, and in 1948, we fought for a Jewish State because we were fighting for life. In light of today’s events, we have to reassert that preservation of life is paramount, that every political and military decision should be weighed on it scale. For example, will the indictment of Israel’s prime minister for having allegedly taken a bribe save lives, or cause the loss of additional Jewish lives? Will the indictment strengthen the land of Israel’s defenders, or enable its enemies to demoralize Israel as they gleefully tell the world, “Israel is led by a crook?”

No one is above the law, but in Judaism and Halacha, the principle of saving a life rises above other laws. It is time to reassert the raison d’etre of the Jewish people. Torah values and divinely revealed laws enable Jews to rise above the moral decadence of contemporary society. Decadence is not to be measured by those who display flesh, but by those who make life expendable. Anyone who would put a belt of explosives on the body of a fourteen-year-old mentally handicapped adolescent, or a bomb in the cart of an eleven-year-old, has fallen to the depths of depravity.

It saddens me to note how insensitive most Americans have become to the loss of life. Body bags from Iraq are returned to America on a daily basis with virtually no media coverage. Please, G-d, let this not happen to Israel. Let Jews continue to be different.

Shabbat Shalom