Peace, Justice and Jews

Have been giving close attention to your marvelous book. Would that it became a handbook, stirring hearts to a passion for justice...

Father Daniel Berrigan,
A Roman Catholic priest and a leading peace activist of the past half-century.

If you have been wondering what your sunday school teacher or your rabbi refused to tell you about Jewish critiques of Israeli policy or US policy, about failures to seek peace & pursue it or to seek just goals by just means, this book will open a locked closet filled with unexpected light.

Rabbi Arthur Waskow,
American author, political activist, and rabbi associated with the Jewish Renewal movement.

Introduction to the Book by the Editors: Murray Polner and Stefan Merken

Peace, Justice, and Jews: Reclaiming Our Tradition is our response to a world that in recent years seems to have grown ever more dangerous and irrational and our response to those of our fellow Jews who believe they can ignore others’ legitimate grievances, as well as the limits of power, and that might makes right. This book also rejects: 1) a mass media that has, sadly, become increasingly irrelevant to citizenship, 2) governments that manipulate and propagandize, and 3) the American neoconservative mentality that has encouraged governing elites in the United States and Israel to rely on preemptive war as their best defense. “War does not bring Peace,” a sign at an Israeli peace rally once poignantly reminded us. It never has. Peace, Justice, and Jews is our way of saying that all people, Jews and non-Jews alike, would benefit from a commitment to and respect for human rights and justice, in a world in which we do not do to others that which we would not have done to ourselves.

We Jews have a peace tradition. Biblical and rabbinical Judaism permitted self-defense, but as Jewish law evolved, acts of retribution, revenge, and violence were hedged with all sorts of restrictions. Thus, we deliberately emphasize peace because we believe it reflects the most basic attitude in our Jewish heritage. Peace has been the idea, the messianic dream, which we have hoped and prayed for, and the goal for our future generations. Religious and secular Jews have historically always been prominent among the skeptics, reformers, and rebels fighting despotism and tyranny. This derives from the purest and highest in our morality: the belief in Shalom, which encompasses much more than the absence of war. Shalom is best defined as wholeness, grace, and truth: ethical values which when married to the concept of justice define what being a Jew—or anyone—can and should be, not merely in opposition to war makers, but equally to the way we treat the most vulnerable among us: animals, prisoners, conquered people, military conscripts, and all victims of cruelty, indifference, and violence.

Our contributors are not all pacifists, nor do they all agree with one another. Some have served in the military. Some like Rabbi Albert S. Axelrad remain “pacifoids,” those who would reluctantly accept warfare should Israel’s existence be genuinely threatened. One, Scott Kennedy, is not Jewish, yet he, like the others in this volume, shares a common faith best described as the acceptance and recognition that moral ends (many hardly moral) cannot justify immoral means, and that violence can never—indeed has never—brought lasting peace, nor injustice given birth to a fairer, more just society. All of the contributors, we believe, would respond favorably to Rabbi Leo Baeck—the former Berlin rabbi and courageous defender of his fellow German Jews facing Nazi persecution—who told his fellow inmates in Theresienstadt in 1944, one the worst years in that dark and murderous era, that our prophets “turned against the sort of politics that creates its own moral code, they objected to any justification of right by victory.” In that improbable and ominous setting where he and his fellow internees were alone and abandoned by the world, Baeck defined the guiding principle of Jewish life: “True history is the history of the spirit, the human spirit, which may at times seem powerless, but ultimately is yet superior and survives because even if it has not got the might, it still possesses the power, the power that can never cease.”

Our book is an alternative forum celebrating the fact that we Jews “are defined by neither doctrine nor credo,” as Henry Schwarzschild, a refugee from Nazi Germany and later a prominent civil rights and antiwar activist and longtime opponent of the death penalty memorably reminded us. “We are defined by task. That task is to redeem the world through justice.” And, we might add, by ethical behavior growing out of our Jewish tradition and our historical and cultural experiences. Nor are we Jews “passivists” as the noted feminist and pacifist Naomi Goodman always insisted, but are instead activists dedicated to defending and preserving life as best we can.

None of us has easy answers to highly complex ethnic, economic, religious, or tribal conflicts. We cannot offer simple solutions to historic hatreds and resentments; but neither can the hawks and neoconservatives in the United States or elsewhere, who rely on force and the threat of force in our troubled world. If the twentieth century was the bloodiest in recorded history, the twenty-first century threatens to be even worse with nuclear proliferation and with the very profitable manufacture and sale of incredibly destructive conventional weapons continuing unabated.

Beginning with the savagery of World War I, where millions died in defense of failing empires, to the 60 million dead in World War II and the Holocaust; from Vietnam and Iraq to all the wars by and against Israel; to the continuing carnage in Asia, Africa, the Balkans, and Latin America—the butchery goes on, leaving shattered populations and ruination in its wake, while in most instances war crimes go unpunished, and the guilty are rarely held accountable. When bloody conflicts finally end, the hope is that violent means can be discarded and ethical behavior can return once more. But it never works that way, as an astute Edward Feder once wrote: “The goal is flawed; one war follows another. A problem solved by war is not a problem solved, and the dustbins of history are full of causes and ideologies turned sour, because the means used to achieve them were evil.”

We offer in this collection an “alternative vision,” as Rabbi Sheila Peltz Weinberg puts it in her essay “Judaism, Feminism, and Peace in the Nuclear Age.” We are impractical visionaries and dreamers, we are told by friends and critics alike, who fail to understand how the “real world” works. There are always “enemies” out there, we are regularly reminded, today more than ever. Thus, torture and perpetual conflict are accepted by far too many frightened citizens. Our way, however, reflects the Avot’s powerful imagery: “The day is short, the task is great…. It is not your duty to complete the task, but you are not free to desist from it…”

In that “real world,” opponents, whoever they may be, are demonized as creatures of unmitigated evil with no moral qualities. “Worst case” scenarios are disseminated endlessly and widely to convince people that an enemy is always coiled to strike. It is not difficult to scare people who have been indoctrinated from an early age in schools and in a popular culture that mythologizes past wars and crusades. It is hardly surprising, then, that families ---willingly send their loved ones off to battle their latest “enemies.”

Above all, our contributors give evidence of the enormous variety of Jewish experience in the United States. From shtiebl to suburban temple to secularists, from the left, center, and right, we are a diverse people with no locus of infallible authority. Our writers are unafraid to take sides, even in the face of majority—often disapproving—opinion. This is evident in our chapter on the Middle East and Israel, which calls to mind a major—if, sadly, largely forgotten—figure of the Jewish past: Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginzberg) whose prescient essay “This Is Not The Way” warned that a future Jewish nation would not succeed if it emulated colonialistic thinking. “The main point, upon which everything depends, is not how much we do but how we do it,” he wrote in The Truth From Palestine, after he arrived home in Odessa from Palestine in 1891. He also cautioned the Jewish settlers in Palestine to consider the rights of Arabs living there. “We think,” he wrote, “that the Arabs are all savages who live like animals and do not understand what is happening around. This is, however, a great error.”

Throughout modern history there have always been peaceful and more enlightened policies available to our leaders. Certainly we know very well why wars begin and how hard they are to stop once underway—when propaganda and uncritical patriotism drown out criticism and stigmatize dissenters as unpatriotic, traitors, and supporters of terrorism. We know the roles that greed, massive expenditures on munitions, imperial hubris, diplomatic myopia, and incompetence, hypocrisy, lies, and ideological and religious fanaticism play. That we know and recognize all of these things is one thing; that relatively few of the world’s powerful elites care enough about peaceful alternatives and “alternative voices” is quite another.