In this week’s parashah, God tells Moshe to make his last act of his life revenge on Midian[1]. Unlike after the golden calf, Moshe does not argue, but immediately commences arranging a war, explaining plainly that it is a war of revenge[2].
This could potentially give us pause. Many among us say that revenge is always a bad impulse; some go farther, saying revenge is a violation of halachah, and they have reason to say so. Revenge in our parashah is called נקמה, and earlier, the Torah quite plainly tells us לא תקם[3]. Is God being inconsistent? Does He give us halachah and then command us to violate it?
We could offer an unsatisfying answer by going back to our discussion of Korach and patience. We could argue that the ideals of the Torah are great in an ideal society, but that in the meantime, the Torah also tells us how to live in an imperfect world. We could claim that this also explains why in our parashah, we see the command to kill all the Midianite boys, and all the adult Midianite women—that had Midian conquered us, they would have dealt with us at least as harshly, and that “going easy” on them would only open us to grave danger. We could point to thugs and mafiosi who are safe in bad neighborhoods because everybody around knows what kind of revenge they would inflict.
Indeed, as we well know from dealing collectively with terrorists, kindness to the enemy is criminal weakness; mercy to the cruel is cruelty to the merciful. Our parashah tells us clearly that if if we leave the other tribes on our land, they will become thorns in our eyes[4]; with a majority of the Israeli population ignoring Torah and fighting a futile battle for the approval of bodies of foreign dictators and aristocrats, we have observed this play out, and have seen very well how pacifists indirectly murder their neighbors.
In our parashah, Moshe himself finds this truth extremely difficult. As he commands the soldiers as to which of the captives they must kill, he cannot keep his cool; he gets angry[5], gets distracted, forgets halachah to the point where Elazar must take over for him when explaining it[6]. Moshe may have some personal issues through which to sort here—after all, he himself has been sufficiently drawn to Midian to move there and marry the daughter of one of its leaders, only grudgingly returning because God commands him to do so—but it is likely that much of this reaction has to do with the difficulty of issuing such an order in general.
The question, however, remains; when we are told in Vayikra not to exact revenge, is this simple naïveté that the Torah later rejects? Bil’am—who, too, is killed for revenge in our parashah—after all, tells us that God is not a person, who might change his mind[7].
We believe that the answer lies indeed in what kind of society we are living in, but we reject the notion that the application of these laws must wait for Messianic times. Many laws regarding thieves, for example, apply only to thieves who voluntarily surrender themselves and do their best to bring restitution to their victims because they want to follow the Torah and make things right before God. This seems very strange for readers in our society, where the only people who can imagine a thief exhibiting this behavior are those sufficiently fortunate and sheltered to have never encountered thieves. The thieves most of us see loot stores shamelessly while being filmed. How often could we possibly apply those laws in this society?
Perhaps the real question is: would the people with whom we are dealing respect a beis din, and honor the decision of a beis din? If yes, perhaps precisely then we may not exact revenge; we may only ask them to appear with us before a beis din.
Do we then have two sets of laws, one for within our people, and one for those outside? We are tempted to say that this is where the Noachide laws come in. There are plenty of people in today’s non-Jewish societies who follow—whether consciously or unwittingly—the Noachide laws; around such people, civilized life is possible. There are others, in the very same societies, living among the civilized, who do not respect the same moral code, and around whom civilized life is not possible. Perhaps that is one way to discern whom to treat how.
Our liturgy is full of revenge. In psukei d’zimrah every morning, chasidim hold a double-edged sword לעשות נקמה בגוים[8]—to “do” revenge on the nations. Is that what we generally picture chasidim doing? שפך חמתך אל־הגוים, we say in the Haggadah on Passover—“spill your wrath on the nations.” Is that what we want for our non-Jewish neighbors?
The Haggadah offers an answer fairly simply. It asks God to spill His wrath on the nations that did not know Him, and on the kingdoms that did not call upon His name. When we read lines in our davening that sound very aggressive against those outside of our community—and we read such lines frequently—perhaps the right way to think of them is that they apply to those who do not follow the Noachide laws. One of these laws is to establish courts; and when a society is truly civilized, such courts could create channels for restitution that would make revenge completely inappropriate. But one must beware: the courts of most societies today facilitate many forms of theft and some forms of murder; what they enforce is often completely incompatible with the Noachide laws.
Perhaps the final word then is that when we read lines about vengeance and wrath, we must remember that everything has a time and a place. There are many situations where many different types of actions are appropriate and inappropriate. Our davening, then, should be for the ability to perform all such actions judiciously and thoughtfully, in full control of ourselves, and with clarity about how the Torah’s guidance applies to our circumstances.
[1] Bamidbar 31:2
[2] He changes only one detail: God calls it our revenge, whereas Moshe calls it God’s revenge.
[3] Vayikra 19:18
[4] Bamidbar 33:55
[5] ibid. 31:14
[6] ibid. v. 21
[7] 23:19
[8] Tehillim 149:7
hindy
Michal
intomeaning
Neil Wernick