Israel’s wars reignite Judaism’s oldest argument.

A struggle for thousands of years between sanctity and survival still shapes how Jews fight, doubt, and define our power.

IDF soldiers at an official ceremony (photo: IDF/X)

Please consider supporting our mission to help everyone better understand and become smarter about the Jewish world. A gift of any amount helps keep our platform free of advertising and accessible to all.

---

This is a guest essay by Nachum Kaplan, who writes the newsletter, “Moral Clarity.”

You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, and Spotify.

---

Disagreement among Jews about when the war against Hamas in Gaza should have ended has been a fascinating study in Jewish ethics and conscience. Some felt it should have ended a year ago, especially given the international pressure Israel was under, while others (like me) thought it should continue until Hamas has been destroyed.

No power is more morally self-conscious than Jewish power, and no conscience is more historically burdened than the Jewish one. For 3,000 years, Jewish history has been a tension between the sword and the scroll; between the need and will to fight and survive and the obligation to remain good while doing so.

From King David’s battlefield to the Israel Defense Forces’ code of ethics, the Jewish dilemma has been how do a people chosen for holiness survive in a world built on violence? How does the nation that invented moral law wield power without betraying it?

The story of Jewish sovereignty, ancient and modern, is this long civilizational struggle between sanctity and survival.

The first Jewish king was also the first Jewish warrior. David united the Hebrew tribes, expanded territory and defended his fragile kingdom against annihilation. He led the Jews to victory, but his hands were bloodstained — so much so that when he sought to build the Temple, God forbade it: “You have shed much blood upon the earth in My sight.”

In that refusal lies the paradox that defines Jewish history. Power is necessary for survival, yet somehow morally disqualifying. The Jew could not live without the sword yet was never meant to be ruled by it.

Judaism was the first civilization to moralize power, to insist that force without righteousness is idolatry. Israel’s kings were not gods, but servants bound by law. In the ancient world, this idea was as revolutionary as it was intolerable. While other empires glorified conquest, the Jews glorified conscience. Their prophets rebuked their kings. Their victories were written more in lament than in triumph.

The Jewish political imagination was always ambivalent about power, simultaneously commanded to defend life and warned against worshipping the means of doing so.

When the Second Temple fell in 70 CE at Rome’s hand and the Jews were scattered, the sword was taken from their hands. For two millennia, Jewish life survived in submission. The rabbis turned powerlessness into virtue. The absence of sovereignty became proof of moral superiority — and, paradoxically, of divine favor. Thinking really cannot get more annoyingly rabbinical than that.

The ghetto replaced the battlefield; prayer replaced politics. Jewish ethics turned inward with survival through faith and endurance through restraint. Powerlessness became sanctified because it was imposed and unavoidable. Living without armies or borders was interpreted as a moral calling, not a curse. It preserved dignity in the face of humiliation, but it also created a reflexive suspicion of power, even one’s own.

This reflex survived exile and migrated into Jewish psychology. It became the collective nervous system of a people allergic to domination, including from their own, which helps explain why the debate in Israel about judicial reform has become so heated.

When modern Zionism emerged, it was a heresy in the sense that it reversed two millennia of Jewish moral grammar. It declared that holiness was not in suffering but in rebuilding, and that piety without sovereignty was death disguised as humility.

The early Zionists were moral insurgents as much as political ones. They demanded that Jews take responsibility for their fate again and become historical actors, not eternal victims. Yet with that reclamation came the ancient anxiety of how to hold a weapon without becoming Pharaoh.

The State of Israel’s founders knew the dangers. Its first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, said: “We do not want to become a Sparta.” It is this reference that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was building on in a recent speech when suggesting Israel become a regional “super-Sparta.” It also explains the depth of the political feeling and backlash against Netanyahu.

The Jewish state’s founders created an army that would fight existential wars while remaining bound to ethical codes more stringent than any other army imposes on itself. The IDF was built to win wars decisively and to remain human while doing so. From its inception, the IDFs carried the Hebrew Bible’s moral DNA. The IDF’s code, “The Spirit of the IDF,” reads like a modern psalm: “The soldier shall maintain his humanity, even in combat.” It is an extraordinary demand. No army fighting for its survival should have to apologize for existing, yet Israel’s army does so daily.

The IDF operates under a doctrine known as Tohar HaNeshek (“the purity of arms”). It insists that force be used proportionately, defensively, and morally restrained. Soldiers are taught that power’s moral burden is as real as its necessity. In practice, this means self-limitation that borders on madness: phone calls and text messages to people inside a building before airstrikes on it, leaflets to warn civilians, restraint under fire. It means Israeli soldiers risking their lives to spare enemy noncombatants.

It is not by accident that in Gaza the IDF has achieved what is generally believed to be the lowest civilian-to-combatant ratio in urban warfare’s long history. It is why foreign military observers have been lining up to learn how the IDF achieved this. It is also why allegations that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza are patent nonsense.

To the cynic or arch realist, this is weakness. To Jewish conscience, it is identity. The Jewish soldier fights for Israel’s soul as well as its borders. Yet the world does not see it that way.

Much of the West remains inherently suspicious of Jewish power, seeing it as an inversion of history’s moral order. Armed, assertive, unapologetic Jews disturb the Western mind and conscience. Thus, every time Israel defends itself, it is accused of excess. Every time it exercises restraint, it is disbelieved. The same world that condemned Jewish passivity in Europe now condemns Jewish agency in Gaza.

But Israel’s critics are not really judging its tactics; Jewish power itself is the offense. What the West cannot comprehend is that Jewish power is not a departure from Jewish morality, but its continuation by other means. The Torah does not romanticize weakness; it demands justice and recognizes the necessity of defense — “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor.” That commandment is as binding in Tel Aviv as it was in Sinai.

Jewish ethics has always known the moral tension between survival and sanctity, which is why Jewish soldiers are taught to wrestle, not just to fight. In every war, Israel reenacts that ancient struggle between the prophet and the king, between the moral absolutist and the realist.

David fought to live; Nathan reminded him to live justly. Both were right. The tragedy of Jewish history is not that Jews lacked power, but that they feared what power might do to them. Israel’s founding of Israel broke that fear, but it did not soothe the anxiety. No other nation debates its morality in real time while under rocket fire, or carries philosophers in its chain of command, or mourns its enemies on national television. This is not moral weakness; it is moral singularity.

Yet the danger is real. In a world that demands purity from Jews and nothing from anyone else, conscience can become self-destruction. Israel’s moral survival depends on remembering that conscience is not guilt, but guidance.

King David’s story is the parable of Jewish power in every age. He was a warrior-poet who built a kingdom, sinned, repented, and wrote the Psalms. He embodied the eternal dialectic between the sword and the lyre — between justice and mercy, vengeance and grace. He was both hero and a warning that Jewish power is blessed only when it remembers who gave it, and cursed when it forgets.

The secular West has no answer. It no longer believes in holiness, only in legality (and it cannot define that meaningfully). It has turned international law into a weapon to wield against Israel. Legality without sanctity produces cynicism and Israel, like Judaism itself, was not built to be cynical, but life-affirming.

For Jews, power is not a license; it is part of the covenant. It is permission bound by purpose and sovereignty tethered to self-restraint. It is the paradox of a people commanded to be both a light unto nations and a shield unto itself.

Every generation of Jewish power rehashes the same argument between those who say morality weakens them and those who say it defines them. It is this argument that keeps Jewish power from decaying into brutality or dissolving into paralysis. Jewish conscience is not an obstacle to victory; it is the reason victory matters.

The IDF’s restraint, its constant self-scrutiny, its insistence on ethical codes even when its enemies exploit them — these are not PR strategies, as is clear from the headlines. They are theological statements. They declare that Jewish sovereignty is not just survival, but civilization continued in uncivilized times and circumstance.

---