Jews are allowed to fight back.

There is nothing un-Jewish about defeating those who seek to destroy us.

IDF soldiers in Jerusalem (photo: Toa Heftiba/Unsplash)

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There is something almost jarring about the way this week’s Torah portion begins: “Ki teitzei la’milchama al oyvecha” — when you go out to war against your enemies.

Not if. When.

The Torah does not pretend that human beings can always reason themselves out of conflict. It does not assume that every enemy can be persuaded, every hatred healed through dialogue, or every threat eliminated by enough empathy.

Sometimes there is an enemy. Sometimes there is a war. And sometimes we have to fight it.

That can be an uncomfortable message for modern Jews, particularly those of us who spent much of our lives believing that Jewish history had entered a new era. We were taught, implicitly and sometimes explicitly, that antisemitism was largely a problem of the past.

There would still be occasional incidents, of course — a synagogue vandalized, a conspiracy theory posted online, an antisemitic politician somewhere on the fringes — but the trajectory was supposedly clear. Education would fix it, dialogue would fix it, progress would fix it.

I, for one, can no longer live under that illusion.

The war that was reignited on October 7, 2023, began in Israel, when Palestinian terrorists crossed the border and murdered Israelis in their homes, communities, and at a music festival. But it did not remain in Israel. Almost immediately, something else happened: The war came for Jews across the world. It is not necessarily a war fought with tanks and fighter jets, but it is a war nonetheless.

It is a war over whether Jews have the right to defend ourselves. It is a war over history. It is a war over Zionism, the national liberation movement of an indigenous people. It is a war over whether the rape, kidnapping, murder, and torture of Jews can somehow be explained away when the perpetrators have the correct political vocabulary. It is a war over Jewish dignity. It is a war over truth.

And increasingly, it is a war over whether Jews will be allowed to remain culturally and sociopolitically relevant in parts of the Western world without first renouncing some essential part of ourselves.

As Jews, we can dislike that reality. We can wish it were different. But Ki Teitzei begins with a warning against confusing our wishes with the world as it actually exists.

We are at war. The question is what kind of people we will become while fighting it.

And this is where Ki Teitzei becomes remarkable: It contains 74 of our 613 commandments, more commandments than any other single Torah portion

Think about that — the Torah opens the portion by sending us onto a battlefield and then immediately overwhelms us with rules. There are rules about prisoners; rules about family; rules about property; rules about returning lost objects; rules about protecting people from dangerous roofs; rules about workers; rules about loans; rules about weights and measures; rules governing sexuality, marriage, divorce, inheritance, poverty, punishment, agriculture, animals, and human dignity.

War is followed not by barbarism, but by more law than anywhere else in the Torah. And today’s onlookers should appreciate just how radical that is.

Long before the modern world developed the language of international humanitarian law, the Torah was already insisting that war did not erase moral responsibility. A soldier could not simply do whatever he wanted because he had conquered an enemy. A captive woman was given protections. A dead body could not be left hanging overnight as a spectacle of humiliation. Military camps were required to maintain standards of cleanliness and dignity. A newly married man could be exempted from military service so that he could remain with his wife.

Even outside the battlefield, Ki Teitzei repeatedly limits the power of the strong over the weak: Employers must pay workers on time, creditors cannot storm into a debtor’s home to seize collateral, the poor must be protected, excessive punishment is forbidden, and even an animal working in the field must be allowed to eat.

Judaism did not invent every moral principle humanity has ever known, but it helped introduce something revolutionary into civilization: the idea that power itself must answer to law. Victory does not make everything permissible. Strength does not eliminate obligation. An enemy’s cruelty does not give us permission to abandon our own standards.

That is something Jews should be enormously proud of.

Thousands of years before phrases like “rules of engagement,” “proportionality,” or “laws of armed conflict” entered the modern vocabulary, the Torah was already wrestling with these same fundamental questions. The Torah seems to understand something about war that humanity repeatedly forgets: The moment when morality becomes most difficult is precisely the moment when morality becomes most necessary.

It is easy to be ethical when nothing is at stake. It is easy to preach compassion when your children are safe. It is easy to demand restraint when someone else is absorbing the rockets, burying the dead, entering the tunnels, confronting the terrorists, and making impossible decisions in seconds.

The real test of an ethical system is not how it functions in a classroom. It is how it functions when we are terrified, when we are angry, when someone has murdered our loved ones, when our survival is threatened, when we possess the power to retaliate.

Since October 7th, the IDF has demonstrated such ethics. There could have easily been a genocide in Gaza, but there was not. Israel could have been rendered the Strip uninhabitable, but it did not. There could have easily been a campaign of indiscriminate destruction with no warnings, no evacuation orders, no humanitarian corridors, and no distinction between civilians and combatants, but that is not the policy Israelis choose.

Israel has the means to do terrible things, and yet it does not. That restraint is not weakness. It is the point. Jewish power is supposed to be governed by Jewish values, even when those values make victory slower, harder, more complicated, and more costly. The test of morality is not whether you possess the ability to destroy your enemy. It is whether, while possessing that ability, you still impose limits on yourself.

There is something else remarkable about the structure of this week’s Torah portion: It begins with an enemy, and it ends with an enemy. The final three verses contain one of the Torah’s most famous and unsettling commands: “Remember what Amalek did to you.”

Amalek attacked the Israelites shortly after the Exodus from Egypt, but the Torah emphasizes how Amalek attacked. They did not simply confront Israel’s warriors. They attacked the people trailing behind — the exhausted, the weak, the vulnerable, the stragglers.

Deuteronomy describes Israel as “famished and weary” and remembers Amalek cutting down those at the rear. The Torah therefore commands Israel to remember what Amalek did and concludes with two unforgettable words: “Lo tishkach” (Do not forget).

Why does the Torah care so much about remembering Amalek?

Perhaps because Amalek represents something larger than one ancient tribe. Amalek represents a particular kind of evil: the courage of the coward, the person who attacks precisely because someone else is vulnerable, the predator who chooses the elderly instead of the soldier, the terrorist who chooses a family instead of an army, the mob that chooses the isolated Jew, the bully who discovers that there is safety in numbers, the person who would never confront a Jew face-to-face but becomes extraordinarily courageous via the internet.

We see that spirit everywhere. We see Jews surrounded and harassed. We see Jewish students intimidated. We see synagogues threatened. We see Jewish businesses vandalized. We see Israelis thousands of miles from any battlefield treated as legitimate targets because of where they were born. And we see something especially ugly online: people who have discovered that Jews can once again be publicly humiliated, threatened, lied about, and dehumanized while receiving applause for doing so.

That is the moral instinct of Amalek.

There are people who interpret Jewish ethics as endless vulnerability: turn the other cheek, empathize with your enemy, absorb another attack, try harder to explain yourself. Maybe they will hate us less tomorrow.

That is not Judaism.

The same Torah that commands us to care for the vulnerable commands us to remember those who prey upon them. The same Torah that places restrictions upon Jewish power commands Jews to possess power. The same Torah that teaches compassion tells us that some enemies must be confronted.

That is the cognitive dissonance at the heart of Ki Teitzei — fight and remain human, defend yourself and maintain boundaries, destroy evil and do not allow evil to remake you in its image. Remember Amalek and remember the other 73 commandments too.

This may be the great Jewish challenge of our generation. We cannot hope antisemitism away anymore. We cannot explain ourselves out of every hatred. We cannot pretend that every movement seeking our destruction has simply misunderstood us. We cannot build our future around the fantasy that if Jews become sufficiently agreeable, quiet, politically convenient, or ashamed of ourselves, eventually everyone will leave us alone.

When you go out to war, sometimes you have to go — strong enough to fight, moral enough to know how, wise enough to recognize evil, disciplined enough not to become it, and courageous enough to remember.

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