The Burden of Jewish Morality

A man is attacked in a parking garage at night. He has under a second to read intent, distance, and the possibility of a weapon. His heart rate climbs past 150 and his fine motor skills begin to fail. He acts. Weeks later, people who slept well that night replay the footage in slow motion and ask why he did not choose differently. I have taught self-defense for decades, and most of our moral confusion about war lives in the gap between those two moments, the second of violence and the months of judgment.

Self-defense law understands something public opinion forgets. A person who is attacked is judged by what a reasonable person would have done under those conditions, with that fear, with that information. The attacker, by choosing violence, forced the defender into a world of bad options, and the law refuses to pretend otherwise. The question is never whether the defender’s choice was perfect. The question is whether it was reasonable inside a situation he did not create.

I teach my students that self-defense in NYC is not recreational or seeking a fight. The goal is to go home safely, to yourself and to the people who depend on you. You do not choose every fight. Sometimes the fight chooses you, and the only question left is how you respond.

On October 7, the fight chose Israel. Whatever anyone thinks about Israeli policy before that morning, the families in Be’eri and Kfar Aza woke up inside a situation they did not create. A nation in that position deserves the same standard of judgment the law gives an individual: reasonableness under the conditions of the attack, with the information available at the time.

To understand why this question is particularly painful for Israel, one must first understand the burden of Jewish morality.

Judaism built a civilization around a radical idea: human life has infinite value. We are commanded to pursue justice, care for the stranger, protect the vulnerable, and remember that every person is created in the image of God.

For thousands of years, Jewish morality did not measure greatness by the ability to conquer. It measured greatness by the ability to hold power without losing compassion, to possess strength without worshiping it, and to carry the responsibility of violence without becoming comfortable with it.

The Jewish warrior was never meant to love war. The highest Jewish aspiration has always been peace. The purpose of strength was to protect life, not to glorify the taking of it.

That is precisely why the moral challenge of war is so painful. The very values that make a society humane can become the values an enemy seeks to exploit.

When Jacob prepared to meet Esau and four hundred men, the text says he was afraid and distressed. Rashi, drawing on the Midrash, explains the doubling: afraid that he might be killed, distressed that he might be forced to kill. That is the Jewish posture toward violence compressed into one verse. Even justified killing leaves a mark on the one who must do it, and our tradition wants it to.

The enemy Israel faces in Gaza studied that posture and built a strategy on top of it. Hamas places command infrastructure beneath hospitals and apartment blocks, fires from school courtyards, and stores weapons in mosques because it understands that Israeli restraint is a resource it can spend. Every Palestinian civilian death serves its strategy twice: once as a shield during the fight and once as an indictment after it.

When one side treats its own population as ammunition, the moral mathematics of war breaks down. The army working hardest to avoid killing civilians can end up carrying the blame for deaths an enemy engineered, while the side that engineered them collects sympathy it converted from corpses.

The paradox is brutal and simple. The more moral one side is, the more an immoral enemy can weaponize that morality. Warnings before strikes become evacuation time for armed terrorists. Roof knocks become rehearsals. Hesitation becomes footage. A military that values life finds its own values turned into terrain the enemy maneuvers through.

Jewish tradition saw this problem long before modern warfare, and it left us a story that still draws blood.

King Saul was commanded to destroy Amalek, the nation that attacked Israel’s weakest stragglers in the desert. The text is harsh, and we should not soften it. Saul wins the war, then spares Agag the king and the best of the livestock, explaining to the prophet Samuel that the animals were kept for sacrifice. Samuel’s answer became one of the most quoted lines in the Bible: To obey is better than sacrifice. Saul loses the kingdom over this failure, and Samuel executes Agag himself.

What exactly did Saul fail at?

The sages refused to read this as a story about insufficient brutality. The Talmud describes Saul reasoning against the command, asking what the children had done to deserve death, and a heavenly voice answering with the verse from Ecclesiastes: “Do not be overly righteous.” The same passage later turns to the end of Saul’s life, when he ordered the massacre of Nov, an entire city of priests, over a suspicion of treason, and the voice then says: “Do not be overly wicked.”

The Midrash draws the conclusion that has unsettled Jewish readers for centuries: “Whoever is merciful to the cruel will ultimately be cruel to the merciful.”

Read carefully; this is a study in misdirected moral energy. Saul’s mercy was selective. He had warned the Kenites to leave before the battle, so he knew how to distinguish populations. Yet he spared a king and prime livestock, the visible and the valuable, while disregarding the actual weight of his obligation. The compassion he spent in the wrong place later curdled into cruelty against innocents of his own people. Misplaced mercy did not stay mercy. It migrated.

I want to be precise here because this story has been abused, including recently and at the highest levels. No modern enemy is Amalek. The lesson of this story is not a license to dehumanize a people. It is a warning about the moral complexity of showing mercy to those who remain committed to your destruction.

Maimonides ruled that even Amalek had to be offered peace before war, a ruling that dismantles every simplistic reading of the command. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, citing his father, understood Amalek as a category of conduct, a description of behavior that can never attach to a population as such. Whoever uses the word as a target list has abandoned the tradition he claims to defend.

What the story does preserve is a question modern ethics prefers to avoid. Compassion is not automatically moral. Directed toward an enemy who remains committed to your destruction, it can become a transfer of risk from his people to yours.

A ceasefire that allows a terror army to rearm may be experienced as mercy in a newsroom and as a future funeral in a border town. The leader who declines decisive action to keep his hands clean has not removed violence from the equation. He has scheduled it for later and assigned it to someone else’s children.

Critics will say a state is nothing like a man in a parking garage. A state has intelligence agencies, lawyers, satellites, and time to plan. The criticism is partially correct, and the correct part matters.

Institutions raise the standard. A nation must investigate its failures, prosecute its criminals, and hold commanders to rules no frightened individual could follow.

The argument is about which standard applies. The law of armed conflict already contains the honest answer: a commander is judged by the information reasonably available at the moment of decision under the conditions of combat. Judging him instead by complete knowledge discovered a year later, sitting in a quiet room after the smoke has cleared and the tunnels have been mapped, replaces moral seriousness with theater.

A strike cell watching a screen at three in the morning with degraded intelligence and minutes to decide is closer to the man in the parking garage than many critics are willing to admit.

None of this licenses cruelty. Jewish law forbids intentionally targeting civilians. We spill wine at the Seder because even our enemies’ suffering diminishes our joy. An Israel that crossed those lines would lose something no military victory could restore.

Israelis who cross those lines must answer to Israeli courts, loudly and publicly, because accountability is part of the defense.

Refusing cruelty is an obligation. Refusing decisive action is a choice. The two keep being confused, and that confusion costs lives.

I have stood close enough to violence to know that nobody walks away from it clean, even when they are right. The man who defends his family at night does not celebrate afterward. He shakes. He replays those seconds for months.

A moral nation at war carries the same weight, and it should, because carrying that weight is proof that the morality survived.

What no person and no nation is obligated to carry is the expectation of being destroyed politely.

Jacob was afraid he would be killed and distressed that he might kill. Then he divided his camp, sent gifts, prayed, and prepared for war, all in the same night.

The fear and the readiness lived in the same man.

Our tradition never asked us to choose between them.

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Tsahi Shemesh