The Jewish Power Blog: ‘Jewish Values’?

In a recent post on “restraint” I offered an interpretation of the story of Joshua and the Gibeonites (Joshua 9). I mentioned in passing that the Gibeonites reappear a couple of centuries later, when they confront King David over King Saul’s massacre (unrecorded, previously, in the Bible) of some of their nation. They demand as revenge the execution of seven of Saul’s sons. David acquiesces.

The Talmud discusses this latter episode in depth (Yebamot 79a); here is what Maimonides learns from this discussion:

Everyone who is arrogant or cruel and displays hatred for others, refusing to be kind, is suspected of being a Gibeonite; for the characteristics of the holy nation of Israel are humility, mercy, and kindness. The text “the Gibeonites were not of Israelite stock,” (2 Sam. 21:2) confirms this, for [in this episode] the Gibeonites refuse compensation, insisting on the execution of Saul’s sons, proving that they are not of Israelite stock, hardening their hearts and refusing [compensation or] reconciliation and showing no mercy to Saul’s sons and no kindness to Israel – despite the kindness with which Israel had treated them [in the days of Joshua]. (Mishneh Torah Issurei Bi’ah 19:17)

The idea that the Jewish nation is characterized by humility, mercy, and kindness was taken for granted (by Jews – not by Shakespeare, Dickens, et al.) for centuries; even Ahad Ha’am, a secular Zionist, believed that these qualities were inherent in “Jewish culture.” And while there have been, in our time, dissenting voices, we still tend, tacitly, to assume its validity. We can divide those dissenting voices into two choruses:

1. a) Those who believe the stereotype but rebel against it; i.e., who see Jewish “humility, mercy, and kindness” as evidence of passivity, weakness, and lack of self-esteem and self-confidence. If only the Jews were not so merciful and humble, their history would be less tear-stained. We can find this idea in the Zionist aspiration to create a “new Jew,” freed of all that exilic self-abnegation.  Why can’t we be more “normal” people, looking out for ourselves and not just for everybody else. “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” In its current iteration, the strident public debate over the abuse of Palestinian detainees amplifies this chorus: why should a soldier who tortures a Palestinian have to face legal charges? In a cruel world, why do we have to be the merciful ones? If it weren’t for all these legal and “humanitarian” strictures “tying our soldiers’ hands,” we could have won the war against the Palestinians a long time ago.
2. b) Those who argue that Jewish “humility, mercy, and kindness” is really just an illusion, an artifact resulting from Jewish powerlessness. The Zionist writer Joseph Haim Brenner (1881-1921) insisted that the Jews were in no way morally superior to anyone else, just as likely to engage in oppression of others; and when they didn’t do so it was not because they were inherently kind, but because they lacked the power to oppress. That is, once the Jews would emerge from political/military powerlessness, they would be free to express their universal human nature as merciless and cruel. To one who claimed that, unlike other nations, the Jews never tortured detainees, Brenner would say that that was because the Jews never had the power to detain anyone – but once they did, they would torture them like everyone else.

The first chorus would have us believe that the “Jewish values” (mercy, kindness, humility) are obsolete and self-destructive, and it’s time to “sober up.” The second insists that those “Jewish values” are simply an illusion – there is no such thing.  Given power, Jews are likely to employ it just as cruelly as anybody else.

There is another voice, one that proclaims that “Jewish values” are not just a function of power/powerlessness, but rather are an expression of a covenant identity: Jewish nationhood must have moral content, or else it will not be sustainable. Here are a couple of modern speakers in that voice:

Philosopher Emanuel Levinas (1906-1995) asks, regarding David’s execution of Saul’s seven sons at the demand of the Gibeonites, “Does one have the right to punish children for the faults of their parents?” And answers:

To punish children for the faults of their parents is less dreadful than to tolerate impunity when the stranger is injured. Let passersby know this: in Israel, princes die a horrible death because strangers were injured by the sovereign. The respect for the stranger and the sanctification of the name of the Eternal are strangely equivalent.  (Nine Talmudic Readings, 1990, p. 27)

And Israeli novelist and secular public intellectual S. Yizhar (Yizhar Smilansky, 1916-2006) wrote in 1988:

To exist, to survive, not to be destroyed, yes, of course, there is no question. But in the struggle to exist, even in the struggle to exist, there are things that are forbidden to the Jew and that a Jew cannot do by the very fact of his being a Jew. For example, to take what is not his. For example, to ignore the tears of the oppressed. For example, to drive out his neighbors. For example, to oppress in his fellow humans what he hates when they oppress in him… (Davar, Jan. 29, 1988)

This voice understands Maimonides to say not that Jews are congenitally merciful, but that they are free like everyone else, to be either cruel or merciful – however, the meaning of their Jewish identity is that they are commanded to choose mercy.

If this voice gets drowned out in the cacophony, what will become of us?