By Rabbi Andrea Zanardo

We read with embarrassment a passage from this week’s Torah portion: “You shall destroy all the peoples that the Eternal your God delivers to you, showing them no pity” (Deuteronomy 7:16). This is a very problematic passage. Not only does it endorse religious violence, but it prescribes it! And this is horrible.

Every year on Yom Kippur, we remember the horrors of the Crusades. The history of many Jewish families, our shared history, has been marked by the pogroms in Eastern Europe a century ago, or in Northern Africa in the 40’s and in the 60s. The horror of the ISIS regime is vivid in our collective memory.

We reject violence. We do not worship a God that prescribes religious violence.  Not only because the victims of religious violence are – more often than not- Jews like us. The very idea of imposing faith with violence is repulsive, and we stand firm in our rejection of it.

Moreover, in those days, religious violence (as well as “genocide”) is an accusation thrown at Israel and by extension at us Jews, as if Israel and Hamas were murderous entities of the same kind.

Obviously, there’s the context. Historians believe that the Book of Deuteronomy was written between the 8th and 7th centuries BCE, a time when plenty of similar literature was produced in the Ancient Middle East and Mediterranean culture, which was far more gruesome and bellicose. It’s important to note that one cannot blame today’s Jews because our ancestors behaved like all the other peoples of the area.

In the Bible itself, some passages prescribe a more humane and, if possible, compassionate conduct in war, especially regarding prisoners, for example, allowing a woman prisoner of war the time to mourn her family (Dt 21:10-14) and -some commentator says- to make herself unattractive and not be raped.

Yet the passage of this week’s Torah portion that prescribes systemic violence against the enemy’s population remains highly problematic to our modern sensitivity. And that is precisely the point.

Almost two centuries ago Rav Hirsch commented the passage in this way:  “The repeated warnings to show no mercy toward the Canaanite population seem to indicate how such merciless behavior was actually alien to both the nature and mission of the Jewish people, who, indeed, are inclined—and must remain inclined—to show consideration for every living being. This implacable attitude toward the Canaanites must be seen as an exception, expressly commanded by God and necessitated by the circumstances”

This is extraordinarily deep. We are upset by the commandment “to destroy  (literally to devour!) all the people that Eternal delivers” to us, not because we are enamoured with the legislation about human rights, and international courts of justice, that are, by the way, so imbued with prejudices against the Jewish State. No, we are troubled by that cruel commandment because it clashes with our Jewish sensitivity, our loyalty to Judaism. We instinctively know, I would say we feel, that merciless behaviour in war and elsewhere is in conflict with Judaism.

To a great extent Judaism’s normative tradition aims to limit and restrain merciless behaviours while simultaneously acknowledging that they are human impulses. For example, the Rabbis have made clear that the idolatrous populations to which the passage refers to, are not around anymore, so the commandment to annihilate them does not apply to our time.

But that is another matter.

When we read this passage, what matters is our gut reaction, our feelings in front of merciless behaviour. Our indignation does not stem from contemporary philosophy or from the bookshelf of modern-day ethicists. It comes from our souls. It is the best part of Jewish tradition, and we must be proud of it.

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