Rabbis inundated with questions from Israeli soldiers on Jewish laws of war (2024)

(RNS) — When Rabbi Michael J. Broyde’s phone rings these days, it may be a fellow scholar wanting an interpretation of Torah or a former congregant at his Atlanta synagogue looking to discuss day-school fundraising. But since some half-million Israelis have been called to military service in Gaza, the questioner is as often an Israeli soldier, calling to ask Broyde, an expert at Emory University on Jewish law, about Judaism’s ancient legal code’s views on warfare.

Broyde is not alone. Rabbis in the United States and Israel have been answering thousands of questions each week, forwarded via WhatsApp, yeshiva group chats, handwritten letters and phone calls:What happens when military orders and religious strictures seem to differ? In a moment of crisis, which body of law prevails — military regulations or halacha, the Hebrew word for Jewish law?

Israeli Rabbi Rav Zekaria Ben Shlomo “literally fields thousands of she’elot (questions) single handedly via WhatsApp to people from all across the religious spectrum,” wrote one of Ben Shlomo’s students in a blog post. The same student noted, “His phone is always buzzing with WhatsApp messages.”

Halacha provides guidance on Jews’ everyday life as well as religious practice, from divorce to dietary law to war. Laws pertaining to warfare fall into one of two categories: a “milchemet reshut,” a permitted but voluntary war, or a “milchemet mitzvah,” a holy war, which Jews are required to wage.

Broyde, who is director of Emory’s Center for the Study of Law and Religion, describes halacha as, “not just law, it’s also the ethically proper thing to do. People who answer questions of halacha frequently say, ‘Even though Jewish law technically permits this, this is ethically improper, and you should not do it.’”

For both Israeli soldiers and the Gazans at the mercy of their decisions, halachic opinions can be a matter of life and death.

Israeli soldiers in Gaza often ask about ritual practice in the field. “’Rabbi, can I do this mission on the Sabbath when I’m in Gaza? Should I fast in the field?'” said Broyde.

Another common thread has to do with commercial issues, which often reach into ethical debates. “’Rabbi, the military gave me a pair of boots in a size 11, but I wear a size 9,'” said Broyde. “‘They don’t fit, but there’s a dead soldier that we captured. Can I wear his boots, can I steal them off his body?'”

Then there are questions about military ethics, which Broyde calls the most serious. “Combat generates unsolvable ethical questions, as the fog of war makes discerning who’s guilty and who’s innocent exceedingly difficult. A wrong move frequently generates the death of innocent people on one side or another.”

Broyde said combat ethics questions often come after the fact. “‘This is what I did. Do I need to repent?’” explained Broyde. “You might ask, did they commit a moral wrong? Or is this just the wrong outcome?”

Other times the questions are prospective. “I’ll get ones like, ‘This is coming down the pike next month, how should I handle it?’ Sometimes you answer by saying, ‘Sit it out, let somebody else do it.’”

Besides seeking out rabbis on WhatsApp, soldiers can consult written guides such as Ben Shlomo’s “Hilchot Tzava” (“Army Laws”), which “contains all the necessary laws required for the religious soldier in the army.”

Books, however, mostly address topics peripheral to warfare, such as whether orders should be carried out on Shabbat, or whether one can eat in a sukkah — a temporary dwelling built for the Jewish “Feast of the Booths” — during training.

Although Israel has a diverse religious landscape — 58% of Jewish citizens do not affiliate with any religious group — the society is negotiating a marked shift in which religious nationalists are growing in power. This shift shows up intensely in the Israeli military. While the military does not track religious identities among Israeli soldiers, observers note a clear surge of religious Zionism in the army.

Israeli academic Neve Gordon told the Middle East Monitor in July, “The proportion of religious Zionists and particularly religious settlers from the West Bank in combat units within the Israeli military has dramatically increased over the past two decades.” This includes many officers, as several high-ranking generals have come from the settlements, Gordon added, and the settlements tend to be more aggressively Zionist.

Yehuda Shaul, co-founder of Ofek: The Israeli Center for Public Affairs, a think tank, said: “in 1990, 2.5% of the graduate officer cadets of the infantry came from the national religious, By 2014, it is 40%. That is three times the representation of the national religious in Jewish Israeli society.”

These religious soldiers are more likely to seek halachic advice on situations they encounter on the battlefield.

Not everyone welcomes the religious influence in the armed forces. During the 2008-2009 Gaza war, attention was drawn to pamphlets circulated by the rabbinate after an official publicly criticized them. One leaflet reportedly read that “not one millimeter” of land should be relinquished and that battle sometimes required cruelty toward the enemy.

Around the same time, a declaration by seven former military rabbis, including the former chief rabbis of the air force, the navy and the Israel Defense Forces Educational Division, argued that in situations where halacha and military orders clash, halacha takes precedence.

In 2016, the military’s chief of staff, Gadi Eisenkot, announced the removal of the Jewish Awareness Branch from the military rabbinate after growing criticism that it pushed an ideological and religious agenda.

When asked which body of law a Jewish soldier should defer to, Broyde said every case is different. Usually, “a military order comes with the assumption that it’s about saving lives, and thus it generally trumps any particular Jewish law.”

Broyde said he has never been involved in a case where “I told a soldier not to do what he was instructed, and I know the soldier defied, and I became subsequently involved.” But in cases of military ethics where he finds Jewish law to be in tension, “I don’t counsel defiance. I counsel excuse.”

Few soldiers are willing to openly defy orders and face court-martial, Broyde explained. Defiance means raising your hand and saying “Lieutenant, this is a violation of Jewish law, and I will not do it.” Excuses, on the other hand, allow soldiers to subvert orders without inviting consequences. “For example, ‘Captain, I would really love to help you, but I have a terrible blister on my toe, or terrible diarrhea, and I just can’t go on the mission today.’ That is better than engaging in defiance,” said Broyde.

Reuven Gal, a senior research fellow at the Samuel Neaman Institute for National Policy Research in Israel, objects to applying rabbinical values to the military, not for religious reasons but political ones. “Most of the religious rabbinate who are involved in discussions or interactions with the military are not just rabbis. They are political leaders,” he said.

Gal said many of these rabbis take positions on topics such as Israel’s borders and the expansion of illegal settlements. “These are political issues. … When these opinions come from the rabbis, listeners begin to believe they come from God.”

Gal insisted that separation between religion and the military should be maintained. “There is only one line of authority in the military. It is called commanders,” he said. “The moment rabbis start giving orders or directions to soldiers that happened to be their former students at the yeshiva, this is not only wrong, it is almost a crime.”

Broyde said the debate is characteristic of the Israeli state. “There’s a novel question in the last 50 years, one of the many novel questions created by a Jewish state,” he said. “Jews have served in the armies of whatever nation they were in for a long time. But suddenly, we have a Jewish army. … That is a different situation.”

As soldiers continue to deploy into Gaza, Gal said, this question has dangerous and material consequences. “The military belongs to the state, not to any religion,” he said. The current spread of religious and rabbinate influence in the military is more expansive than he predicted years ago.

“It is worse than I fantasized. The influence is very strong, it is very wrong, and I say that with lots of worry. I condemn any intervention like this. I am not the only one who has this position in Israel.”

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