Shoftim: What Do We Do With God?

More often than usual, I’ve been having individuals reach out to me about the past few parshiyot of the Torah, and particularly this one. The consistent calls to arms, demands for ethnic cleansing of Canaan, the plan laid out for how the Israelites will occupy and dominate the region—all are troubling, and in this time of ongoing Israeli genocide in Gaza and advancing violent ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, can easily feel resonant. The book of Deuteronomy itself, written probably 2600 years ago, and hundreds of years after the Israelites built their civilization in ancient Canaan, says nothing to support the Israeli atrocities being wrought upon the Palestinians today. Any attempt to do so is a misreading. How can I say that with such confidence? God.

Rather than a question of belief, it is a literary question. The text can’t be understood without seeing God as a character playing a role in the story. For instance, in this week’s portion, it says, “For anyone who does such things is abhorrent to God, and it is because of these abhorrent things that Adonai your God is dispossessing them before you.“ (18:12), or “When Adonai your God has cut down the nations whose land God is assigning to you…” (19:1) before explaining the commandments for settling the land. Both of these make something quite clear if we take them in their literary context: It was God who did the dispossessing, not the Israelites. 

In contrast, the rationale and plan for Zionist settlement is quite different. The founder of Revisionist Zionism, Vladimir Jabotinsky, once stated, “There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supersedes all — [Jewish] settlement [of the land]."

It is hard to fathom how effectively Zionism has infiltrated every aspect of Jewish education and even self-understanding since the 1940s. Over that time, religious Zionism was mainstreamed, and has attempted to hijack the actual text of the Torah for its own purposes, often ascribing a supremacist repositioning of the contemporary “Jewish people” as the hand of God in the world. Through the efforts of the Zionist movement itself within Jewish institutions, and because embodying Zionism became the normative role for Jews in America as part of America’s own relationship with Israel, this ideological capture has been incredibly effective. The Zionist interpretative framework will often find its way into our own minds, even if we ourselves would reject it if we knew it was there.

When Deuteronomy talks about the dispossession of the Canaanites, it talks specifically about God enacting this dispossession. Further, as a document written well ex-post-facto, it is painting an imagined picture of the ancient Israelites’ own history. It places the original audience’s ancestors in the role of triumphant conquerors only because God supported them, therefore securing that generation’s fealty to God, and the theocratic political structure they were inheriting in the 7th century BCE. When we read it today, we, too, must remember that many of the commandments in Deuteronomy are specific to the time and place of their writing, and, by and large, record a history that never literally happened. To seek literal history or precedent for violence from the Torah is to read it with a Zionist interpretative lens. 

May we, instead, find in our sacred scriptures ethical guidance that transcends time and space, unmoored from any particular locale or moment. The moral mandate of the covenant persists. The necessity of pursuing justice to earn our keep wherever we may be, in the homes we have inherited in our own personal lives, continues unabated.