From Hadesh - Renewal Vol. I. Issue No. 2
By: Efrayim ben-Yehi’el
Note from the editor: The following article is not necessarily representative of the views of Hadesh Journal or its members.
Nietzsche rather famously blamed his so-called ‘slave morality’ on the Israelites. His philosophical system waged war on the morality of “turn the other cheek” and many concepts we traditionally associate with “decency”. Nietzsche’s criticism, rather than a fair assessment of the Jewish contribution to Western morality, is rather of Christian morality proper. If this criticism is true, and slave morality originated in Christianity rather than Judaism, then the popular Jewish conception of moral and immoral must be a great distance from that of our forefathers. In a world of Judeo-Christian morality, it bears asking whether the Christians have Judaized more than the Jews have Christianized.
I begin with a choice quote from the late Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, student of Rav Joseph Baer Soloveitchik, founder and former rosh yeshiva of Yeshivat Har Etzion:
I recall in my late adolescence there were certain problems which perturbed me, the way they perturb many others. At the time, I resolved them all in one fell swoop. I had just read Rav Zevin’s book, Ishim Ve-shitot.
In his essay on Rav Chayim Soloveitchik, he deals not only with his methodological development, but also with his personality and gemilut chasadim (acts of kindness). He recounted that Reb Chayim used to check every morning if some unfortunate woman had placed an infant waif on his doorstep during the course of the night. (In Brisk, it used to happen at times that a woman would give birth illegitimately and leave her infant in the hands of Reb Chayim.)
As I read the stories about Reb Chayim’s extraordinary kindness, I said to myself: Do I approach this level of gemilut chasadim? I don’t even dream of it! In terms of moral sensibility, concern for human beings and sensitivity to human suffering, I am nothing compared to Reb Chayim. Yet despite his moral sensitivity, he managed to live, and live deeply, with the totality of Halakha—including the commands to destroy the Seven Nations, Amalek and all the other things which bother me. How? The answer, I thought, was obvious.
It is not that his moral sensitivity was less, but his yirat Shamayim, his emuna, was so much more. The thing to do, then, is not to try to neutralize or de-emphasize the moral element, but rather to deepen and increase the element of yirat shamayim, of emuna, deveikut and bitachon.1
After October 7th, the ethos of Rabbi Lichtenstein has been hard to justify. At least the confidence through which this assertion was said has been dampened. Of the thousands of Jewish civilians who died during that massacre, of the hundreds of men who died in the ensuing war, something even more substantial died, unnoticed at the time. Jews became apostates of Judeo-Christian morality.
While military planners intended a clean invasion of Gaza, enlisted soldiers had something else in mind. Soldiers took vengeance into their own hands, destroying buildings without purpose and acting carte blanche (although the full extent of this will likely not be known for decades). The general response to this program among young Jews ranges from denial to apathy to jubilation.
This would have been unimaginable just five years ago, or a generation ago, when the legacy of “Never Again” restrained Israeli action. After Schindler’s List (1993) redefined Jewish identity to be that of the lamentable Holocaust victim (and the non-Jew to the roles of either the heroic Schindler or villainous nazis), the tyrannical goddess Progress declared ethnic conflict to be a relic of the past. Hands would be shaken, papers signed; Israelis could finally fulfill their aspiration of becoming “normal” citizens of a decadent globalized world. Make a small fortune selling bloatware during the dot-com bubble, get a nice penthouse in Tel Aviv, and vacation in Berlin. At the End of History, it did not seem like Jewish ethical taboos would ever be transcended.
The Palestinians–God bless them–had other plans.
Having witnessed the barbarity of our enemies in 1080p High Definition, the paradigmatic failure of Oslo and neoliberal Netanyahu-ism (that the Palestinians can be pacified by integrating them within Israel’s economy) was evident to all but the truest believers. Every young Jew felt that something was very wrong with the worldview we inherited from our parents.
And yet such an exilic morality could never survive our reentry into the land and exposure to the conditions of national incorporation in the Middle East. It now appears that Nietzsche's slave morality was less a Jewish morality than a morality of Jewish exile. Two thousand years of persecution had transformed our nation into pacifists of the most un-sympathizable sort.
Politics and war are exercises of will. In the long term, strength is respected and victimhood lamented. Israel is respected when it launches surprise attacks, and is disrespected when it is attacked against. Dwell on this.
The result is something quite new which I hazard to fully describe. Suffice it to say, our soldiers in Gaza would be completely unrecognizable to the generation of Oslo or the resigned nonaggression of the Sages. Yet they would be entirely at home with the generation of the Exodus, the valiant men of Joshua’s conquest, the warriors of the Judges, and the soldiers of the monarchy. We have accelerated through Judeo-Christian morality and arrived at a morality that is basely Israelite in character.
God have mercy on our enemies. Because we won’t.
Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein. (1986). Being Frum and Being Good: On the Relationship Between Religion and Morality. Lecture.