Israel's Righteous Fight

Israel’s decision to respond forcefully to Hezbollah’s assault on its soldiers and its citizens has been met with near-universal condemnation. The world is a lot more comfortable with an Israel that does not fight back. And so are a lot of Jews. Steven Spielberg’s movie, “

,” made the argument that when Israel kills terrorists, it risks becoming like the terrorists.

But it is a specious argument that suggests that a country is more moral when it allows evil to triumph. Would Israel be doing the right thing by allowing murderers to get away with murder?

But we are getting ahead of ourselves.

The Jewish state is named after the patriarch Jacob, whom the Bible renamed “Israel.” The similarities between country and namesake are instructive: Each has traditionally been criticized for precisely the same thing.

Jacob has never been very popular among non-Jews. Christians and Muslims identify with Abraham rather than Jacob, for he appears be the better man. Abraham discovers God under the starlit heavens of Mesopotamia and thereafter largely keeps to himself, which is why he is called, ‘HaIvri,’ a man set apart. When his nephew Lot argues with him over disputed land, Abraham immediately gives in and offers to move away. Abraham does not like to argue.

Jacob, by contrast, fights back. Rather than be dominated by his hunter brother Esau, he tricks him into selling his birthright in exchange for a bowl of soup. He even goes so far as to trick his father, who mistakenly believes that Esau is the virtuous one, into giving him Esau’s firstborn blessing rather than allow his bullying brother to assume the mantle of leadership that the blessing would have conferred upon him.

Compared to the wholesome Abraham, Jacob comes across as a schemer and a conniver. Is this the stuff of which righteous men are made?

But the greatness of Jacob, which by far transcended that of Abraham and Isaac, was that he was the first personality in the Bible prepared to resist evil, even if it tarnished him. And by fighting evil, Jacob set a precedent that the righteous, rather than the cold and the heartless, would inherit the earth.

Jacob knows that Esau is a bad man, and he will do everything in his power to remove from him the blessings of dominion. Likewise, Jacob will not allow his father-in-law Laban, a psychopathic liar, to take advantage of him, because someone has to stand up to a bully.

Stated in other words, Jacob is the first biblical personality forced to translate a passion for goodness into a world where goodness is seen as weakness. Abraham is the righteous loner who separates himself from the corrupt vices of his neighbors. He will pray for Sodom and Gomorrah, but he will not live among them. Abraham did not seek to salvage a world which was beyond redemption. But Jacob was not prepared to forfeit the earth to criminals. He would stand up for himself, even as doing made him enter the gray areas which his grandfather avoided like the plague. While Abraham is more angel than man, Jacob is forever and vicariously perched between heaven and earth, struggling to do the right thing in a world of wickedness and evil.

Continued on page 2: False piety and moral cowardice... »