This post was extracted from the TIDE WhatsApp group.
https://chat.whatsapp.com/FNbFs4JEXZkIzVNLJx3HuM
When Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu invoked the biblical category of Amalek at the outset of the Gaza war, the statement reverberated far beyond its immediate military context. It was cited as a central piece of evidence in the genocide case brought against Israel at the International Court of Justice. And it crystallized a question that had been building within observant Jewish communities for years: what does Jewish tradition actually say about labeling contemporary enemies with the most dangerous category in its moral vocabulary — and what does it say about those who do so while wearing a kippah and claiming to speak in Torah's name?
For the Hirschian tradition, the answer begins with a fundamental premise. A Hirschian cares about all of humanity. Period. The Mensch-Yisroel ideal is not a pleasant supplement to Jewish religious life — it is a core requirement. The aspiration to be a "priest of pure humanity," to regard every human being as a bearer of the divine image, is not a liberal sentiment imported from outside Torah. It is, on Hirschian terms, what Torah itself demands. An ideology that systematically dehumanizes whole populations — that treats entire nations as enemies by nature, that encourages contempt for non-Jewish life — is not a stricter or more authentically Jewish position. It is a fundamental failure of the Jewish religious mission.
This does not mean that Jewish tradition is without categories of genuine enemies, or that every act of military force is morally equivalent. Hirsch and his son Mendel addressed the category of Amalek directly in their writings, acknowledging it as a divinely decreed exception to the general principle of universal human dignity. But the tradition is equally clear that this exception has no halachic application in the contemporary world. No one has the halachic status of Amalek today. When Rav Soloveitchik cited his family mesorah in the twenty-fifth footnote of Kol Dodi Dofek — that any nation conspiring to destroy the Jewish people acquires the status of Amalek — the precise scope and implications of that claim remain actively debated within serious Torah scholarship. What that debate means for how the category may or may not be applied in contemporary military contexts is a question that has not been resolved, and invoking Amalek loosely against entire civilian populations, including children, goes well beyond anything the tradition has sanctioned.
The political expression of this tendency — associated in recent years with figures such as Itamar Ben Gvir and the broader Kahanist movement within Israeli politics — has provoked sharp responses from within the Orthodox world. Rav Yitzchak Yosef, the Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Israel and himself a committed Zionist, publicly called Ben Gvir "hevel" — worthless — and described his conduct as a chillul Hashem, a desecration of God's name. If an acting Israeli Sephardi Chief Rabbi of Iraqi descent could speak out so sharply against a national-religious minister in the current government, one tradition-minded analyst observed, one can scarcely imagine how much more severe the response of Rav Hirsch — a burning opponent of nationalist ideology who placed the dignity of every human being at the center of his worldview — would have been.
The Hirschian critique of Kahanism is not primarily political. It is philosophical. Hirsch's vision of the Mensch-Yisroel cannot coexist with a worldview that labels contemporary humans as Amalek, that celebrates violence against civilian populations, or that treats military and political power as the primary vehicle of Jewish redemption. These represent not a stricter form of Jewish commitment but a different and incompatible one. As Rav Henkin has written, since the destruction of the Temple we are no longer a warrior nation — a perspective that bears directly on how Torah ethics apply to the conduct of a modern Jewish state and its citizens.
What makes this question pressing for the TIDE community specifically is not merely the theological debate but the communal silence that surrounds it. The major Orthodox institutions — the Agudah, the Orthodox Union — have, as far as can be determined, said little publicly about Jewish violence against Arabs in Judea and Samaria, or about the ideological currents that produce it. The frum media presents a consistently one-sided narrative. A Hirschian voice would say something genuinely different — grounded not in political liberalism but in the claim that Torah itself, properly understood, demands the moral clarity that other Orthodox institutions have been reluctant to provide.
Whether public statements are the right instrument for delivering that voice, however, is itself a matter of principled disagreement within the TIDE community — and not merely a practical one. Some argue that public declarations of protest are not only premature for a nascent organization but are fundamentally the wrong approach: that tochacha, moral reproach, is ineffective and possibly forbidden when delivered in that format, and that the Hirschian tradition is better served by patient internal education and the articulation of positive values than by reactive condemnation of other communities. Others hold that silence in the face of chillul Hashem is itself a form of complicity, and that Hirsch's own willingness to fight publicly for his principles — his Open Letters were, as one participant observed, the nineteenth-century version of the internet — provides a clear model for engaged public witness. That debate remains open, and its resolution will say much about what kind of organization a revived TIDE movement intends to be.
No comments:
Post a Comment