Ethics of Our Fighters, by Rabbi Shlomo M. Brody, was published by Koren at the very end of 2023. Apart from being a rabbi, the author is a teacher, scholar and researcher who holds a doctorate in law and a journalist. His writings on contemporary moral dilemmas have been cited by the Israeli Supreme Court—a body that is no stranger to moral dilemmas, having over the years created more than one of their own.
Avot Today noted this book when it first appeared (see our
initial observations at avot-today.com/2023/12/hitting-mark-missing-point.html).
I have now had a chance to read it carefully and here are my thoughts.
Despite the resonance between the title with the English
name by which Avot is best known—Ethics of the Fathers—and despite the
reference to Avot in the book’s publicity, this is emphatically not a
book about Avot and there are very few points of even possible contact between
them. One is Avot 3:18, where Rabbi Akiva reminds us that all humans are dear
to God, being created in His likeness—a mishnah based on a Torah verse that,
taken literally, would hold fighting forces to moral standards that most would
regard as quite unreasonably too high.
Rabbi Brody’s book provides a detailed and well researched discussion of the Jewish response to the legitimacy of various issues. These include national security, human rights, conduct in regular battle, pre-emptive action, dealing with non-combatants, collective punishment, responses to terrorism, reprisals and deterrents. The most fascinating feature of many of these debates is the nature of the debaters themselves: orthodox and non-orthodox rabbis and religious scholars, secular Jews, Zionists, nationalists, military leaders, politicians and philosophers. Given the extreme importance of the subject matter and the extent to which influential opinions are liable to lead to action, these are debates in which no party and no argument can be safely ignored, and where no opinion can be discarded on the basis of the status of the person who expresses it.
This is not a casual read for the curious, since it demands
one’s full attention. However, it will repay the effort involved in studying it
seriously and in following the various analyses and discussions as they travel
through time and space. For me, the best bit of this book is one of the
shortest: it’s chapter 8 (‘The Jewish Multivalue Framework for Military Ethics’).
This is because it highlights for military ethics, in like manner to Pirkei
Avot, the impossibility of finding a single answer or of establishing a
hierarchy of norms to situations that inevitably depend on their own unique
facts. It is helpful to bear this in mind when reading, for example, chapter 23
(‘Once the War Starts: Shifting Moral Responsibilities in Urban Warfare’),
where it is moral responsibilities that come into conflict.
We readers are not all the same and no publisher can cater
equally for every taste. However, my personal preference for a work of this
nature is that it should present references to source material and other useful
or relevant notes at the bottom of each page, rather than in an appendix of
nearly 70 pages where these items are listed chapter by chapter. I do not believe that the sort of people who
are likely to read this book in any sort of depth will be deterred by the
appearance of footnotes, and they will be greatly assisted if they do not have
to keep turning to the back of the book for the information they seek.
With that one small proviso, I very much enjoyed reading
Rabbi Brody’s work and believe that it is not only a useful contribution to
discussion on the ethics of war but, in effect, an agenda that will be
enormously helpful to those seeking to understand the topic, to teach it or to
take it to the next level.
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