There is only one thesis for this dvar torah, but there’s a high-falutin’ academic version of it, and a spicier, more topical and current events-y version of it.
The academic question I pose today is this: what are the legitimate boundaries of scriptural interpretation and exegesis? What are the rules and limitations by which we might derive the authoritative meaning of a so-called Divine text in order to discern what is God’s will for us in terms of moral and ethical behavior?
The more controversial way to ask that question is this: how on earth can Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth claim that the Bible clearly says it is America’s moral destiny to vanquish her enemies in war, whenever and wherever they please? Can the Bible really be used to prove with prophetic endorsement that God has beknighted America with Divine authority to rule over all other nations?
I think you all know enough to know that at least this second thesis about Pete Hegseth is something of a setup. It is patently absurd to use the Bible in the modern era to prove categorically that God is militarily on your side, and that God has granted you the authority to make pre-emptive war whenever and wherever you please, because you are God’s chosen people. To some degree, I’m gonna put this guy and his <sarcastic air quotes> ^^ biblical interpretation ^^ up like a pinata and beat the crap out it for a while in this sermon. And yet, I’m speaking about this today to alert you to the fact that our Secretary of Defense, the sixth-in-line to be president of the united states, has regularly invoked Christianity and Jesus as the basis for why and how the US engages in warfare.
I learned of this from an NPR show called ‘on the media’, led by journalist Brooke Gladstone, who interviewed a Baptist minister named Brian Kaylor who has been keeping an eye on the public monthly Pentagon prayer service that Hegseth leads, and the words and choice of verses that Hegseth uses, and is ringing the alarm bell that our military leadership uses scripture to justify violence. That was surprising to me, considering that Jewish prayer generally does not do that, and it was especially surprising to me because of the quotations from scripture that Hegseth has been using to invoke violence - they come from Psalms, and Jeremiah, and Exodus, and Samuel. In other words, the Jewish bible. And that peaked my interest. How do Jews read the Bible and come away with one approach to prayer, and another group of people - a group of Christian warhawks read the same bible and reach opposite conclusions? And is any read of the bible legitimate, or is it truly and fully ‘in the eye of the beholder’?
I’ve been thinking about this question long before I’d ever heard of Pete Hegseth. I remember perhaps more than 20 years ago reading the line we say every day in morning prayer in the song of the seas - “adonai ish milchamah, adonai shemo markevot paro vecheilo yarah bayam - God is a man of war, Adonai is God’s name, the chariots of Pharoah and his soldiers were thrown into the sea.” And I would think to myself - what does that mean ‘God is a man of war’? The simplest answer that fits the needs of a contemporary human in prayer is that God is present with a soldier when they go into battle - that God is with you when you fight. This would be a comforting idea if I were in the military, and so I can see a reasonable application of this verse. But what other interpretations could there be? Well, we could apply it in situ - only at that moment in the bible - to understand that it was God’s Divine will to lure the Egyptians into the red sea and then close the seas upon Pharoah and his army.
By the way, the keen reader will note that this account of the parting and collapsing of the red sea in Exodus 15 directly contradicts the version one chapter earlier in Exodus 14 verse 28, where it says
וַיָּשֻׁבוּ הַמַּיִם וַיְכַסּוּ אֶת־הָרֶכֶב וְאֶת־הַפָּרָשִׁים לְכֹל חֵיל פַּרְעֹה הַבָּאִים אַחֲרֵיהֶם בַּיָּם לֹא־נִשְׁאַר בָּהֶם עַד־אֶחָד׃
The waters turned back and covered the chariots and the riders—Pharaoh’s entire army that followed them into the sea; not one of them remained.
So did the waters collapse on them, or did God pick up all their chariots from off of dry land and chuck them into the water? The medieval commentators have a lot of fun with this problem. But the point is, if we are restricting the song of the sea poem this past Wednesday, the seventh day of Pesach, to referring only to God, the man of war, in the biblical event of the red sea crossing, then God is simply being thanked for making war that one time on the Egyptians. I have a third interpretation that you might like. Adonai ish milchamah - God is a man of war - could be taken to mean that God is keenly understanding of the suffering of combat veterans. Witnessing war and violence as either a neutral bystander or a combatant causes a lasting psychological reaction that can produce stress and anxiety and can be disabling or debilitating - a disorder that was once called shell shock or battle fatigue and is now referred to as post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. I know a little about PTSD because I’ve experienced it myself, having witnessed a violent incident when I lived in Israel in 2004. Adonai ish milchamah, to me, means that God is with those who suffer PTSD, because God has been in those situations too and knows what you are going through. God knows the struggle of the widow and the orphan and the stranger, and sympathizes with them, and is with them, and in the same way, God knows the plight of the soldier experiencing PTSD and sympathizes with them, and is with them.
Pete Hegseth, of course, does not utilize any of these interpretations. In December Hegseth brought his favorite pastor, Franklin Graham, to the Pentagon, to preach a Christmas mass, and Graham said, “"We know that God loves, but did you know that God also hates? Do you know that God also is a God of war? Many people don't want to think about that or forget that.”
Graham goes on to justify this God of war argument by reading from a passage in the Hebrew Bible, which in that time and place was a call to genocide - a kind of no holds barred warfare. Samuel is telling King Saul to go and kill Amalek and all their cattle and sheep and their women and children. You’re all familiar with - First samuel chapter 15 - because we read it about 4 weeks ago - it’s the Haftarah to Shabbat Zachor. And you’re all aware that the Jewish tradition has - for centuries - understood the call to war against Amalek as a spiritual war against the forces of evil. And you all know that we read the verses in Samuel in situ and allegorically, much like we read the verse in song of the sea. Hegseth was reading it at the Pentagon prayer service literally - as a justification for a removal of all barriers and guardrails from US soldiers in combat - as a biblical injunction to ignore inconvenient things like the Geneva conventions or morality or the US military code of conduct when our soldiers go out to war.
In March,at the prayer service which coincided with the beginning of the war in Iran, Hegseth used a mix of Psalm 144 and Jeremiah 50 when he said “ Almighty God, who trains our hands for war and fingers for battle. You who stirred the nations from the north against Babylon of old, making her land a desolation where none dwell.” Psalm 144 is a prayer for soldiers that starts the way Hegseth quoted it, but then pivots to asking God to vanquish Israel’s enemies on the battlefield with lightning. It has two lines you will all be familiar with - one that gets imported into the Yom Kippur liturgy about fragile mortality:
יְהֹוָה מָה־אָדָם וַתֵּדָעֵהוּ בֶּן־אֱנוֹשׁ וַתְּחַשְּׁבֵהוּ׃
O ETERNAL One, what are mortals that You should care about them, human beings, that You should think of them?
אָדָם לַהֶבֶל דָּמָה יָמָיו כְּצֵל עוֹבֵר׃
They are like a breath; their days are like a passing shadow.
And the final line of 144 which we said about 10 minutes ago -
אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֶׁכָּכָה לּוֹ אַשְׁרֵי הָעָם שֱׁיְהֹוָה אֱלֹהָיו׃ {פ}
Happy the people who have it so; happy the people whose God is the ETERNAL.
In other words, in context, these verses are about human mortality and fragility and that we call on God to protect us if we should go to combat.
Hegseth used these verses differently, saying: “Grant this task force clear and righteous targets for violence. Surround them as a shield. Protect the innocent and blameless in their midst. Make their arrows like those of a skilled warrior who returned not empty-handed. Let every round find its mark against the enemies of righteousness and our great nation. Give them wisdom in every decision, endurance for the trial ahead, unbreakable unity, and overwhelming violence of action against those who deserve no mercy.”
Hegseth is doing something all clergy do - which is take scripture and interpret it for today - nothing wrong with that. But the pastors he cites and calls upon to direct the legitimate manner of interpretation play by some rules that are anathema to the way Judaism interprets Torah and Tanakh. Hegseth’s pastors, Graham and a man named Brooks Potteiger invoke American Christianity in a hyper-Calvanist “we are God’s will because we are God’s elect and the most mighty nation on earth” understanding. There’s a mismosh of a belief in Jesus and armageddon and might makes right and that we cannot fail because God and Jesus are behind the US Military.
To be sure, this theology does exist in the Torah - much of Isaiah and Jeremiah and Deuteronomy effectively say a sort of inverse version of that - IF the Jewish people keep the commandments and are moral, God will protect us from our enemies. BUT IF we do not obey the Torah, then the Babylonian or the Assyrian or the Egyptian or the Persian Empire will rise up as the mighty fist of God and give us our just punishments. And thus the Tanakh understands the vanquishing of Israel’s armies in 722 BCE and 586 BC as punishment for our losing our way.
Hegseth reads these verses in Psalms and Jeremiah out of context and upside down - BECAUSE America is so great and follows Jesus and BECAUSE God made us obviously the greatest nation on earth, we WILL defeat all comers, namely, this time, the literal modern day Persian Empire. It’s magical thinking. And it is illegitimate use of holy text for militant and violent purposes, and its end result is hubris and self-righteousness that will end in disaster.
It’s also an application of the Torah that went out of favor in Judaism about 2000 years ago. When the Roman empire smashed the Great Revolt in 70 CE, and again smashed the Bar Kochba revolt in 135 CE, the rabbis that wrote the Talmud deemphasized war, and statehood, and kingship, and armies, and Divine prophetic inevitability tied to violence. Having been the victims of violence by a powerful empire that utterly desolated the land of Israel, the rabbis of the talmud interpret the Bible going forward to teach us that we do not force God’s hand in global geopolitical matters through violence and the amassing of power. We are a spiritual people who are Jews not because we are bound to one land or one temple or one king by our might and armies. We are the people of the book and the people who act through commandedness, not prophetic calls to arms.
And I will add that Jews are guilty of this too. About 15 years ago a rabbi in Israel wrote a book called Torat HaMelekh - laws of the king - justifying Jewish violence against non-Jews for any purpose using this same kind of textual cherry-picking and illegitimate anti-moral justifications for violence. The book was roundly condemned and is mostly ignored today, but there are elements in Israel who dangerously use preferred parts of the Torah as theological justification to ignore moral laws in other parts of the Torah, and we should all be vigilant against this kind of perversion of Torah to illegitimate ends.
The legitimate path in Judaism of scriptural interpretation came through learning the hard way about violence, but the rules have been laid down and followed by your rabbis for literally 2000 years. We are taught by a rabbinic midrash the following:
Our Torah portion today, Shmini, is the story of two men, Nadav and Abihu, who brought an inappropriate offering on the altar that ended disastrously. Our words and our interpretations of Torah are the metaphorical equivalent today of offerings on that altar, and they should be holy and pure, and when they are not holy and pure, things end badly for all involved. May all our words be pure and holy. When you see Torah being twisted for evil by others, call it out for what it is.Meanwhile, may we all strive to read Torah within a moral context of right and just action with deliberation and context and humility - for Torah’s sake and not for our own sake or with any ulterior motives. Shabbat Shalom.
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