Reflections from Rabbi Ellis

This week’s Parsha is the sixth Parsha in the book of Devarim, the final book of the Torah. Moshe continues to prepare us for life without him in the land of Israel by illustrating the successes and challenges that we will meet there and reminding us of the commandments that will be incumbent upon us there. One of the main subjects of this week’s Parsha is how the nation wages war, what is permitted and what is not. The laws of war for the nation of Israel are remarkable, first and foremost is the fact that we have had them for over three-thousand years. As we have seen thus far in the Torah our enemies are willing to use any weapon they can get their hands on, yet G!d demands restraint from us.

The first line in this week’s Parsha, “When you go out to war against your enemies” seems redundant. That is to say who else are we going to wage war with if not our enemies?

One of my best friends in Yeshiva, David, spent twenty years in the U.S. military, he even looked like an action figure. David took part in the U.S. invasion of Panama in 1989. He related that he took part in the biggest battle of the whole invasion, it was against other U.S. forces. At the beginning of the battle both sides failed to identify themselves and so they fought each other furiously to a draw.

All too often we go to war against ourselves. We see this on three different levels. First and foremost, we see this on a national level. The greatest threat to the nation of Israel is almost always internal. The Talmud tells us that the second Temple was destroyed only because of the baseless hatred that raged amongst the people. Rabbi Avraham Yitzak Hakohen Kook spoke about this phenomenon in pre-state Israel as well. The source of such animosity is that both sides share the same goal, while disagreeing regarding the methods for achieving said goals. Because each side reinforces the other regarding the importance of the goal, each side becomes entrenched in their position regarding the methods for achieving that goal. We become so busy defending our position that we forget about our actual goal. The means become the end, so even the smallest amount of compromise becomes a threat.

The next level that we wage war against ourselves is in the family. There was a time when families were economic units and needed to stay together to survive. Now that we don’t need our families for material wellbeing, we get the feeling that we don’t need them at all. Thus, we don’t pursue contact or worse yet actively avoid it. While families provide all manner of challenges, they are also the foundation on which we build our lives and those of our children, whether we want them to be or not.

The final level where we end up waging war against ourselves is the personal. The greatest impediment to many people's success is themselves, there's no destruction like self-destruction. In recent years suicide has become the second most common cause of death for Canadians between the age of 15 to 34. The crises on the national and familiar level are creating a crisis on the personal level. We need to learn to make peace with ourselves or we risk losing whatever it is we thought we were fighting for. 

Shabbat Shalom!

Rabbi Yehoshua Ellis