The Newborn War
Sgt. Declan Coady was only 20 years old, and a local boy from Des Moines. Together with Maj. Jeffrey O’Brien from Indianola, he represents two tragic losses from the Hawkeye State among six American soldiers killed in the new Iran war. A ‘newborn war’, a poignant and bitter turn-of-phrase coined by the Israeli rabbi and poet Naomi Steinberg.
‘Will we feed its voracious appetite and watch it grow?’ writes Steinberg. Already, this war is growing, morphing, shapeshifting into more cruel guises. As of the time of this sermon, the United States lost six soldiers already, Israel lost twelve civilians and the Iranian death toll numbers over a thousand, culminating in the gut-wrenching death of 175 elementary schoolgirls blown up by what was likely an American bomb.
Indeed, this newborn war entered the world squalling and hungry, and I fear its appetite has not been stilled, and will not be for a long time to come.
As we sit here in safety (for now), civilians in Iran, the Gulf, Israel, Palestine and Lebanon are sheltering in place; some in designated shelters, but most unprotected. As the attack started last Saturday, it did not take long for pundits, politicians and voices on social media to have their say. This included Jewish community leaders and rabbis, expressing vocal support for the American and Israeli aggression, and sometimes even glee.
I decided to take my own moral wager: I oppose this war and its rationale on moral and humanitarian grounds.
I am not a Middle East expert or political analyst. If good transpires out of this war, such as the emergence of a genuine liberal democracy for the oppressed people of Iran and the cessation of proxy terror in the region followed by a more peaceful, just and stable Middle East, then I will humbly and heartily issue a future apology for my misjudgment. However, even I have studied enough history and marched in enough anti-war protests to know that it is very likely that this war, born in fire and blood, will mature into disaster, suffering and societal collapse. (This does not mean that there is no place for complexity next to moral clarity. No person who claims to believe in liberal democracy and universal human rights has any kindness to spare for Iran’s brutal and theocratic regime and the Iranian people deserve to be free and they have a right to speak for themselves).
While I am not a political analyst, I feel compelled by my vocation to always speak for life and humanity. I will leave the question of the legality of this war-of-choice to constitutional scholars, but any event that causes such mass suffering is at odds with the Jewish and rabbinic values I hold dear and am called upon to represent.
The question is whether my opinion, as a smalltown Midwestern rabbi, even matters. In the grand scheme of things it doesn’t. I certainly do not curry any influence with anyone of significance who could silence the guns and bombs or bend the arc of history towards justice. But it matters to our souls. It matters if we want to make space for our dissent and moral injury. It matters here, in this space. It matters to the moral fabric of American Jewish life.
Which brings me to the heart of this sermon. There is very little that we can control, but we can control our own moral character—that of us as individuals and as part of communal life. Speaking out against war, against mass civilian death and suffering, is to resist a callous idolatry that one person is created more b’tzelem Elohim, in the Divine Image, than another – that some humans are somehow considered worthier. That some human life ultimately is dispensable.
However, I want to go a little further than this, because idolatry breeds more idolatry. As we read the story of the Golden Calf in this week’s Torah Portion, we hear Aaron proclaim about the newly minted idol: ‘eleh eloheicha Yisrael’ – ‘this is your god, O Israel.’ Idolatry is a form of uncritical and misplaced devotion on things that are neither God nor of God’s image on earth: human beings. In that sense, I think it is fair to argue that nationalism, in particular ethnonationalism, is a form of idolatry.
Allow me to be clear. It is not idolatrous to love one’s community, people, place, country. I love Amsterdam and Málaga and Iowa City and Leeds and Jerusalem – all the places that have touched my life. I love the American people. I love my fellow Jews. It is not idolatrous to care about Jewish self-determination, to be close with or inspired by Israelis, to feel solidarity and kinship with those you are proximate to. But when love of place and people turns into exclusive and essentialist (and God forbid, supremacist) ideologies, then we are falling into the sin of idol worship.
The clamoring for war, without regard for human life and suffering, is a form of idol worship. If we as human beings point to our own sense of power as our salvation, then we are gesturing towards the Golden Calf and saying, ‘behold O Israel, this is your god.’
This newborn war is still young, and it is impossible to tell how it will grow, even as it grows foraciously. Our Jewish community, both as an aggregate of diverse individuals, as well as a collective represented by establishment voices, does well to heed the warnings of idolatry and not trade inviolable universal human dignity for power or nationalist fervor.
In these early days, I will admit that I have been disappointed by some of our communal leaders’ endorsement of this war and this is why it matters: not because I am morally pure, but because we as a Jewish community still have an opportunity to grow, pivot, evolve and embrace the humanitarian ethos of our tradition.
For those of us who are Jewish, we have a stake in both our individual voices as Jews and the collective voices of our institutions; it is up to us to hold our institutions and leaders accountable and to charge them to work towards peace. This is our chance, not to ignore divisions or walk away from difficult conversations, but to do something meaningful and powerful within our own communities. Like the Israelite women who resisted donating their golden jewelry to the project of the Golden Calf, there are small acts of mercy, strength and grace we can grasp onto.
‘What stories will we tell this infant war, what songs sing to it?
Will we feed its voracious appetite and watch it grow…’
Rabbi Steinberg writes:
‘or find a way to mercifully put it to sleep?’
Ken yehi ratzon, may that be God’s will. May we pray for and work towards days of healing and peace.
