“… It came to pass, in those days, that Moses, having grown up, went out to his brethren and saw the burdens that weighed upon them. He saw too an Egyptian striking a Hebrew, one of his brethren. He turned this way and that and, seeing that there was no one about, he struck the Egyptian and buried him in the sand.1”
This famous episode has given rise to the usual number of commentaries. Rashi maintains that there was no murder, on the grounds that the Egyptian had slept with the wife of a Hebrew. The spirit of his midrash seems to be the following: Moses was only defending his own; the Egyptian is not an individual, but the very being of an oppression whose inescapable consequence is physical and spiritual rape. The fact remains that Rashi thinks it useful to vindicate Moses.
Ginzberg’s collection of legends is more reassuring still: before killing the Egyptian, Moses reflects at length, hesitates, and sees (but how?) that, the Egyptian being fundamentally evil, one cannot hope that he will mend his ways. Beyond redemption, the Egyptian fully deserved his fate.
For the modern exegete of a paperback-edition Moses2, this episode proves that Moses breaks the egoism of his “self” and discovers his neighbor — his brethren — at the same time as he discovers violence. And he curiously adds that the distance between men has disappeared. By a kind of tacit agreement among these commentators, it has been decided that the moral problem relating to the murder of the Egyptian shall not be raised.
There thus exists in Jewish tradition an entire apologetic current, whose salient trait is that it strives to give only a glorious or reassuring interpretation of facts that are not always so, or not exclusively so. This tradition was fully justified in epochs when the Jews, dispersed and humiliated, had at their disposal no weapon to defend themselves — save the sense that their cause was just and their prophets impeccable. Since we had far fewer sins than enemies, we could well leave to the latter the task of tallying the former.
The situation, today, is no longer quite the same. The Jews, too, have learned to make use of violence, and this novelty — after twenty centuries of unarmed existence — has visibly not been understood by certain of our intellectuals who, contrary to what Martin Buber, for instance, did, take it as their function to reinforce, on every occasion, the good conscience of their readers. Do they not write as though the Jews were still nothing but pure victims or generous archangels? Alas! this idea they form of their function ranks them, from the outset, among the propagandists of a certain policy, of which they make themselves, implicitly or explicitly, the defenders.
When Shmuel Yosef Agnon, Nobel laureate in literature, signs a manifesto demanding that the conquered provinces be purely and simply annexed; when Rav Kook affirms that “the cession of occupied territories would be a sin and a criminal act (…) contrary to the Torah”; when André Chouraqui intones a paean to a unified Jerusalem without asking himself what the Arab inhabitants of the city think of this unification; when one prints, in a previous issue of this review [L’Arche3], that the only difference between a village and a refugee camp is of an aesthetic order — the reader of common sense is entitled to wonder what these thinking heads are doing with their heads and their thoughts. For the role of Jewish intellectuals is not to furnish just any justification for just any Jewish act. It is rather to ask publicly under what conditions morality can still find its due in a context dominated by violence. For example: Israel has a right not only to existence, but to security. This means that the borders must be modified, and the modifications discussed in the course of a negotiation. An Israeli has the right to free access to the holy places — that is, to the Wailing Wall and to a few scattered sites located in the old Arab city. But the unilateral decision to annex the entire old city of Jerusalem goes well beyond this right to security and this right of free access to the holy places. So that when one claims to ask for nothing other than negotiation without annexation, while letting it be understood, however, that one will first annex the Golan, Jerusalem and Gaza4 — that is, that on these points one has, in a sense, negotiated all alone — this is a grave inconsistency that gives the Arab States a plausible pretext for refusing negotiation and recognition of the State. It is therefore bad politics, for, in order to secure the support of international opinion and of part of the left, one must furnish the proof that intransigence lies entirely on the Arab side.
The role of Jewish intellectuals, today, is no longer only to demonstrate the bad faith of the Arabs and to denounce their obstinacy in refusing the existence of Israel: it must also be to point out the inconsistencies of Israeli policy, and to engage in polemic with those who think that biblical geography authorizes the Israelis to retain definitively the territories acquired during the Six-Day War. But on this point, our intellectuals observe the same demure silence as certain commentators with regard to the murder of the Egyptian…
There exists, however, a midrash whose author asks himself for what reason Moses was not permitted to enter the land of Canaan. One of the answers is precisely that, in striking the Egyptian, he had committed a fault. The midrash does not say that one must not kill when it is necessary: it acknowledges only that every act is two-faced, and that the necessity in which one finds oneself of resorting to violence does not abolish its consequences: one remains forever answerable for them.
The role of intellectuals cannot be to muddle that reckoning. It consists rather in establishing it with clarity, even at the price of making oneself unpopular. And let no one say that this would be playing the enemy’s game: that argument has served all too well among the Stalinists, at a time not so very distant. What plays into the enemy’s game above all are the political faults one commits oneself.
By a coincidence that is, after all, not so very frequent, a sincere offer of negotiation without annexation — without any annexation — is an offer in which morality and politics converge. As for the necessary modifications of the border lines, these must, precisely, be the object of the negotiation.
For the rest, those who think that, among the Jews, all that is real is at once rational, moral and politically adroit will never be left alone: there will always be enough unconscious souls among us to say that it is untimely to sweep before one’s own door, and to reinforce among the Jews that good conscience which, on the political plane, has never produced anything but disasters.