Rechavia Berman – GangstaYid

The #2 chaplain in the IDF, who is in charge of all religious education to soldiers, answers a religious law question and comes out flatly for the right of a Jewish soldier to rape a foreign captive

You know how old things crop up on the Internet? Well, today something floated to the surface on the Hebrew portion of the net that may hound Israel and the IDF for years to come – if both institutions even have many years left to them.

But doomsaying aside, the public and straightforward halachic opinion issued by Colonel and  Rabbi Eyal Krim, the number two man at the IDF’s Military Rabbinate, back in the bloody days of the Second Intifada and “Operation Defensive Shield” (2002), is sure to create a storm. How big a storm will provide indications both of the current state of Israeli society at large, and of the degree to which the foreign press pays attention and gets the point.

The halachic issue in question is one known in Judaism as that of the “Pretty Woman”. The dilemma here is not whether it’s OK to fall in love with a prostitute as cute as Julia Roberts whom you hired as eye candy for a party, but something far darker.

A translation of the question (politely stated, with the tell-tale religious acronym for “with heaven’s help” at the top) and the answer by Colonel Krim, follows in full (Hebrew original here):

Question:

I have read on this site about [the halachic issue of] a pretty captive woman, and the relevant portions from the Torah, yet I am left with a question:

In various wars among the nations, such as World War 1, various nations fought amongst themselves, without any of them being particularly “good” or “bad” for the Jews…

But if an army were to conquer a village and rape Jewish girls there, it would have been justly considered as a disaster and a tragedy to the girl and her family.

Therefore, rape during time of war is considered heinous. So how is it that I have been told by a rabbi that “a pretty woman” is permitted, according to some rabbis, even before the process laid out in the Torah? Meaning he may first give in to his urges and lay with her, and only then take her to his home? And so on.

This seems like a contradiction. After all, if the rape of civilians during war is considered to be awful and forbidden, why should Jews supposedly be allowed?

Are IDF soldiers in our time, for example, allowed to rape girls during warfare, or is this forbidden?

Thank you.

.

Answer:

The wars of Israel – both the Mitzvah wars and the wars of choice – are Mitzvah wars. This is how they differ from the wars that take place amongst the nations of the world, between themselves.

Since war in essence is not a matter for the individual but nations war as wholes, there are situations in which the personality of the individual is “erased” for the greater good. And vice versa – at times we may endanger an entire unit to save an individual when this is required for morale.

One of the vital and crucial elements in war is to maintain the army’s fighting capacity. Thus, he who is afraid and faint of heart returns behind the war, so as not to soften the hearts of his brethren, and the emotions and needs of the individual are pushed to the side in favor of national success at war.

Just as during war the boundaries of risking oneself for others are pushed, so are the boundaries of chastity and kosher diet. Foreign wine prohibited during times of peace has been allowed at time of war to maintain the high spirits of the fighters. Prohibited foods have been allowed during wartime (according to some authorities even when there is kosher food available) in order to maintain the fighters’ fitness, although at peacetime they are disallowed.

Thus war also takes precedence over some coital laws. Although having relations with a gentile woman is a very grave act, it was permitted during wartime (under the conditions it was permitted) due to consideration of the difficulties of the fighting men, and since the success of the collective is our main object, the Torah has allowed to indulge the evil urge under the conditions specified, for the success of the collective.

Shalom

Eyal Krim

.

As we Yids say: Oy. I mean, where to start? With the Bronze-Age morality that sees war as a state that suspends all regular notions of justice and decency? To be fair, for that era that was advanced morality. Nobody else prohibited any treatment of war captives at all. Woe to the vanquished was the universal standard, and conquering kings gloried in the trampling of their enemies and rape of their women. The Torah said that even in war actions have consequences, and equaled the penalty of rape at war with that of rape of your neighbors daughter: You had to marry her, and you even had to give her a fortnight month to grieve for her lost family. But what was morally progressive back then is now what we godless buzzkills like to refer to as a war crime. Practiced on a wide enough scale, it can even make crime against humanity.

However, lots of blood has flown out of bodies and been buried in the mud over the millenia since, and at a slower pace, even broadly accepted standards of minimal mandatory morality have risen. Even at war. The entire aftermath and results of WW2, which incidentally featured the greatest slaughter of Jews in history, were a rejection of that notion, which was heartily embraced by the vanquished side in that conflict. If there was supposed to be one group of people that was unanimously, unequivocally against the German variety of the ultra-nationalist plague and all it stood for, it should surely have been the Jews. Or at least so one would think.

Need we go on? Krim is clearly more troubled by the act of having sex of any kind with a goya than by the notion of raping one. Then again, he is only following the inflexible logic of his creed. That IS what the Torah says. The rape is sometimes condoned but consensual relations with a heathen vagina never is.

That such views exist is not surprising. That such views are held by a high ranking military officer, one whose job is to oversee the religious indoctrination forced upon soldiers who come into combat situations in urban areas more than any other in the world, is alarming to say the least, and should lead to deep reflection on the part of Israelis who care in any way about their people’s religion.

Oh, the official response? Glad you asked. When acclaimed blogger (and personal friend, full disclosure) Yossi Gurvitz wrote to IDF Spokesperson’s “New Media” unit to ask whether these statements were consistent with IDF position, and if not what will be done regarding Krim, and how the IDF plans to deal with the possible blowback from this new revelation, he was told that his questions reflected a disrespect both towards the IDF and the Jewish religion, and that therefore the Spokesperson Unit will no longer be replying to his queries on any matter. So there.

In the 19^th century, Judaism was faced for the first time in many centuries with a fundamental schism, as educated Jews who had taken advantage of emancipation laws sought to reconcile the good in Judaism with the universal values of the Enlightenment. From this drive were born the two main branches of world Judaism today: Conservative and Reform. The main difference between the two is that Conservative Judaism accepts the overall authority of the Halacha – that 1800 year-old corpus of religious law expounding on the words of the five books of Moses – while giving itself more freedom to tinker with it than is accepted in the Orthodox world. Reform Judaism, on the other hand, allows itself to simply disregard certain portions of halacha that it finds either irrelevant in the face of modern technology or outdated in the face or modern moral views.

One would think that Reform Judaism would be the natural fit for Israeli progressives. But neither Conservative nor Reform Judaism ever made even the smallest recognizable advance within any segment of Israeli society. They have always existed on the margins, discriminated against in the disbursement of religious-affairs budgets, and devoid of any political clout whatsoever (save that which the anti-clerical left was willing to throw them in order to score hits on the religious parties). Even leftists, who often say they yearn for a “humane” Judaism, don’t throng to the two main alternatives. A young Israeli humanist seeking spiritual food is far more likely to either embrace oriental philosophies or to “see the light” and realize why a creed that grants him special and irrevocable privileges is in fact the one true truth.

This is easily understandable. Both reformation movements are uniquely exile-oriented and were designed explicitly to enable Jews to integrate in societies in which they were not the majority and did not call the shots.

However, the rightward messianic and/or fundamentalist drifts of virtually all parts of Orthodox Judaism in Israel means that anyone who cares about the perpetuation of Israeli Judaism, as a faith that can be professed without being automatically suspect by any right-minded person in the world, must create the grounds for the rise of a Judaism that can maintain a by-and-large consistency with basic modern notions of human rights – even if that means devising a whole new form of Judaism, which while speaking of and to the Jew living on his ancestral land and constituting a majority, is still at least as enlightened as the best of “the nations”. Leaving the definition of free, homegrown Judaism to these retrograde troglodytes will lead to Judaism everywhere being viewed on a level akin to that of the Westboro Baptist Church or the Lord’s Resistance Army.

P.S. Yes, I totally ignored the wonderful people of Shomrei Mishpat – Rabbis For Human Rights, who with precious few numbers do great deeds to restore honor and humanity to the name of Judaism. However, those rabbis are mostly Conservative and Reform, and in any event the humanist version of Judaism has been tested at the ballot box more than once over the past two decades. It never managed to get elected to Knesset on its own.