Defaming God in God’s name - The Jewish Standard

Whenever the world’s media report on Israel’s Finance Minister Betzalel Smotrich or its former National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir, one item on each of them stands out for all to see: the kippot they wear on their heads.

I imagine that, like me, neither of them is even conscious of putting on a kippah. It is simply second nature to us. To the outside world, however, those kippot symbolize Judaism and its core beliefs, because observant Jews wear them.

A kippah is a symbol of sorts, but not in the way the world thinks, and wearing one was not even a halachic requirement until relatively recently. In the 18th century, for example, Rabbi Elijah Ben Solomon Zalman, of blessed memory, the acclaimed Vilna Gaon, ruled that “it is permitted to enter a synagogue and to pray” with head uncovered, because “there is no prohibition…at all.”

Keeping one’s head covered is mandatory today, at least when praying, reciting blessings, or studying sacred texts. As to why head coverings should be worn at least part of the time, the Babylonian Talmud tractate Shabbat (156b) offers an answer: “so that the fear of heaven may be upon you.” The Shulchan Aruch says that doing so is one way to “honor God.” (S.A. Orach Chayim 2:6.) The Vilna Gaon, in his commentary to S.A. Orach Chayim 8:2, says that it “is a good moral practice.”

If the “fear of heaven” is upon Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, however — if they understand what Judaism considers to be “a good moral practice” — it is not reflected in their politics, which dishonors God in so many substantive ways. Bluntly stated, they are guilty of committing a chilul ha-Shem, the sin of causing God’s holy name to be disgraced. When I was in yeshivah, our rabbis suggested that there were times when we should not wear our kippot in the outside world to avoid creating a chilul ha-Shem. To this day, I wear a hat over my kippah in public for that reason.

After a religious Israeli extremist assassinated Prime Minister Yitzchak Rabin in November 1995, the highly respected rabbi, talmudic scholar, and leader of Israel’s modern Orthodox community, the late Rabbi Aharon Lichtenstein, z”l, spoke about it at a Teaneck synagogue. He began his speech by raising his right hand straight up and, in a pained voice, said, “How can the hand that put on tefillin in the morning take a human life at night?”

His point was that tefillin are not ends onto themselves. They are meant to remind us that we need to follow God’s code of ethics and morality as the Torah records that code and our Sages of Blessed Memory interpreted it. The hand tefillah reminds us that we may not use our hands to harm someone, just as the tefillah on our heads reminds us not to dream up ways of harming someone. A kippah serves that purpose all day long — or it should.

That is totally lost on Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and, doubtless, their many followers. And because they have the votes in the Knesset to bring down the current government, that message is lost on Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who has little regard for Torah law in any case. (Two years ago next week, for example, he demonstrated that disregard when he and his wife, Sara, allowed themselves to be filmed having Friday night dinner in chef Gordon Ramsey’s very non-kosher London restaurant.)

There is no other way to explain Netanyahu’s decision to bar “the entry of all goods and supplies to the Gaza Strip,” as his official statement put it. Bibi may not care that starving Gaza’s non-combatants and civilians into submission violates Torah law on many levels, but Smotrich and Ben-Gvir must care, yet they make no secret that doing so is their dream come true.

Ben-Gvir, in fact, has pushed for this from almost the beginning of the conflict. On Oct. 17, 2023, he posted this on X, the former Twitter: “The only thing that needs to enter Gaza are hundreds of tons of explosives from the Air Force, not an ounce of humanitarian aid.” He resigned from the cabinet in January because Netanyahu chose instead to agree to the ceasefire-for-hostages deal. Smotrich stayed only because he hoped to change Bibi’s mind, which he finally did.

For his part, on March 2, Smotrich hailed the decision because “opening the gates of hell” was “an important step in the right direction.” He added that “we must open these gates as quickly and lethally as possible against the cruel enemy, until complete victory” is achieved, “and God willing, it will be so.”

The next day, Ben-Gvir also welcomed the decision but said it did not go far enough. “Gaza must endure hell,” he insisted. Israel had to “suffocate Hamas” by bombing all the existing aid depots in Gaza and by totally cutting off its electricity and water supplies. On March 9, Netanyahu, in fact, ordered Israel’s share of Gaza’s electricity supply to be turned off. Gaza, Ben-Gvir said, “must be plunged into complete darkness immediately as long as there are still Israeli captives.”

Earlier this week, on Tuesday, Bibi and his Likud Party ally, Defense Minister Israel Katz, gave Smotrich and Ben-Gvir even more of what they demand by opening the “gates of hell.” That is how Katz described the resumption of hostilities. Said he: “Hamas must understand that the rules of the game have changed.” Either Hamas immediately releases all the hostages, the living and the dead, or “the gates of hell will open, and it will face the full might of the IDF in the air, at sea and on land.”

Several former hostages have accused Ben-Gvir of making their ordeal worse with “every irresponsible statement” he has made since they were captured. Not only has he refused to apologize to those making this accusation, but he acknowledged that Hamas might kill all the remaining hostages if the government follows his advice. But, he said, that was a price Israel had to pay “for its continued existence.”

All too many secular Jews say such things, of course, but when such words are spoken by obviously religious Jews who claim to zealously follow the word of God, it leads people in the outside world to think ill of “the God of the Jews,” and that is a chilul ha-Shem.

God’s Torah, however, is totally opposed to the views espoused by Smotrich and Ben-Gvir, and so many others on the religious far-right.

Using starvation as a weapon of war is nothing new, of course, but it is what other people do, not something the Torah sanctions. It may even threaten Israel’s “continued existence.” As the 19th-century biblical commentator and founder of neo-Orthodoxy Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, z”l, warned in commenting on several verses in Leviticus 18, the Land of Israel is “the land of God.” If we who are “the People of God” adopt the immoral ways of the Other, “the land…will vomit out that society even as any organism will reject an element that has become incompatible with it.”

To be sure, nothing in the Torah explicitly prohibits starving an enemy population into submission, but it is implicit in the laws it does give us. For example, Deuteronomy 20:19–20 explicitly forbids needlessly destroying an enemy’s food trees during a siege. From that, we derive the implicit commandment forbidding the wanton destruction of anything (the principle known as bal tashchit, “do not destroy”), which includes forbidding causing indiscriminate harm to civilians and their sustenance.

Based on that verse and on rules of war found in Numbers 31, Maimonides (the Rambam) ruled that in besieging a city, the army may “not encircle it from all four sides, but only on three. We leave one side open … [so that] anyone who wishes to escape with his life may do so. (Codified in Mishneh Torah, the Laws of Kings and Their Wars 6:7.)

Rules such as these severely curtail, if not altogether prohibit, the kind of tactics the likes of Smotrich and Ben-Gvir advocate, and that Netanyahu has now adopted. Even when military action is called for, the Torah and rabbinic tradition insist on the preservation of noncombatant life and the avoidance of unnecessary suffering and destruction.

Uppermost in this is the concept of tohar haneshek, purity of arms. It requires that the use of force must be directed exclusively against armed enemies while avoiding causing harm to noncombatants and civilians. That is not possible when bombing Hamas and Islamic Jihad enclaves because these terrorists deliberately use human shields to increase the civilian body count to turn the world against Israel. However, cutting off supplies of food, electricity, and water from an entire population is not the same thing.

The late Rabbi Shlomo Goren, z”l, a one-time IDF chief rabbi and later an Ashkenazic chief rabbi of Israel, insisted that “the principle of tohar haneshek must always guide us, so that our weapons remain pure in our hands.” Because “the sanctity of human life [the principle of pikuach nefesh] is a cardinal value in the Torah,” he said, “we must take great care to avoid harming the innocent” when going on the offensive against an enemy who attacks us. “This is a moral imperative,” he added, and it must define the very character of Israel’s army, “which is governed by both Jewish law and ethical considerations.”

Other rabbis have said similar things, including Rabbis Lichtenstein and Shlomo Aviner, and the late Rabbis Yehudah Amital and Shaul Yisraeli of blessed memory.

Benjamin Netanyahu may care little for halachic concepts as tohar haneshek, pikuach nefesh, and bal tashchit, but people like Betzalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben-Gvir do have to care because of what their kippot require of those who wear them, just as they have to avoid a chilul ha-Shem, defaming God’s Holy Name, by ignoring what their kippot stand for.

Shammai Engelmayer is a rabbi-emeritus of Congregation Beth Israel of the Palisades and an adult education teacher in Bergen County. He is the author of eight books and the winner of 10 awards for his commentaries. His website is www.shammai.org.

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