My mother taught me Jews are above vengeance. The Israel-Hamas war is finally making me doubt her
In the wake of the Oct. 7 terrorist attack on Israel, understanding the difference between justice and vengeance is crucial
Mahmud al-Astal, a Palestinian nurse, attends to a little girl with a head wound at Gaza’s Nasser hospital after Israeli airstrikes on Khan Yunis in the southern Gaza Strip on Friday. Photo by MAHMUD HAMS/AFP via Getty Images
Growing up in suburban Chicago in the decades following World War II, I was instructed by my mother in the conviction that, as Jews, we always held ourselves to a higher moral standard than that exercised by much of the rest of the world.
A proud naturalized American and an equally proud Jew, she often cited the precept “an eye for an eye,” first deciphered from an ancient inscription attributed to the Mesopotamian King Hammurabi. Like many Conservative Jews in the postwar years, she had learned about that idea from the commentary in the Hertz Pentateuch, in which the then-Chief Rabbi of England interpreted the biblical code of ethics as a major leap forward from that ancient code.
Now, as we brace for a seemingly inevitable Israeli ground attack on Gaza after Hamas’ Oct. 7 terrorist attack on innocent Israeli civilians, I wonder how my mother would respond. How, if at all, can Jews hold ourselves to a standard that focuses on higher aims than revenge against the “other” — Hamas, Palestinians in Gaza or the West Bank, the “Arab world” — where many are celebrating the attack?
Part of the trouble has to do with the distinction between revenge and justice. As Francis Bacon put it in the 16th century, “Revenge is a kind of wild Justice; which the more Man’s nature runs to, the more ought the Law to weed it out.” And as much as I believe, like my mother, that Jews must hold themselves to a higher moral standard, recent Jewish history itself illustrates this difference.
After the Holocaust, the Nuremberg trials enacted justice for some of the most egregious offenders. But there were groups of Holocaust survivors who resorted to vengeance instead — to such a degree that, had law not interfered, they might have committed a true atrocity. “Ha-nokmim,” or “The Avengers,” led by Abba Kovner, one of the leaders and survivors of the uprising in the Vilna ghetto, prepared a list of 13 million targets who were known or thought to have been involved with the Nazis.
They succeeded only in sickening some 2,000 Germans with poison, with no known deaths; their plot to poison the water system in postwar Germany was thwarted at the last minute by British military police, who had been alerted to the plan.
The clear distinction between the moral right of the justice enacted by the Nuremberg trials and the terror Kovner and his followers aspired to create complicates a common perception about the moral universe around the Shoah, in which many see only two groups of people: the Jews, innocent victims, and the Nazis, the incarnation of evil. For many modern Jews, we are all Holocaust survivors — even if no one in our immediate family was a direct victim.
But that’s a dangerous simplification of victim and victimizer. And only now, in the context of the escalating violence, have I come to realize how much of Jewish tradition in fact condones the very vengeance my mother cautioned me against — leading back to Amalek, the archetypal biblical enemy whom Torah instructs us must be both remembered and “blotted out.”
“In every generation they stand up to destroy us,” Jews chant during the Passover service, before we are told to open our door and to invoke God’s fury upon those “who do not know You.” In Psalm 94, God is addressed as “El nekamot,” or “God of Vengeance.” Psalm 137, which sweetly begins “By the waters of Babylon,” ends with a vow: “Fair Babylon you predator,/ A blessing on him who repays you in kind/ what you have inflicted on us. A blessing on him who seizes your babies/ and dashes them against the rocks.” (These verses are often suppressed in upbeat musical renditions.)
When Elie Wiesel’s Night, his memoir of Auschwitz and Buchenwald, first appeared in Yiddish in Argentina as Un di Velt hot Geshvign — in English, And the World was Silent — it ended with a vision of vengeance that was omitted from later versions. Scholars including Naomi Seidman who have studied this version emphasize Wiesel’s castigation of his fellow survivors for thinking of nothing but food: “They did not fulfill the historical commandment of revenge,” Wiesel wrote.
What is almost inevitable about revenge is that the so-called “first cause” is generally forgotten once the vengeful spirit has been unleashed. The play Scorched, by the Lebanese Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad, focuses on the civil war in Lebanon. In it, a doctor speaks of three young refugees who strayed outside the camps and were hanged by the militia:
Why did the militia hang the three teenagers? Because two refugees from the camp had raped and killed a girl from the village of Kfar Samira. Why did they rape the girl? Because the militia had stoned a family of refugees. Why did the militia stone them? Because the refugees had set fire to a house near the hill where thyme grows. Why did the refugees set fire to the house? To take revenge on the militia who had destroyed a well they had drilled. Why did the militia destroy the well? Because the refugees had burned the crop near the river where the dogs run. Why did they burn the crop? There must be a reason, but that’s as far back as my memory goes … but the story can go on forever…
I see that loss of historical understanding unfolding in Israel today, as vengeance, rather than justice, appears to be an ever-more-dominant force.
Perhaps the most powerful revelation of the Jewish attraction to revenge came in 1986, when David Grossman, in See Under: Love, exhorted Israeli readers to explore “the Little Nazi in you.” Then his words were seen as radical. But today, the Jewish reflex towards vengeance he was referring to is being openly, shamelessly galvanized in military strikes against Gaza in response to Hamas’ barbaric slaughter of innocent Israelis in early October.
Army rabbis are invoking Amalek in conversations about the war, Amos Harel wrote in Haaretz on Oct. 19: “There has never been so much talk of vengeance in Israel … And if this weren’t enough, army rabbis are now wandering around bases and preaching the biblical injunction to destroy Amalek.”
These vengeful intentions portend unbridled violence against not only Hamas, but also whole communities of innocent Palestinians caught in the crossfire. (In a cruel twist of irony, most of the casualties of the brutal attack in southern Israel were peace-loving Israelis who, in the last election, voted against Bibi.) It is vengeance, not justice, that is taking the lives of innocents on both sides. For zealots on both sides, vengefully purifying the land is fulfilling God’s — or Allah’s — will.
As the most primitive form of religious confrontation, there is a terrible realization of the concept my mother so despised — “an eye for an eye” — in the retaliatory cycle of actions between Hamas and the current Israeli government.
I take grim solace in the fact that my mother is not alive to witness all the blind survivors who will grope their way through the rubble. After all, as our “national poet” H.N. Bialik wrote in his response to the Kishinev Pogrom of 1903, it’s a cycle that risks dooming us all. “And cursed be the man who says:/ Avenge!” he wrote. “No such revenge — revenge for/ the blood of a little child — has yet been/ devised by Satan.”
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