I, like millions of other Americans, was initially attracted to your candidacy by your opposition to the war in Iraq and, more broadly, by your way of seeing the role of the United States in the world. Ultimately this was only one of the many reasons that we volunteered for you, donated money to your campaign, voted for you, and believe that you can transform politics and leadership in this country.
I write in the fervent desire that you will stick with that vision.
You are inheriting the leadership of a country engaged in two wars. You have promised to quickly end our engagement in Iraq and bring our soldiers home. However, you have also promised to increase troop levels in Afghanistan and fight al Qaeda along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. You did not get us into this war, but I am hoping that even here you will place a premium on the role of diplomacy.
I do not intend to give you advice about how to wage war. I want to urge you to spend a lot more time thinking about waging peace. The so-called "war on terror" is a futile and disastrous affair. A recent Rand Corporation study has suggested that the term "war on terror" not be used anymore. According to the study, of the 648 cases of terrorist groups that existed between 1968 and 2006 and "ended," only 7 percent were terminated by military force. On the other hand, 40 percent of the groups stopped functioning as terrorist groups because they were incorporated into the political process.
It is important to reorient our thinking away from the tried and truculent truisms of the Pentagon and Capitol Hill. While the U.S. armed forces are pushing for billions for new weapons, more than 1,000 diplomatic and foreign service positions remain unfilled. We must stop our participation in the armed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and begin to think anew about the role of war in global affairs.
Jewish tradition is not essentially pacifist. However, the fact that nations wage war does not cause the tradition to celebrate that fact. The opposite is the truth. The middle third of the Tanakh, the Jewish Bible, is called Nevi'im, or Prophets. It can be divided in two. The first part of the prophetic books, traditionally referred to as the First Prophets (Joshua, Judges, Samuel, and Kings), is part of the mythic history of the Jewish people. In these sometimes very bloody books, war is waged and territory captured.
The second part, the Later Prophets, is a critique of the power politics and the associated injustices and waging of war of the first part. Joshua kills and burns his way into and across Canaan, and the book of Judges recounts the cycles of sin, occupation, violence, and military salvation of the decentralized tribal Israel. But the prophets Isaiah and Jeremiah put the poor and the widow at the center of their concerns, and exhort Israel to justice and peace, to turn swords into plowshares.
Israel, like all nations, has a mythical history that explains how it became a nation. That myth put the possibility of freedom from oppression into the world, but it was also bloody and martial. The genius of Rabbinic Judaism was to sequester the ability to make war in the mythic past. On the one hand, the midrash (rabbinic commentary) adds to Joshua another narrative layer in which the Israelites consistently sue for peace before laying siege, while the Babylonian Talmud transposes David from a warrior king into a sage and a scholar who spent his days engrossed in the study of Torah. On the other hand, the halachic or Jewish legal tradition places the bar for waging war so high-there is a need for a king and the acquiescence of the Great Sanhedrin-that it is impossible to legally wage war according to Jewish law.
The inevitable conclusion that one must reach from a comprehensive reading of the Jewish tradition is that war is a theological problem for Judaism; that the world was not created so that nations should war against each other, as one early-twentieth-century rabbi puts it.
As we go forward in an Obama administration, I hope that you will conduct your foreign policy from within a framework in which the unleashing of the uncontrolled and uncontrollable violence that is modern warfare is taken off the table. I urge you to fill all the diplomatic posts and put even a very small percentage of the budget of the Department of Defense toward research into peacemaking.
We have never tried this way, the way of waging peace. We do not know what solutions will be found on that path. It is sure, however, that in that direction is found change and hope. "Then shall your light burst through like the dawn."
Aryeh Cohen teaches Talmud at the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies of the American Jewish University. He is one of the founders of Jews Against the War (jewsagainstthewar.org).
