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March 21, 2003/Adar2 17 5763, Vol. 55, No. 30
Rabbis support U.S. attack on Iraq
STEWART AIN
Jewish Week
In deciding whether the United States should attack Iraq, rabbinic leaders from the different streams of Judaism are drawing upon Talmudic and biblical sources such as the Exodus story in which Moses and Aaron ultimately resort to "force" to win freedom for the Jews.
And while the rabbinic leadership appears largely behind President George W. Bush, the Jewish community as a whole is deeply divided. Except for the Orthodox, leaders of the other movements said there was no consensus among their congregants about whether to go to war now.
Rabbi Ammiel Hirsch, executive director of the Reform movement's ARZA-World Union, North America, cited the Talmudic principle that "if one seeks to kill you, rise early in the morning and kill him first. The whole notion propagated by various people that you have a moral obligation to absorb the first blow is not Judaism's perspective at all."
Rabbi Peter Levi of Temple Chai, a Reform congregation in Phoenix, agreed. "You do not have to wait until someone has pulled the trigger to defend yourself."
Hirsch also said that although he is "sensitive to the moral cautionary sentiments coming from so many quarters around the world, if the risks are as the president articulates, that to me is morally compelling.
"I'm very sensitive to the oppression of the Iraqi people," he added. "They have a moral claim to be liberated - and by force as a last resort. That is the lesson of the Exodus. Moses and Aaron tried to persuade Pharaoh (to free the Jews) and the only thing that worked was force."
Rabbi Hershel Billet, president of the Orthodox movement's Rabbinical Council of America, said Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein is an "evil" man and that there is a "fundamental com-mandment in the Bible to eradicate evil" from our midst.
Rabbi Zvi Holland of the Phoenix Community Kollel cited a passage by Maimonides to prove that action against Iraq is moral and warranted. "War should not be waged against anybody until he is offered the opportunity of peace (Laws of Kings and Wars chapter 6:1)," quoted Holland. "It seems that after 14 years, Saddam Hussein has been given ample chance to avert this conflict. There is a real sense of fear that he is a threat to not only Israel but the U.S. as well," he added.
The war against Iraq is justified as a war of self-defense, according to Rabbi Mark Bisman of Har Zion Congregation, a Conservative congregation in Scottsdale. "I assume politically that Saddam Hussein and Iraq are a serious enemy of Israel and the Jewish people and represent a threat to the United States by supporting those who do us harm," he explained.
Rabbi Ismar Schorsch, chancellor of the Con-servative movement's Jewish Theological Seminary, who last September expressed concern about an American attack without international consensus, applauded Bush for seeking United Nations support but criticized him for "becoming impatient for no reason."
"There is nothing urgent about going to war to-morrow," he argued. "Iraq is not a threat at this point, either to the United States or its neighbors. The evidence simply is not there."
Rabbi Michael Wasserman of The New Shul, a traditional-egalitarian congregation in Scottsdale, also has his reservations about the de-cision to go to war.
"Saddam Hussein is a tyrant and a menace - but this is a war of choice, not of necessity. Going to war now is a legitimate thing to do, but that does not automatically make it a wise thing to do, particularly when it isolates us from the rest of the world," said Wasserman. "I am also concerned that the American people have not been prepared for the hard and long task of building democracy in Iraq. I am afraid that the goal of democratization may be forgotten once our attention turns elsewhere."
Rabbi David Ellenson, president of the Reform movement's Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion in Cincinnati, said he believes President George W. Bush has "built a plau-sible case that Iraq and its regime pose a real danger to persons in the Middle East. It is a regime that oppresses its own people and promotes terrorism. Therefore, from all of these perspectives, it seems to me that a war against such a people is justified from the vantage point of Jewish teaching."
Billet said the Orthodox community is generally more conservative politically than other Jews and that he suspects they support Bush.
"I have a shul of 850 families and the over-whelming majority of con-gregants agree" with the president, he added.
The executive leaders of the Reform, Conservative and Reconstructionist move-ments' congregational arms all said their members are split on the need for war now.
"The Jewish community is very ambivalent and divided," said Rabbi Eric Yoffie, president of the Reform movement's Union of American Hebrew Congre-gations.
Judy Wortman, executive vice president of the Jewish Reconstructionist Fed-eration, said: "Our congre-gations are all over the continuum. ... There is not a consensus within the con-gregations."
At least two local con-gregations lack consensus concerning the decision to go to war against Iraq.
"(Temple Chai) is torn in both directions," said Levi. Some congregants are con-vinced about the need for force and others are more ambivalent and question why the U.N. needs to be cir-cumvented, he added.
"Har Zion is a community split over whether United States should go to war," noted Bisman. There are many congregants who are questioning Bush's diplomacy at this time, he said.
Stewart Ain is a staff writer for the New York Jewish Week.
Editor Barry Cohen contributed to this article.
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