Ki Tetze: All-Out War
Ki Tetze: All-Out War

Historian Sir Martin Gilbert relates a story about the Six Day War:

On June 1,1967, four days before Israel attacked the Egyptian Air Force in order to break Egypt's illegal blockade of the Gulf of Akaba and Eilat,  Moshe Dayan (appointed that very day to be Minister of Defense) met with the IDF's Chief of Staff Yitzchak Rabin and Head of Southern Command Yeshayahu Gavish. Dayan asked the two soldiers to present their plans for the imminent war. For years, Rabin had been advocating a limited war in just such a scenario, to conquer Gaza and use it as a bargaining-chip to get Egypt to open the Gulf. Gavish had planned an ambitious attack of Egypt deep in Sinai. Rabin turned to Gavish and told him to" give the war plan to the Minister".

Gavish asked: "Which plan?"

"The second", answered Rabin. The rest is history (Israel: A History, page380).

This week's parsha opens with the words:" When you go out to war". The Slonimer Rebbe quotes the Zohar that the war discussed here is the war each Jew embarks upon every year in the month of Elul, thirty days before Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur: the war against Evil, against one's own evil inclination ( Netivot Shalom, Devarim, pages 127-131). The Rebbe notes that the Rashi here cites the Talmud (Kiddushin21b), which says that here "the Torah speaks keneged (in direct opposition to) the yetzer hara (the Evil Inclination)". Kneged, says the Rebbe, hints at total opposition.

It implies not merely a battle on this or that Mitzva of the Torah, on details; the Thirty Day War of Elul is not that a person chooses some commandment or commandments that he has been lax in fulfillment, and writes a list of New Year's Resolutions for improvement. Rather, the war described here is a total war against Evil, "a generalized war to rule (lehishtalet) totally over the enemy; not to be satisfied with limited goals, merely to disobey the Inclination here and there, but to conquer (kovesh) him and absolutely subdue him under your power, as is says:' Who is mighty? One who conquers hisy yetzer hara (Ethics of Our Fathers, chap.4)' ".

The Slonimer Rebbe also comments that "when you go out (Ki Tetzei)" implies an active, preemptive strike against the enemy, "for only thus can one hope to utterly subdue him, as opposed to the early war of Joshua against Amalek/Evil , in which Evil was merely weakened.(Exodus17,13)".

Rav Matis Weinberg has a different approach to the idea of Ki Tetzei, "going out to war". He also notes how it refers to Elul and the war on the yetzer hara, but also stresses that "this is a war of reshut (non obligatory)" as is stated in the opening Rashi to Ki Tetzei. The 'going out' refers to the permission the individual and the nation has to leave our borders (Rambam, Hilchot Melachim,chapter 8, with opening Radvaz), both physical and spiritual.

It refers to the vast contemporary issue of Tradition versus pushing the envelope outward, to include within Israel the "eishet yefat toar", the beautiful woman captive, i.e. the world's beauty. Obviously, this is one very risky war of "reshut", involving all the dangers we see today, of assimilation and intermarriage. But Torah and Israel were meant to include all the world's beauty, and the issue in "war of reshut" is our divine-granted right to absorb the best of the world and "bring it into our house "(Deut.21,12). This requires not only kivush/conquering, but also a difficult "filtering process, the 'taking off the captive's garb, the mourning of the captive for mother and father, the shaving of the head and the overgrowing of fingernails', all of which are needed to remove the Beauty from her cultural context, with all its depravity and evil".

Moreover, this "going out (to war)" demands what both the Slonimer Rebbe and Rabbi Weinberg denote is " latzeit me'atzmo legamrei", to totally leave one’s preconceptions and previous existence. This is the beginning of Teshuva, of the creation of one's personality and of the Nation's character, during the Elul-High Holy Days period. Success in this War of Elul requires the baal Teshuva to leave all options open, regarding no life-choices as closed to him, "placing his soul in the palm of his hand, fearing nothing, with no thought of wife or children; wiping all thought of them from his consciousness, clearing himself from everything but the battle at hand(Rambam,Hil.Melachim,chap,15;7)".

This is the most vital part of all, because we readily fool ourselves and believe we already know the important parameters of life, dancing(cult-like, as it were) around our own preconceived Golden Calves. Rabbi Weinberg even mentions that the Zohar on this Parsha of Yefat Toar refers to our sin of " revealing the nakedness of the Lord Himself and His Torah", to our 'illicit relationship' with the Almighty Himself, based on our false premises and narrow, man-made, idolatrous  spiritual horizons.  

This leaves Israel, this Elul, with the necessity to start thinking outside of the box of our fixed notions. For all our progress in so many arenas, we are still a people who can summon Rabbis Shapira and Lior to a police investigation over a book of Halakha; that can't say "no freeze" to the weakest US President and US in decades; and whose Prime Minister can espouse the murderous, dangerous two-state solution, with all its connotations of further "disengagements". As the prophet Isaiah says in the Haftorah, only serious "broadening of our tents (our mental horizons), stretching of our partitions and lengthening of our cords" will lead us to seek serious solutions to the quagmire in which we find ourselves, and to "Tetzei", get out of the box.