The portion begins with a martial moment: "When you go out to war against your enemy...." (Deuteronomy 21:10) From the literal point of view, the enemy is a real one, the battle is physical. Force is pitted against force, weapons against weapons, and may the best man win - though the history of warfare proves that often the best man loses and, indeed, no one ever really wins.

Who... is the enemy against whom we must struggle?



The habit of our sages being to see a story within a story, a theme within a theme, it is possible to interpret the reference to war metaphorically, with special pertinence to this time of the year just before Rosh HaShanah. Who, in this sense, is the enemy against whom we must struggle?


Answer: ourselves. We each have a yetzer ha-tov, a good inclination, and a yetzer ha-ra, an evil inclination. At a season of judgment, the two are locked in combat.


It is a familiar theme in the literature of Jewish spirituality - the imbroglio of the inclinations. Shimon Peres said once, "Many observers think that the Israeli people are divided half and half. I think that each Israeli is divided half and half." In the internal struggle within every Jew, not only every Israeli, we might expect that the cheer leading is for the good inclination. The hope is that the evil inclination will be defeated once and for all.


But that's not how the story works out at all. Both inclinations were created by the same God - the Creator of light and also of darkness, of good and of evil (Isaiah 45:7). Since the first chapter of B'reshit keeps on telling us that whatever God made was good, we have to presume that, in some sense, even the evil inclination is also good. If we ever succeeded in crushing and destroying it, the world would lose (Yoma 69b).


In what way is the evil inclination valuable? Symbolising the passions that force us along, the yetzer ha-ra is said to be that drive that leads people to get married and have children, to build houses and to struggle to accumulate possessions (Genesis Rabbah 9:7). What is evil about the "evil" inclination is not that it exists, but that it can take control of human beings to such an extent that they are no longer masters of their own destiny.


One of my children said years agom when refusing to follow parental instructions, "I'm the boss of me!" The war between the inclinations needs us each to reassert control over our lives, to say, "I'm the boss of me!" That's why the rabbis say (Kiddushin 30b) that Torah is the way to control the yetzer ha-ra. Torah represents the ground rules.


Achilles and the Voice of Shofar
Every weekday during Elul the shofar is sounded at the end of the service. It reminds us that when Moses was away on the mountain, the trumpet was sounded in the camp to warn the Israelites not to misconduct themselves. For the Israelites of a later generation, blowing the shofar is a reminder that the Days of Awe are on the way and we should guard ourselves against spiritual or ethical lapses. Whatever we can do to enhance our religious life should be undertaken at this season, especially in terms of our personal Achilles heel.

Whatever we can do to enhance our religious life should be undertaken at this season.



Who was Achilles? In Greek folklore, a fabled hero whose mother plunged him into the river Styx and made his body invulnerable, Superman-like, except for the heel with which she held him. Eventually, he met his death by being wounded in the heel. In our case, we probably all have an Achilles heel that needs to be watched carefully, though we are more fortunate than the mythological Achilles of ancient times, since we can make a conscious decision to remove our problem.


If, as often happens, our Achilles heel is our mouth (a religious version of foot-and-mouth disease), we can get to work on sh'mirat halashon, "guarding our tongue from evil and our lips from speaking guile," as the final meditation of the Amidah prayer puts it. The tongue is such a powerful instrument that we can decide to use it only to speak positively and constructively, and otherwise not to speak at all.