Striking the Rock

Both sides in the Gaza crisis should reflect on what the Torah teaches about our responses under pressure.

By Haim Watzman

As the world watches the Israeli invasion of Gaza, international debate rages about the correctness of the military action and whether Palestinian provocation merited the intensity of the Israeli response. Can the Torah help us navigate the dilemmas Israel faces?

The portion of the Torah Jews read during the week of June 25, which began with a deadly Palestinian guerrilla attack on an Israeli army unit and the abduction of a young soldier, Gilad Shalit, into Gaza, was Parashat Hukkat (Numbers 19:1 - 22:1). At its center is one of the Bible's best-known stories. Moses strikes a rock to bring forth water for the thirsty children of Israel, for which God punishes him by denying him entry into the Promised Land.

Given the devastating nature of the punishment, one would think that the nature of our greatest prophet's sin would be clear and unequivocal. Here, if anywhere, one would expect the Torah to be explicit about what Moses did wrong and why the penalty was a fitting one.

Yet the text is ambiguous--so much so that the great 19th-century Italian commentator, Shmuel David Luzzatto, refused to elucidate the question. His predecessors, he said, had attributed no less than 13 sins to Moses, and he feared that if he thought about it, he'd burden the poor man with yet another transgression.

Moses had to provide his thirsty people with water. Israel must provide its citizens with security. Its incursion into Gaza is a clear case of self-defense. Our government has held back for months as Islamic militants used the Gaza Strip to attack Israeli towns with rockets. The range of the rockets is improving. Just this past week, one fell on a school in the center of Ashkelon, a city that is home to important infrastructure and facilities. After Islamic militants from Gaza staged a carefully planned and executed attack on a military target, leaving two soldiers dead and one a hostage, Israel's right to engage in military action was unquestionable.

However, having the right to invade and bomb Gaza doesn't mean that invading and bombing Gaza is necessarily the right thing to do. Military force is a blunt instrument for achieving diplomatic, political, and strategic goals. Even precision attacks too often miss their mark, killing the wrong people—as we have seen in recent weeks in the Gaza Strip. Furthermore, since even armies with the best possible intelligence operate in the face of many unknowns, the outcomes of military actions are notoriously hard to predict. A single misstep—striking camp too far away from the nearest source of water—lost the Crusaders their kingdom in a single, agonizing battle.

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