Does the Torah Prescribe Genocide Against the Canaanites?

So one is often told on the basis of statements in the books of Deuteronomy and Joshua, the latter of which is said to describe an actual policy of extermination carried out by the Israelites against the non-Israelite inhabitants of Canaan. But both claims, argues Reuven Kimelman, rest on selective or inaccurate readings:

The popular reading of the [Israelites’ behavior toward the] Canaanites filters it through the prism of Deuteronomy. . . . In actuality, the biblical data are much more ambiguous [than generally assumed], making the most destructive comments the exception, not the rule. . . . With regard to the extermination of the seven nations of Canaan . . . the biblical record is . . . not of one cloth. The clarification of their status in the Bible requires a systematic treatment of all the data book by book. . . . Exodus’ position on the elimination of the Canaanites is a gradual dispossession by God, not by the Israelites.

Read more at Seforim

More about: Canaanites, Deuteronomy, Genocide, Hebrew Bible, Joshua, Religion & Holidays

 

It’s Time for Haredi Jews to Become Part of Israel’s Story

Unless the Supreme Court grants an extension from a recent ruling, on Monday the Israeli government will be required to withhold state funds from all yeshivas whose students don’t enlist in the IDF. The issue of draft exemptions for Haredim was already becoming more contentious than ever last year; it grew even more urgent after the beginning of the war, as the army for the first time in decades found itself suffering from a manpower crunch. Yehoshua Pfeffer, a haredi rabbi and writer, argues that haredi opposition to army service has become entirely disconnected from its original rationale:

The old imperative of “those outside of full-time Torah study must go to the army” was all but forgotten. . . . The fact that we do not enlist, all of us, regardless of how deeply we might be immersed in the sea of Torah, brings the wrath of Israeli society upon us, gives a bad name to all of haredi society, and desecrates the Name of Heaven. It might still bring harsh decrees upon the yeshiva world. It is time for us to engage in damage limitation.

In Pfeffer’s analysis, today’s haredi leaders, by declaring that they will fight the draft tooth and nail, are violating the explicit teachings of the very rabbis who created and supported the exemptions. He finds the current attempts by haredi publications to justify the status quo not only unconvincing but insincere. At the heart of the matter, according to Pfeffer, is a lack of haredi identification with Israel as a whole, a lack of feeling that the Israeli story is also the haredi story:

Today, it is high time we changed our tune. The new response to the demand for enlistment needs to state, first and foremost to ourselves, that this is our story. On the one hand, it is crucial to maintain and even strengthen our isolation from secular values and culture. . . . On the other hand, this cultural isolationism must not create alienation from our shared story with our fellow brethren living in the Holy Land. Participation in the army is one crucial element of this belonging.

Read more at Tzarich Iyun

More about: Haredim, IDF, Israeli society