48 | MAY 16 • 2024
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hen Shlomo Brody told a
learned colleague that he,
Brody, was working on
writing a book on Jewish military ethics,
the colleague responded, “That’s going to
be a very short book.”
The colleague had reasons for
skepticism. Biblical sources instruct
soldiers of the kingdoms of Judah and
Israel in response to the norms of war in
antiquity; it seems plausible that modern
warfare has different norms.
For the past two millennia, Jews have
generally existed as partially tolerated
minorities in someone else’s country.
The world’s political leaders and military
commanders chose their actions without
consulting Jewish sages. Jews more
often participated in warfare as civilian

casualties. Over those centuries, rabbinic
literature has rarely had to confront the
ethical challenges of modern warfare.
When Jews were drafted, rabbis
advised them on a narrower agenda:
how to hold on to Jewish identity or
ritual practices while serving in national
armies.
But as Jewish communities in pre-
state Israel faced violent opposition,
they needed organized self-defense; and
then as the nation of Israel achieved
independence surrounded by ferocious
enemies, it needed a national army.
Reality rather suddenly confronted
modern Jews with all the ethical
challenges of military force. Political
leaders, military commanders, secular
ethicists and rabbinic scholars argued

about what principles should apply, and
how to apply those principles, even as
fighters engaged in unavoidable bloody
conflicts. Jewish military ethics had to
grow up fast; “Jewish Military Ethics”
could not remain a short book.
“Following many centuries of
powerlessness,” Brody observes, “Jews
needed to ask: What does it mean to
fight as a Jew?”

CASE STUDIES
In each case study in Ethics of Our
Fighters, Shlomo Brody presents a
dramatic life-and-death confrontation in
real life and competing recommendations
for what fighters should have done.
Brody tells the stories in rough in
increasing analytic subtlety. He begins
with incidents in World War I that
inspired Rabbi Aaron Samuel Tamares
(1869-1931) to the absolute pacifist
evaluation that taking part in war
amounts to idolatry. Brody repeatedly
manages, in the course of three or four
pages, to involve readers in a compelling
dramatic military account, and then
to sympathetically present contrasting
evaluations of the combatants’ actions.
Brody moves seamlessly among the

Ethical Warfare

Review of Ethics of Our Fighters: A Jewish
View on War and Morality by Shlomo Brody.

LOUIS FINKELMAN CONTRIBUTING WRITER

BOOK REVIEW

Rabbi Shlomo Bordy
was featured on
Israel National News.

ARTS&LIFE