Va'etchanan

Va'etchanan - Miriam Bayfield

Miriam Bayfield is the Associate Rabbi of Finchley Reform Synagogue in London and a member of the Limmud Executive.

I can just imagine what those reporters on the BBC or CNN would make of this Shabbat's Torah reading. "Jews around the globe united in their defiance of the Arab world by chanting in unison about conquering the Land and eliminating the nations there. They emphasised the inhabitants' destruction, offering them no compromise and giving them no quarter."

This section of Parashat Va'etchanan (Deuteronomy 7:1-8) is not easy to read with our modern sensibilities. These verses form part of Moses' long speech, describing what God wills them to do on entering the Land. He explains that they must both destroy the inhabitants of Canaan and separate themselves from them so as not to take on their gods.

My fear is that Jeremy Bowen and Robert Fisk, as well as some within our own communities, would read God's promise and conclude that it is these words which have led to today's misery in the Middle East.

However I will stand in Synagogue this Shabbat and read these verses without shame and with no embarrassment at what others may think about my relationship to Israel.

As a Reform Jew I understand the book of Deuteronomy, in its written form, to be a very late piece of work, edited some time during the 7th century BCE and linked very closely to the major religious reforms carried out by King Josiah in 622 BCE. It is the battle that Josiah was fighting that is reflected in his seemingly brutal view of the inhabitants of the land.

Josiah's religious reforms were the result of his struggle for Judean religious, cultural and political autonomy. Josiah was trying to maintain the distinction between the religion of his One God and the influences of the ever-encroaching Assyrians. Above all, Josiah was speaking with hindsight. He was asking himself the question: what if we had dealt differently with the inhabitants when entering the land? Surely if they had been destroyed or if people had understood the need to keep the cultures separate, the situation he found himself in all those years later would never have arisen.

We know from the narrative of the books of Joshua and Judges that the actual process of settlement was one of slow and gradual infiltration, small-scale battles and gradual settlement amongst the other peoples. If you like, it was a model for the difficult process of finding our place amongst other peoples and gradually acquiring a land of our own. So why does Deuteronomy suggest such brutality? Because it is written with hindsight. It is written with the comfort of knowing that is simply not how we did or would ever act but allows us to express the frustration of what trying to live alongside other people can lead to - syncretism, assimilation and betrayal.

King Josiah knew that it would have made his life easier to destroy anyone who tried to encroach religiously and politically. But he also knew that the answer lay not with an imagined past programme of violence but with the religious rejuvenation and reform that he embarked on.

As we read these verses from the portion this week, all these many generations after Josiah, we too can understand that sometimes violence is a necessary evil but our support for Israel and our prayers for its safety are about stating our rights to our own secure religious and political entity and not about the destruction of another people.