Precepts and Pragmatics

[HT: meh.feh.blah]

Israel’s current process of disengagement from the Gaza Strip is not a failure of faith. It’s a public policy decided on by Israel’s government. The country’s leaders have come to the conclusion that Israel has no vital interests in that territory and that the task of defending the settlements and the roads leading to them are straining a seriously overtaxed army facing a Palestinian rebellion that probably cannot be brought to a peaceful resolution any time soon. It’s all the more telling that this conclusion has been reached by Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, the former general who spent most of his political career pushing for the establishment of as many settlements as possible.

Sharon is not a religious man, but religious Jews should in principle have no problem with taking practical considerations into account when making decisions of policy, even in a Jewish state. One only has to open a page of Talmud or a Jewish legal treatise to see how sages and rabbis have always balanced belief and precept against the practicalities of specific times, places, and concepts. Judaism is a legal religion, and the Jewish legal literature is in large part case law—rabbis addressing specific cases and problems rather than conducting rarefied philosophical discussions.

That’s why I can believe that God gave the land of Israel to the Jewish people, and at the same time argue that that general principle does not lead inexorably to the conclusion that the current state of Israel must control and settle Jews in all parts of that land. God gave us the land but he also gave us minds and powers of judgment.

from Let My People Leave by Haim Watzman at Beliefnet]