Our lengthy Torah reading this week (the longest of the year), contains two passages near the beginning and the end which seem totally contradictory. At the beginning of Parshat Matot we read of the war against the Midianites. Even by ancient standards this seems to be waged with exemplary cruelty, Moses commanding the killing of the women, not only the men. While this is explained by the fact that it was primarily the women that were involved with seducing the Israelites into apostasy, leading to thousands of casualties, it still raises questions about the moral principles of the Torah.

In contrast, at the end of Parshat Masei we have the laws of murder and manslaughter. Here not only is murder punished severely but even involuntary killing is punished by exile. The judgement of the killer is taken out of the hands of the family of the victim and transferred to an impartial judiciary. The basic motif threaded throughout this section is the value of human life while the narrative of the battle against the Midianites appears to point to the opposite. It can seem that these two passages emerge from a different moral universe yet they are both part of the same Torah and the same book and are read on the same Shabbat.

I believe that this contrast is purposeful and exists throughout the Torah. The Torah, through the medium of the Jewish people, seeks to create a new society, more humane, equal and just than the existing social order. Yet that attempt creates implacable hostility by groups who share none of those values and to whom moral qualms are a weakness to be exploited. This new Torah based society therefore needs to be defended, sometimes in brutal ways which challenge the very morality the Torah is seeking to inculcate. These two passages therefore are not conflicting opposites but the two horns of a dilemma that has faced Jewish polities from then until today. Dead Jews cannot become ‘a light to the nations’ but in ensuring that Jews live, we can be in danger of subverting the values that we seek to live by and pass on to others.

This is the dilemma set out in the Torah this week and that is exactly the dilemma we face as a people today. The last century taught us that Jews without power end up as ashes, and corpses can’t teach anyone anything. Yet the attainment of Jewish sovereignty and its defence is bound up with acute moral dilemmas, especially as we face cruel enemies who are prepared to use their own children as weapons. In this situation it is extremely difficult to keep a steady moral compass, to balance need with morality and to avoid the temptation to fall into the trap of thinking that the solution of every problem is the use of kinetic power. This is the challenge of our generation, as it was of that of Moses and later prophets and it is for us to rise to that challenge with wisdom and courage.