Mitzvot in War
On Shabbatot, the white tent that served as a makeshift synagogue on our army base became a bustling beit midrash with havrutot and shiurim. When it was my turn to give a shiur one afternoon following Mincha, I shared the following halakhic dilemma with the guys. At night I had done a long and exhausting shift, the fickle targeting equipment kept us on our toes from one to five in the morning. When I finally go back to sleep, should I ask to be woken up in time to make it to Shaharit in the morning? Or should my resting and sleep be considered as engaging in the mitzva of war itself, and therefore exempt me from other mitzvot—and allowed to stay in bed? It was a long shiur, full of sources and Talmudic hairsplitting. This is a question I have pondered since the beginning of the war. On Saturday evening, Shalom approached me and said: “I understood what you were getting at in the shiur, I may even agree, I just didn’t understand one thing. What does it matter if I have to get up or don’t have to get up? After a week in the field and countless guard shifts and fighting and shooting, there’s no way I’m going to skip tefilla. I need to get to prayer first and foremost for myself.”
There is a question that countless rabbis were asked during Simhat Torah as the attack unfolded and soldiers and volunteers streamed to the front. As we know, a soldier who is called up in an emergency on Shabbat is allowed to take with him food and equipment and everything required to function in combat. The question is what to do with his tefillin. According to the strict halakhic reckoning, there’s no justification to carry the tefillin, which are muktza, on Shabbat. One does not desecrate Shabbat in order to perform a mitzva on Sunday. And despite this, the answer given by most of rabbis is that in such a situation a soldier should also take his tefillin, because tefillin in war are not only a mitzva, but a necessity. To disconnect for a moment from the immediate physicality in the field of battle, to actually remember who you are, you need your tefillin. And not just the tefillin. The daily prayers and blessings also become points of support. My brother-in-law Avinoam told how on the Friday night of the ground invasion into Gaza, the Druze battalion commander told the unit’s rabbi: “Say Kiddush over the radio system, so that everyone will hear,” and added, in his distinct Arabic accent, but with the precise pronunciation of a yeshiva bachur, “Don’t start talking to me about De-Oraita or De-Rabbanan. It’s not for the mitzva of Kiddush I’m concerned, but for the mitzva of the war.”
This war opened a new channel for me to connect with our religious world. I look at my duties and halakhic habits with new eyes. Before what seems like an eternity I wrote a doctorate on the meaning of prayer. Since it was undertaken in the university, and not in a yeshiva, I had to deal with a variety of untraditional sources. One of the most serious heretical things I quoted was from Rabbi Nissim of Marseille (14 century). Although an extraordinary thinker, if he published his books today, they would be quickly removed from all the batei midrash. When asked how it is that prayer is useful in war, he explained that it does not cause any miracle to be delivered from above. Its effectiveness stems from a very simple cause: a soldier who prays is a calmer, more balanced soldier, and as a result also more determined and precise, so he is more likely to prevail in battle.
I am not prepared to say that’s all there is to prayer. His position remains, in my eyes, a bit heretical. But I can say that in this war I learned how much mental strength Torah, halakha and prayer produce. I saw the power of a page of Gemara to generate meaning in dreary times of waiting for the next mission and to offer comfort in moments of sorrow and pain. I felt the ability of three daily prayers to create order in the chaos (Shir shel Yom was, for a while, the only thing that stood between me and losing track of the days of the week). The change that lighting Shabbat candles creates even when all other activities continue as usual is enormous. Rightly so, the military rabbinate ordered that sometimes it is even permissible to carry a Torah scroll without an Eruv in order to read from it on Shabbat. Because even a “normal” Torah reading, which in peace-time one might spend reading from the parasha pamphlets between aliyot, becomes a moment of spiritual elevation, of a soul-reviving encounter with “the Lord your God who walks among you in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you” (Deut. 23:15).
Rabbi Avraham Stav teaches at Kollel Shaarei Zion in Yad HaRav Nissim, Jerusalem, when he is not serving in an artillery unit. This essay is translated from an earlier version that appeared in Makor Rishon. Read his recent TRADITION article on Rav Kook’s progressivism and conservativism.