History Rhyming

In our minyan last Shabbat, I gave a brief commentary on that week’s portion, Va’etchanan, f0cussing on the very last part of the portion. Moses is addressing the Israelites, who are camped on the east bank of the Jordan River, ready to cross it and conquer the Promised Land. How should they treat the indigenous inhabitants, the Canaanites? Moses conveys the Eternal’s instructions: “You must doom them to destruction, grant them no terms and give them no quarter” (in the Gunther Plaut translation).

The Almighty, in other words, is ordering genocide, which to the modern reader is disquieting, to say the least. I tried to square the Divine’s injunction with modern notions of justice, by pointing out that the Israelites are also directed to smash the Canaanites’ holy places and to burn their idols. If the Israelites had done that and then firmly suppressed the Canaanite cult, they would have destroyed the Canaanite people as surely as if they had killed them. The Canaanites would have lost their identity along with their myths, their idols, and their worldview. It would have been murder, yes, but soul murder instead of physical extermination.

Va’etchanan is the second portion of Deuteronomy, which was composed during the eighth and seventh centuries before the common era. Even if you believe that its authors wrote it with the help of Divine inspiration or even with Divine guidance, you don’t have to believe that they wrote it in an historical or political vacuum. The authors remembered the Assyrian destruction of the northern kingdom; they remembered the Babylonian exile; they knew that conquerors deported large portions of a vanquished population to make room for colonization. So the command to destroy the Canaanites was probably not as shocking to contemporary audiences as it is to us. The authors also knew that Israelites were marrying Canaanites and, worse, were worshipping Canaanite gods. So the injunction to destroy the Canaanites along with their religion reflects what the authors wished had been done at the time of the Conquest.

Although I didn’t allude to it in my comments, except to say that the Israelites did not find “a land without a people for a people without a land,” a slogan popular with the early Zionists, it cannot have escaped my listeners that the conflict between the Israelites and the Canaanites parallels in some respects the conflict between the Israelis and the Palestinians. It’s a good example of history not repeating itself but rhyming. There are, of course, many differences. Unlike the contact between Canaanites and Israelites, there is little intermarriage between Israeli Jews and Palestinians, and virtually no threat to Judaism from Islam, as there was from polytheism. The Canaanites eventually disappeared, which is unlikely to be true of either the Palestinians or the Jews, in spite of the wishful thinking of each side.

If Israel and Palestine can ever come to an agreement that lasts – a questionable outcome - will the legacy of hatred and suspicion between the two nations dissipate? Will the two peoples begin to interact normally with one another once again? Will a modern prophet rise to denounce intermarriage and whoring after false gods? We’re not likely to find out for a long time.

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