NOTES for Deu 20:1-20

Those who go to war to conquer the Promised Land and those who remain at home—out of faintheartedness or for more respectable reasons—nevertheless remain one people. The entire people are entitled to the spoils of war.

From what does this unity grow? At the level of the state, it can easily be explained by the way a state is organized—some fight while others plow—for the common good. But how can unity be preserved where the common good is not obvious—in a single church, in a single community? The work and ministries of those close to us often seem remote and unnecessary to us. A family or community is often not united by common interests or professional concerns—how can we be one in such a situation?

Though we perform different functions, we remain not separate parts of a machine but organs of a single body: the same blood flows in us and the same Spirit lives in us. God unites us not by means of a single ideology, a “faith,” but in the one Son, in His divine body.

Some laws and prescriptions of the Torah can at first glance appear not only strange and paradoxical, but even plainly absurd. Indeed, everyone knows that in wartime everyone capable of bearing arms is treated with utmost strictness and given no indulgences. War is war, mobilization is mobilization, and during war it is necessarily universal; here no allowances are made for moral or psychological unreadiness. Any act of cowardice is regarded as desertion, with all the consequences that follow from it in wartime.

The Torah, meanwhile, prescribes something directly opposite: it requires that everyone who is "fearful in heart" have the opportunity calmly to leave the battlefield - to leave altogether, return home, and remain there until the end of the war, and without any punishment, even without any public reproach; the Torah by no means considers these people worthy of contempt.

What is this: pacifism? Clearly not: the matter is not a refusal of war, but only those who are weak for it. Weak above all spiritually: the expression "fearful in heart" means precisely this. And the matter is not necessarily fear and the cowardice that flows from it, although this is significant too: everyone who imagines what panic on the battlefield is knows perfectly well what the appearance of even one panicker in the ranks of fighters can lead to. But spiritual weakness can express itself differently as well: a person can simply become brutalized by war, turn into a killing machine, enter such a spiritual state that he begins to enjoy killing. And even if the matter concerns killing an armed enemy on the battlefield, such a spiritual state is still destructive for a person. Any war will end someday, but the habit of killing and, still worse, enjoying the fear that a person experiences before the face of inevitable death, will remain. And the former soldier will carry it home, into peaceful life. If so, then pacifism is better.

Can one be a pacifist before the face of an enemy during war? Perhaps, but not for very long. Or for long enough, but then already at someone else's expense - at the expense of those who reject pacifism and take up weapons in order to defend both themselves and those who cannot defend themselves, or do not want to, like the pacifists themselves. But if a person knows with certainty that war will break him, turning him not into a coward, no, but into a killing machine, if a person knows that he will not be able to remain human in war, then his pacifism is justified. To remain human before God is more important than to become a hero in the eyes of this world. In the end, God needs our heart, not our heroism.