The Talmud (Brachot 8b) reports that the brilliant scholar,
Rava, bequeathed to his children the following pearl of wisdom:
“When you are cutting food, don’t cut downward with the knife while
the food is in your hand. This will cause two problems. First, you
will cut your hand. Then the blood will ruin the food.” I studied
that at age 16 or 17 as a Yeshiva student, and it nagged at the
back of my consciousness for more than two decades. Did this great
genius have no more poignant message to leave his children than
this? And why was the Talmud troubling to report something so
picayune?
One day it hit me. It was about ten years ago and I had made a
mess of some life situation or other, when insight dawned. Rava was
telling his kids not to make the mistake of thinking that you can
beat the system. Everyone knows in theory that it is unsafe to cut
food downwards toward their skin. But they think they will manage
to do it and get away with it because they are being super alert
and careful. The end is that they not only hurt themselves, they
bungle the job as well, ruining it irreparably.
Both the United States and Israel were guilty of this behavior
in the decades preceding Sept. 11, 2001. They allowed various
noxious elements to grow as opposition forces, reasoning that they
were too small to do much damage and could be swatted easily when
they make a move. And, to be honest, this sort of skating on thin
ice continues apace when dealing with sovereign nations. Neither we
nor Israel have a real answer for Iran, so we muck along, murmuring
some idiocy about indigenous political movements. Same goes for us
and North Korea.
However, one line was drawn by President Bush. That was against
terrorism. That is to say, that the buildup of non-governmental
forces will no longer be seen as something local to its host
country. Their profession of war against us will be promoted to the
level of reality. It is their fantasy that they can fight us even,
but it is real that they can strike and wound in spots. If we
tolerate that as an inevitable annoyance, then we live in a de
facto state of war, because the threat to each individual
preoccupies the entire nation. So we might as well fight it as a
real war.
Indeed the insistence by the Supreme Court that captured
terrorists be accorded the protections of the Geneva Convention,
while it presents certain inconveniences, ultimately underwrites
this novel concept of war between a sovereign state and a club,
organization or militia. Strange as it seemed until a week ago, and
new as it is in world history, the full faith and credit of these
United States has been engaged in warfare with an amorphous band of
punks without an address known mostly as al-Qaeda.
Yet even that squad, more successful in killing than any
previous group of terrorists, has been limited in its choice of
weaponry to conventional guns and bombs. The one time they manned
aircraft, it was done by hijacking ours and striking before we had
acclimated. Never did they strike with planes or rockets of their
own. To an extent the image of the unfair war was exacerbated by
that limitation upon their capacity.
What Hamas, to a degree, and Hezbollah, to a far greater degree,
are showing now is the wisdom and the urgency of the Bush approach.
Here we have these unincorporated entities shooting missiles with a
range of forty miles and unmanned drones that can attack a ship at
sea. This is an absolutely unimaginable escalation, not only in
degree but in kind. This is a qualitative leap forward for the
international thug culture. Rockets without flags.
President Bush has been courageous in backing Israel’s massive
counterattack, as the usual suspects in the EU and the UN have made
their predictable prissy noises. But beyond courage, he is
operating from a profound intellectual awareness that this weekend
has substantiated retroactively his half-decade of war against the
shadowy al-Qaeda. Take the Supreme Court decision and add it to the
face that Hezbollah showed the world this week; the combination of
the two establishes without doubt the reality of true war being
engaged between governments and roving international armies of
menace: crusaders, if you will.
Let us pray that Israel can score a crippling wound against
Hezbollah in the time allotted to them before the critical mass of
international disapproval becomes too straitening. The era of big
government is over…at least in the arena of the battlefield. If
they can become big enough to manufacture, store and fire
long-range missiles, we had darned well better muster the gumption
to blast them off the face of the earth.
