Ethics in Times of War: Parashat Ki Teitzei. Kol Shalom, 2025

This week’s parashah, Ki Teitzei, opens with a striking phrase: “When you go out to war against your enemies…” (Devarim/Deuteronomy 21:10). It does not say “if you go out to war,” but “when.” The Torah, realistic, knows that war has been part of human experience since ancient times.

What is surprising is how the Torah addresses this subject. It does not dwell on military strategies or heroic victories. Instead, it gives us a set of laws that seek to humanize the inhuman. Norms that limit violence, that draw red lines, that remind us that even in the midst of conflict, human dignity must not disappear. Even in war, not everything is OK.

One of the first examples is the figure of the “Eshet yefat toar” —the captive woman of war (Devarim 21:10–14). In a time when women were treated as spoils, the Torah introduces a surprising regulation: the soldier could not simply take her. He had to bring her into his home, grant her a month of mourning, and only then decide whether to marry her. And if he no longer wished to, he had to set her free, without selling or enslaving her. To our modern eyes this remains problematic, but in its context, it was a revolutionary step: limiting the brutality of the victor, recognizing the humanity of someone who had fallen into misfortune. 

And far more troubling still is that, three millennia after these laws, we continue to witness rape and sexual abuse in any context, including in war.

Another precept speaks of the prohibition against destroying fruit trees during a siege (Devarim 20:19–20). The Torah asks: “Is the tree of the field a human being, that you should besiege it?” 

It is a precious teaching: even in the midst of war, life and nature must not be laid waste. The tree—symbol of continuity and sustenance—must be preserved. The Torah educates us in an ecological ethic and in the idea that not everything is permitted in the name of victory. 

When the intent is to make everything disappear—destroying and burning all, murdering entire families indiscriminately, raping and kidnapping with premeditation and malice—that is no longer called war. I don’t know what to call it, but it sounds more like an attempt to committing something essentially different..

Beyond this, the rabbinic tradition has always insisted that civilians must not be deliberate targets of violence. The Talmud in the Tractate of Sanhedrin 74a teaches: “Who says your blood is redder than your fellow’s?” It reminds us that the life of the other has the same value as our own, and that killing an innocent person erases any moral justification for combat. Innocents must not be killed—on any side. Not even when the enemy puts them in front as a shield.

Let it be clear:  I am not drawing any kind of moral comparison. There is no moral equivalence between the savagery of Hamas and Israel’s legitimate defense of its citizens. 

What I am saying, 700 days after the massacre, with 48 hostages still being abused and tortured, is that we owe it to ourselves to be more, to be better—always, and even in extreme situations.

These three examples—the treatment of prisoners, the protection of innocents, and the care for nature—show us a single principle: ethics do not disappear in war; they become even more urgent.

Today, more than three thousand years later, these words remain current. It is enough to look at the news, not only in Israel but in many parts of the world: wars in Ukraine, in other parts of the Middle East, in Africa, and in so many regions where entire populations live under the horror of bombings, persecution, and forced displacement. We see families torn apart, people kidnapped and tortured, children losing their childhood, entire communities erased from the map. And most painful of all: the feeling that the world is getting used to it.

In the face of this reality, Ki Teitzei reminds us that getting used to it cannot be an option. We cannot accept violence as if it were a natural part of the human landscape. 

The Torah calls us to uphold an ethical standard, to raise our voice for those who have none, to keep moral conscience alive even when nations are at war.

In my interpretation, the Torah faces war as an act of defense, not as a value in itself, God forbid. We need a Department of Defense, not one of War.

And there is another profound teaching here: true power is measured not only by weapons or military victories, but by a people’s capacity not to lose its moral compass. Strength without ethics is mere brutality; strength guided by human dignity is what builds civilization.

And for us, who read these words from the distance of everyday life, the message has real spiritual implications. We are not the ones to decide military strategies, but we are called to something just as important: to choose each day not to dehumanize ourselves. To choose peace in our homes, justice in our communities, compassion in our relationships.

For war does not begin on the battlefield. War begins in the heart, when we stop seeing the other as a human being. And peace, too, begins in the heart, when we dare to see the other with respect, with sensitivity, with love.

May Ki Teitzei inspire us to rebuild that world. May we know how to set limits to violence—both others’ and our own—may we defend human dignity even in the midst of darkness, and may we never forget that the Torah’s dream is not a world of regulated wars, but a world of Shalom, in which swords are turned into plowshares, vineyards and orchards are in abundance, and people no longer need to prepare for war.

Am Yisrael, and all the peoples of the earth, are called to that vision.For wars have a beginning, but they must also have an end.

May we have the courage to draw nearer to that vision, step by step, word by word, gesture by gesture.