Thread by @rabbisacks

Here is a thread from my Covenant & Conversation essay on #Tzav called "Destructive and Self-Destructive". You can read it in full here: bit.ly/2OgO2ke & download the accompanying Family Edition here: bit.ly/2HGyoOX. #ShabbatShalom

War is a destructive and self-destructive activity. Why then does it persist?

According to @B_Ehrenreich it is the dysfunctional survival of instincts, profoundly necessary in an age of hunter-gatherers, into an era in which such responses are no longer necessary. Human beings still thrill at the prospect of shedding blood.

Maimonides was right to see in the blood sacrifice a central idolatrous practice. Nahmanides was equally correct to see it as a symptom of human cruelty. We now sense the profound wisdom of the law forbidding the eating of blood.

Only thus could human beings be gradually cured of the deeply ingrained instinct, deriving from a world of predators and prey, in which the key choice is to kill or be killed. Sadly, the contemporary world continues to be scarred by violence and terror.

The instinct against which blood sacrifice is a protest – sacrificing life to exorcise fear – still lives on.

Where there is fear, it is easy to turn against those we see as “the other” and learn to hate them. Which is why each of us, especially we leaders, have to take a stand against the instinct to fear, and against the corrosive power of hate.

All it takes for evil to flourish is for good people to do nothing.