ואחר כן תבוא אליה…ולקחת לך לאשה
רש”י :לא דברה תורה אלא כנגד יצר הרע
WAR CRIMES
Throughout human history, the military leaders of all the peoples of this planet motivated their warriors to conquer the enemy, encouraging them with the promise of obtaining the tempting spoils of war: money, land… and the women of the enemy. They were part of the booty that belonged to the victor. And a great incentive to fight with more courage and adrenaline. Captured women were treated like objects, at the will of the soldier. After being abused the poor victims were killed or in the best case scenario sold as slaves. Wartime sexual assault was never questioned but normalized. And is not a just thing of the past. In this article with the surprising title “”Challenging a tradition that enjoys impunity” we can read about the prevalence and normalization of wartime rape, even in the 20th century.
THE TORA IS DIFFERENT
In this week’s Parsha we see that the Tora demands of the Jewish soldier an exceptional behavior, completely different from the Gentile soldier. An attitude of respect towards the enemy that has no precedent or parallel in the annals of history, probably until well into the 20th or 21st century (remember, for example, Japan’s invasion of Nanjing, China, in 1937; or the behavior of the Russian soldiers in Germany, or even the abuse of ISIS in the XXI century). The Tora, with an incredible and perhaps unappreciated sense of anticipation for human rights, refers in this week’s Parsha to “the rights of female prisoners of war”. If the soldier wished to be intimate with that woman, he was obliged to marry her (something the Tora, in this suggestive way, discourages). If the Jewish soldier married her—these prisoners of war, or ‘ebed kena’aní, were automatically converted to Judaism—he had to allow her to mourn her family, grow her nails and shave her hair (following the customs of Gentile civilizations in biblical times) and only later could he marry her. Furthermore, once married, he could not discriminate against her or her children or make her work as a servant. All these “regulations” went through the soldier’s head and in a certain way made him reflect on whether it was really OK for him to get carried away by his impulse “now” and have to go through all this process “later”. The idea, obviously, is that all these regulations managed to dissuade the Jewish soldier from taking advantage of that defenseless woman.
POSTPONEMENT AS A STRATEGY IN LIFE
We should be amazed at the mental training, education, and control, that the Tora demands of a Jewish man. The Tora —attentive to the psychological state of a victorious soldier facing an attractive and defenseless woman in the enemy camp, where adrenaline easily combines with testosterone—doesn’t tell the soldier “you can’t be with that woman,” period. First, since most probably a simple “no” in these circumstances might bring the unintended consequences: abuse and rape. The Tora designed a strategy for the soldier to “take his time, think and reflect” and not get carried away by his impulse in the midst of war. This “mental mechanism” that the Tora designed is: positive procrastination. Rashi explains that this biblical commandment goes beyond the specific case of a soldier on the battlefield. The Tora is teaching us a strategy to deal with our own yetser hara’: our physical urges, instincts and desires, when they are inappropriate. Instead of saying “NO”, the Tora tells the soldier: “YES, but NOT NOW.” Delayed gratification is a well-known psychological tool that educates the individual and trains him to control his impulses, and mature.
ONE NOW OR TWO A LITTLE LATER
The 1972 marshmallow experiment was a study on “delayed gratification.” It was led by psychologist Walter Mischel, a professor at Stanford University. In this study, children were offered a choice between a single marshmallow now or two marshmallows, if he or she waited a period of time. Once he explains this to the child, the researcher leaves the room for about 10 minutes and then returns with the second marshmallow in hand for those who resisted the temptation of immediate gratification. In follow-up studies, researchers found that children who were able to wait longer and control the urge to eat one marshmallow NOW tended to have better youth and adult life outcomes, better scores on SAT, educational achievements, and even the right body-mass index (weight), and other matters that demand “delaying gratification in the present” for greater gratification in the future
NEGATIVE PROCRASTINATION
But procrastination is a double-edged sword. Delaying a good and healthy project, which we know is necessary to improve our lives, is usually one of the most common psychological traps we set for ourselves. For example, when we need to lose weight, and we know we have to follow a strict diet, many times instead of saying to ourselves: “I’m not going to do it”, “I’m giving up good health”–an argument that our common sense and our guilt would not tolerate– we use the psychological strategy of procrastination, but in a negative way: we delay the diet from one week to the next. In this way, our guilt is silenced, because “we have decided to do it”, but time will eventually bring oblivion, and the good resolution will probably die…
In the area of our spiritual improvement, procrastination is also a lethal trap. During the month of Elul, and as we get closer to Rosh HaShana and Yom Kippur, we commit ourselves to adopting new habits and we resolve to make some major improvements in our Jewish lives. For example: “This year I will dedicate an hour every morning to study Tora”, “To read this very good book that has been highly recommended to me.” But then, when we find this project a bit difficult, we suspend it, but without giving it up completely! We tell ourselves that we are not really giving up. We’re just delaying this project until we find a better time. We convince ourselves that right now, we are very busy, business is very demanding, etc. … The trap is that by not giving up on the idea altogether… by delaying this project into the future, we make it easier for our minds and guilt to abandon it, and eventually it will “die by procrastination”. The destructive side of our imagination — yester hara’ as Maimonides defines it — set us up psychologically, and we became victims of this old syndrome.
