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Desiring Life or Death

Gil Reich
@GilReich
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Jews only read the story of King Solomon commanding to cut the baby about once a decade. We'll be reading it this Shabbat. The story is fascinating, with a dead baby and a live one, and the defendant's plea:

“my son is the live one, yours is the dead one”

But the first woman insisted, “No, the dead one is yours and the live one is mine.” -- 1 Kings 3:22

Solomon notices that the women phrase their claims differently. One focuses on her own live baby. The other focuses on her adversary's dead one.

Solomon repeats what he heard:

Then the king replied, “This woman says, ‘My son is alive and yours is dead,’ but that woman says, ‘No, your son is dead and mine is alive.’”

The plaintiff's real desire is not to raise the other woman's baby. It's for the other woman to have a dead baby.

A clever test confirms the theory. "Cut the baby" the apparently foolish king commands. Caught off guard, the plaintiff reveals her actual desire.

"Neither you nor I will have, cut him."

Perhaps the plaintiff didn't even realize what was driving her. Our mind provides noble rationalizations for even our darkest desires.
The story reminds us that people are driven not just by love and a desire for good, but by hate and a desire for pain. Hate is at least as natural as love. We must be aware of this to fight it, both in ourselves and in others.
For ourselves, we need to be aware that our wants and needs do not always come from a good place. Even our desires that seem most noble. Perhaps especially those.
And when dealing with others (or advising people on how to deal with others) we must be aware of this too. Before trying so solve a conflict, we should ask whether each side desires a positive outcome for itself, or a negative one for its adversary.
Let us consider the evidence in the battle in Israel.
Consider Israel's national anthem:

As long as in the heart, within,
The Jewish soul yearns,
And towards the ends of the east,
[The Jewish] eye gazes toward Zion,

Our hope is not yet lost,
The hope of two thousand years,
𝄆 To be a free nation in our own land,
The land of Zion and Jerusalem. 𝄇

And Palestine's

Warrior, warrior, warrior,
Oh my land, the land of the ancestors
Warrior, warrior, warrior,
Oh my people, people of eternity

Chorus:
Warrior, warrior, warrior,
Oh my land, the land of the ancestors
Warrior, warrior, warrior,
Oh my people, people of eternity

I
With my determination, my fire and the volcano of my vendetta
With the longing in my blood for my land and my home
𝄆 I have climbed the mountains and fought the wars
I have conquered the impossible, and crossed the frontiers 𝄇

Chorus

II
With the resolve of the winds and the fire of the weapons
And the determination of my nation in the land of struggle
𝄆 Palestine is my home, and the path of my triumphal[b]
Palestine is my vendetta and the land of withstanding 𝄇

Chorus

III
By the oath under the shade of the flag
By my land and nation, and the fire of pain
𝄆 I will live as a warrior, I will remain a warrior,
I will die as a warrior - until my country returns 𝄇

The differences aren't subtle.
And they are consistent with how the conflict has played out. One side wants to live. The other side wants to kill, and worse.
Cutting Israel in half isn't quite the same as cutting a baby in half, but for many of its adherents, the intent is the same. And having half of Israel would be just as unsatisfying for most Palestinians and their supporters as half a baby would have been for Solomon's plaintiff. The goal is not to have, but for the other side to not have.
There's no good reason why the UN, Europe and others care so much about the Palestinians when they care so little about other oppressed or dispossessed groups. They don't love Palestinians more than they love others; they hate Israel more than they hate others.
In the nearly 1,000-year-old song My Soul Thirsts which Jews still sing on Shabbat, the poet (Ibn Ezra) puts the words from this story into the mouths of Israel's enemy, "no your son is dead and mine is alive."
Many people are driven by a need for Judaism (and often Jews) to die.
We need to recognize this when we try to solve problems. "Win-win solutions" are likely to backfire if the other side's primary interest is in you losing. We reached the Abrahamic Accords because we ignored the desires of John Kerry and others for Israel to make painful sacrifices, and instead worked with Arab leaders whose primary interest was in making things better, for themselves at least.
You cannot approach a conflict where the other side's goal is your suffering and death the same way you would approach a conflict where the other side's goal is life and happiness.

This post was promoted to the Main Feed at the recommendation of Ricochet's members.

Discussion (13)

  • Saxonburg@Saxonburg

    This seems like the right post to quote Golda Meir:

    "We can forgive [the Arabs] for killing our children. We cannot forgive them for forcing us to kill their children. We will only have peace with [the Arabs] when they love their children more than they hate us..."

  • Old Bathos@OldBathos

    Israel's economic success, rule of law, technological prowess, and military competence comprise a living rebuke to the rest of the region. No one would notice what a sh*thole always emerges from inshallah habits of thought if the entire region happily descends back into the tenth century. Killing skyscrapers and jet planes on 9/11 is the same mindset.

    The new anti-semitism is fueled by the lemming-like woke stupidity that it is deeply offensive to notice what Islam has done to its own and would like to do the rest of us. Israelis must be interlopers and foreigners because the natural order of the region is supposed to be a patina of rigid theological uniformity spread over hopeless political instability, tribalism, corruption, and systemic abuse of women.

    People in a less depraved culture would have quickly made peace with the Jews and profited greatly from trade and exchange with them and rejected the leadership of thieves and rear-eschelon jihadis.

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