Aaron Samuel Tamares
A Passionate Pacifist: Essential Writings of Aaron Samuel Tamares
Ben Yehuda Press
At some point in 1877 or 1878, Aaron Samuel Tamares, then a young Cheder student in Grodno District of the Russian Empire, would to “stand glued for hours” before a heroic painting hanging in the home of a Christian lady, depicting a Russian bayonet charge in the Russo-Turkish War. The young boy was “bewildered by the idea that human beings could become accustomed to such acts,” and wondered “how the soldiers could endure such dreadful circumstances.”
Yet far more perplexing was the fact that the Christian lady had just received news that her son had been killed in a battle just like the one in the painting; the “fallen soldier’s mother wept bitterly at the news – and the little Jewish boy wept with her.” How, the now-grown Rabbi Tamares reflected almost 50 years later, could the bereaved mother “tolerate having such an image in her home, compelling her always to look upon the cursed event which had left so many mothers bereaved.”
Thus Tamares introduces his principled opposition to war in his “Autobiography of ‘One of the Sensitive Rabbis,’” rendered in English for the first time in A Passionate Pacifist: Essential Writings of Aaron Samuel Tamares, edited and translated by Everett Gendler, with contributions by Ri J. Turner and Tzemah Yoreh, from Ben Yehuda Press. Tamares’ unique perspectives on peace and war, drawing from rich Jewish prophetic, exegetic, and philosophical traditions, speak directly to our historical moment, making this rare publication of his writings in English translation (the only other is Politics and Passion, also translated by Gendler, and published by the Jewish Peace Fellowship forty years ago) a major event.
A Passionate Pacifist contains a great wealth of Tamares’ work, including his 1926 autobiography, numerous sermons from his time as the rabbi in the town of Milejczece, near Bialystok in Poland, an excerpt from Three Unsuitable Unions, and the entirety of The Community of Israel and the Wars of Nations, a treatise on peace, war, and nationalism published in 1918, in the wake of the First World War.
What emerges from these writings is the voice of a man fervently committed to the religious obligation “tzedek, tzedek, tirdof” (“Justice, justice you shall pursue,” Deuteronomy 16:20), and negotiating the harsh realities of war and 20th century nationalism. Indeed, Tamares’ work seeks to reconcile the apparently irreconcilable. In his “Autobiography,” the rabbi says that he did not write to reach a public audience outside of Milejczece, nor did he intend his political writings “to repair the world from which he was so cloistered.” Yet, his philosophy of pacifism was predicated on reaching the hearts – if not necessarily the minds – of people in the Jewish community of the Russian empire, and his essays, published in the journal HaMelitz, brought him to the attention of the community’s most prominent leaders.
Tamares was initially enthusiastic about the Zionist movement because, hearing the speeches of Max Nordau, he believed that it “was a movement devoted to freedom and justice, to the struggle against enslavement and evil.” Yet, upon attending the 1900 World Zionist Congress in London, (far from his beloved forests), his “fantasy that Zionism would uplift the Jewish spirit as a vehicle for the fight against bondage, dissolved into nothingness.” Zionism was, to the “sensitive rabbi’s” mind, just more of the same chauvinistic nationalism which would, 14 years later, devastate Eastern Europe and European Jewish life.
The theoretical heart of A Passionate Pacifist is Tamares’ 1918 treatise The Community of Israel and the Wars of Nations. In it, he proposes that war is an inevitable consequence of the “idolatry” of nationalism: “The name of this great idol is ‘the honor of the fatherland,’ its shape determined by combining all the private egotisms found in the hearts of the residents of the nation. Its worship is the slaughter of millions of men in wars for the ‘native land.’”
For Tamares, this makes opposition to war a Jewish ethical obligation. Not only does Israel have the religious mission, as a “nation of priests,” to oppose idolatry but, as a nation without a state, we have the obligation to oppose nationalism. It is this purpose that gives meaning to diaspora and exile, and it is the means to effect Israel’s divine purpose. “… Exile was not exclusively, or even primarily a punishment for the past, but rather, and essentially, a constructive measure for the future.”
In The Wandering Jews, published in 1927, Tamares’ near-contemporary Joseph Roth struck a similar note: “Because actually the world is not made up of ‘nations’ and fatherlands that want only to preserve their cultural distinctions, and only if it means not sacrificing a single human life,” he wrote. “Fatherlands and nations want much more, or much less: They have vested interests that insist on sacrifices. They set up a series of ‘fronts’ to secure the ‘hinterland’ that is their real objective. Given all the millennial grief of the Jews, they still had one consolation: the fact that they didn’t have such a fatherland. If there even can be such a thing as a just history, surely the Jews will be given great credit for holding onto their common sense in not having had a fatherland at a time when the whole world launched itself into patriotic madness.”
What for Roth was an accident of history is for Tamares a vocation. The people of Israel, he writes, must oppose the claims nationalism and the demand for sacrificial victims in brutal wars and must also resist the pressures of assimilation. “Above all, we should announce to the nations of the world that they should give up their attempts of assimilating us and eliminating us as a nation.” It is a declaration of the necessity of Jewish survival, and of the urgency of Jewish relevance in a non-Jewish world.
In hindsight, there is a heartrending poignancy to this statement of purpose. One cannot read Tamares’ essays today without reflecting that the nations of the world came very close, indeed, to eliminating the Jews – a tiny irritant within their nationalist body politic. Yet it seems deeply unfair to condemn “the sensitive rabbi” for lacking the foresight in 1918 – and even in 1926 – that no one else had, despite the ominous murmurs of antisemitism even then.
Moreover, Tamares demands that we consider the “spiritual Israel” from which we would be (indeed, have been) exiled by erecting our own “national idol.” “Zion should continue to develop within us that which we have acquired and nurtured in our exile,” he writes at the conclusion of The Community of Israel and the Wars of Nations. “We have ceased to be like all other nations, and we don’t need to be given back the dubious gift which we have lost.”
Tamares’ incisive pacifist critique should demand our attention at a time when the Zionist project has interpellated the Jewish people into an endless cycle of generational war and bloody conflict in the name of feeding the idol of nationalism. And, as Russian missiles, drones, and tanks again ravage the lands laid waste by wars in 1914-1918 and 1939-1945, he exhorts us to consider a different kind of pacifism that challenges the passivity of Leo Tolstoy and Mohandas Gandhi, and their acolytes in the contemporary left. While they demanded sacrifice for peace as a matter of Christian faith, or Christian-inspired spirituality, Tamares identifies sacrifice itself, and the idols it serves, as the great issue.
“The passionate rabbi” asks readers a century later to conceive of a pacifism – a principled opposition to war – founded on the Jewish obligation of pursuing justice rather than the Christian ethos of sacrifice. And, even if he does not quite provide a schematic for how such a pacifism might look in the details, it is a question of singular relevance to our dark times.